Foojay Podcast #67: Writing a book. Does it make you rich and famous?

February 24, 2025
159 Unique Views
2 min read

Table of Contents

Trisha Gee
Len Epp
Wim Deblauwe
Marián Varga

Book by Frank
Books and links by Trisha Gee
Books by Wim Deblauwe
Book by Marián Varga
Leanpub
Lulu

Let me share a personal story. I started experimenting with Java on a Raspberry Pi about five years ago and blogged a few articles about it. But the more I experimented, the more I wrote down, and eventually, I had written a book… I worked on it for six months in a row, every evening and a lot of weekends. But the moment I received the box with my author copies was an incredible feeling. Holding a paper book with your name is a special moment.

Fast forward to now. The 1000 paper copies are sold out. I have the last 10 copies in case you still want one 😉 But as I self-published the ebook, it's still for sale on Leanpub, and I keep updating it. That's one of the first significant differences between publishing a paper book and an ebook…. As an author, I got about 2 euros per paper book from the publisher, and LeanPub pays 80% royalties. Don't forget that I have to pay taxes on what I earn. So, if you do the math, you'll understand that the book didn't make me rich. But yes, it helped me in my career and was one of the reasons I became a Java Champion. So, we can argue about the "becoming famous".

But that's only my story. I invited several guests to share their knowledge about book writing:

Marián Varga is finishing a book and tells about publishing a book with a publisher.
Wim Deblauwe wrote a few books and has much experience with self-publishing.
Len Epp is the co-founder of Leanpub, so he can tell us a lot about ebooks.
And we start with Trisha Gee, who wrote a lot of books!

Video

Podcast (Audio only)

Guests

Trisha Gee

Len Epp

Wim Deblauwe

Marián Varga

Content

00:00 Introduction of the topic and guests

01:53 Books by Trisha Gee
02:24 Trisha's motivation for writing books
04:13 Difference between publisher and self-publishing
09:53 Publishers are looking for authors and course creators
12:55 How long do you work on a book?
17:35 Can we expect a new book by Trisha?
21:00 Automating the writing process

24:50 Len Epp about Leanpub and how it started
27:18 On Leanpub, you can publish a book-in-progress
27:51 Different publishing processes with Leanpub
30:20 You can use LeanPub to generate your book, but you don't need to sell it on Leanpub
32:57 80% of the selling price goes to the author
40:09 How to market your book
45:35 Let an expert handle the payments...

50:55 Books by Wim Deblauwe
51:45 Wim's motivation for writing books
53:15 Earning back the time spent on the writing
54:37 How to sell paper books on Lulu
57:19 Tools used to write a book
58:34 Wim's author-plans for the future
59:42 How the books influenced Wim's career

01:00:02 Marián Varga about the topic of his book
01:03:07 Current status of the book
01:04:03 The book is a teamwork with a publisher
01:07:06 Organizing the work between multiple authors
01:09:17 Time worked on the book
01:10:40 Feedback from the community for the content
01:12:13 What Marián wants to achieve with the book

01:14:38 Conclusion

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Frank Delporte

Author

Frank Delporte (@frankdelporte) is a Java Champion, Java Developer, Technical Writer at Azul, Blogger, Author of "Getting started with Java on Raspberry Pi", and Pi4J Contributor. Frank blogs about his experiments with Java, sometimes combined with electronic components, on the Raspberry Pi.

Trisha Gee

Author

Engineer, author, keynote speaker, developer champion, catalyst. Developer Advocate @ Gradle.

Wim Deblauwe

Author

Wim Deblauwe is a freelance Java Developer, blogger, open-source enthusiast and author of “Taming Thymeleaf”, a book on working with Spring Boot and Thymeleaf.