For this author, and many others, the book is somewhat of a loss-leader of some sort: a form of marketing for a consultant, freelancer, aspiring politician, scientist, activist, or similar. PhD theses often work like this, too.
In that scenario, the royalty cheque is sometimes nice, but not considered necessary. If given a choice between, say, ten people reading the book for free versus one person buying it and never getting around to reading it, these authors will always chose the former.
But there is, quite obviously, a different kind: the professional author. GoT wouldn't have happened within George RR Martin's lifetime if he had to teach English or run a really strange cult on the side to pay rent. Many non-fiction authors fall into the same category. James Gleick might be one people here enjoy.
This isn't necessarily a binary distinction. Noam Chomsky, Richard Feynman, or Edward Tufte could have all lived quite comfortably on just their salary as professors and the occasional Nobel prize. But their success as authors drastically increased their freedom, possibly allowing them to take risks in their work they would have avoided otherwise, like talking truth to NASA (and/or capitalism).
As an analogy, consider the not-uncommon offer to work for free on someone's (commercial) software project in exchange for "exposure". This is more common among designers and musicians these days, but used to happen quite frequently to programmers as well. It's exactly the same logic, and not always entirely wrong. Nonetheless, it has become somewhat of a running joke/faux pas/universally recognised sign of a person having no clue of the industry and to be avoided.
I think you have it wrong, there are different types of audiences. It’s not exactly hard to find a free source for learning any tech because there is just so much material out there, and in that environment it’s often better to get paid by people who have liked the work you offered them for free.
I would have never read, or later purchased, the testing goat book for Django if it wasn’t freely available because I would have simply selected another source.
People don’t really do that with fiction because there isn’t 9 million different Harry Potters that are all almost equally good.
A further benefit of having a lot of people read your tech book is that you get more feedback which makes it easier to improve it, and a lot of tech books are really rather terrible until they’ve been heavily edited. And unlike fiction there is often a correct way to do things with tech.
For this author, and many others, the book is somewhat of a loss-leader of some sort: a form of marketing for a consultant, freelancer, aspiring politician, scientist, activist, or similar. PhD theses often work like this, too.
In that scenario, the royalty cheque is sometimes nice, but not considered necessary. If given a choice between, say, ten people reading the book for free versus one person buying it and never getting around to reading it, these authors will always chose the former.
But there is, quite obviously, a different kind: the professional author. GoT wouldn't have happened within George RR Martin's lifetime if he had to teach English or run a really strange cult on the side to pay rent. Many non-fiction authors fall into the same category. James Gleick might be one people here enjoy.
This isn't necessarily a binary distinction. Noam Chomsky, Richard Feynman, or Edward Tufte could have all lived quite comfortably on just their salary as professors and the occasional Nobel prize. But their success as authors drastically increased their freedom, possibly allowing them to take risks in their work they would have avoided otherwise, like talking truth to NASA (and/or capitalism).
As an analogy, consider the not-uncommon offer to work for free on someone's (commercial) software project in exchange for "exposure". This is more common among designers and musicians these days, but used to happen quite frequently to programmers as well. It's exactly the same logic, and not always entirely wrong. Nonetheless, it has become somewhat of a running joke/faux pas/universally recognised sign of a person having no clue of the industry and to be avoided.