Seven years of Mastering Vim

Oh, how the time flies. I published the first edition of Mastering Vim in 2018. Since then, it has been translated to Japanese and received its second edition.

In 2021, I wrote about how much money publishing Mastering Vim has earned, and I think now’s the perfect time to get an update.

Mastering Vim was never meant to become a bestseller, but it did fairly well given the fact that I haven’t done much promotional work and haven’t been particularly active in Vim space since then.

For the first edition of the book, I receive 16% royalties. For the second edition, I negotiated a step-up based on publisher’s net receipts (over the lifetime of the book): it starts as low as 16% and climbs as high as 25% once the publisher nets £40,000 from my book.

Here’s year over year sales and revenue data, you can see it to be predictable and steady:

Year	Copies	Revenue
2018	284*	$363*
2019	533	$1,433
2020	548	$1,533
2021	458	$1,752
2022	386	$1,403
2023	279	$1,112
2024	381	$1,206

* Mastering Vim was published in Q4 2018.

On average, I earn about $5 for every print book sold, and a bit over $2 for every ebook sold.

In addition to book sales, I also receive a portion of translation fees (for the Japanese translation), as well as subscriptions to the publisher’s service (something I do not promote nor care about).

Book sales	Translation fees	Subscriptions
$8,803	$1,669	$572

In the past seven years, Mastering Vim has sold close to 3,000 copies (not including the Japanese edition, which I have no visibility into). This has grossed slightly over $11,000 in total revenue. While this amount is definitely not enough to live off the royalty income, I have truly enjoyed learning more about the domain and becoming a subject matter expert throughout the writing process. Having a published book feels like a legacy artifact that I can be proud of. Of course, the quarterly royalty statements are a nice bonus as well.

If you’d like to see the book for yourself, Mastering Vim can be picked up on Amazon.