I can't speak to the people writing books on coding, etc., but I have written a lot of product documentation and am thinking about doing it full time as an independent consultant.
The small startups where I have worked have had woefully bad documentation. Developers and support reps never have time or want to write it. I would say the most useful thing I have done for these companies has been to set them up with a basic Zendesk account and just start writing articles to answer the most basic support issues and how-to guides.
I have found these topics to be not very prone to political word-smithing. People are just grateful for the documentation to be written. The company word smiths and bullst artists would rather fight over the copy for the front page of the website than type up "Troubleshooting CentOS Client Installation". It's uncontroversial stuff.
You would have to offer a turnkey solution (set up a Zendesk or Confluence knowledge base for them, perhaps as a value-added reseller), propose a list of articles to be written, then knock it out in a couple weeks, with add-on work to keep the documents fresh with future releases.
Your sweet spot would be companies with 25 employees or fewer who don't have the money to bring in a full time technical writer.
I don't think you could make F-U money, but you could do much of it remotely, and it would be less stressful than other types of work. Your clientele would have to come largely based on personal reference.
Doing this properly is often not the most fun thing that people can be doing, but is extremely important for getting others using your, well, whatever. I remember working with an older colleague who was excellent at building up good documentation and we'd follow whatever instructions were there, hit problems and solve them, add something to the docs then go back to the beginning and go through everything again. In doing so, we could often create scripts to automate sections and improve the setup process itself.
It's a task that can be hard to get devs to spend their time on, requires skill in a few different areas and has some clear benefits (reduce dev setup time / onboarding costs, improve customer support, etc). There's no lock-in and progress and completion can be pretty clear.
There might be a good source of bounties for the same kind of thing for open source projects too.
Thanks for the advice. I once read that if everybody thinks something is boring, but you find it fun, then it might be a lucrative niche. That's how I feel about documentation.
The small startups where I have worked have had woefully bad documentation. Developers and support reps never have time or want to write it. I would say the most useful thing I have done for these companies has been to set them up with a basic Zendesk account and just start writing articles to answer the most basic support issues and how-to guides.
I have found these topics to be not very prone to political word-smithing. People are just grateful for the documentation to be written. The company word smiths and bullst artists would rather fight over the copy for the front page of the website than type up "Troubleshooting CentOS Client Installation". It's uncontroversial stuff.
You would have to offer a turnkey solution (set up a Zendesk or Confluence knowledge base for them, perhaps as a value-added reseller), propose a list of articles to be written, then knock it out in a couple weeks, with add-on work to keep the documents fresh with future releases.
Your sweet spot would be companies with 25 employees or fewer who don't have the money to bring in a full time technical writer.
I don't think you could make F-U money, but you could do much of it remotely, and it would be less stressful than other types of work. Your clientele would have to come largely based on personal reference.
Curious if others think this is viable...