Slashdot Mirror
The 'Adventure' In Self-Publishing an IT Book
An anonymous reader writes "Author Keir Thomas has blogged about his experiences self-publishing a computing book. Quoting: 'I knew that publicizing the book would be difficult so I hit upon an idea: Why not give away the eBook (PDF) version? I could use Amazon S3 for hosting the file, so it would cost me just a few dollars per month. Sure enough, giving the eBook away generated a lot of publicity. ... Since going on sale at the start of 2009, the book has made me $9,000. ... I’ve had worse salaries in my life, and I’m very grateful, but I know total royalties would probably have been higher had I gone through the traditional route of working with a mainstream publisher. I estimate I have to give away 446 copies of the eBook for every sale of the print edition.'"
Many times you see pro-piracy guys on slashdot suggesting, or might I say demanding publishers to use alternative ways to get money. Or just do it for the fun. Well, here again we see that those guys cannot see things clearly from both sides. They just want free stuff.
The guy missed out - he could have made a fortune by charging a couple of bucks for it.
Learn about Photography Basics.
They are always out of date before you can buy them, they are of variable quality compared to what you get from the olde dayes with fully documented reference and user guides that took up several meters of shelf space. And unlike yesteryear, developers learn as they go, often filling in the blanks when they get there. As such, there's invariably someone that has had the same problem, bad functionality, bug, wrong docs, that's asked in a forum, mailing list, usenet et al.
I noticed a donate button on that website.
I wonder how many people just donated, compared to the % of people who bought. I'll be taking a look at this book, it looks interesting and rather useful.
Love the "department" - rockin' the old school Zelda ;)
The pro-piracy frame would see every publisher backed into a corner, gnawing its own limbs off. And I suppose they think the next step would be that they get to feed on the bloated carcass.
The only problem is, once that meat is gone, that will be it. All that will remain is the slow trickle of feed from Mr. $4500 a year and his like, and many of the niche offerings will be created no longer.
' Since going on sale at the start of 2009, the book has made me $9,000. ... I’ve had worse salaries in my life,"
That amounts to, what, $2.25 an hour? Sorry, even when I was in high school back in the 80s, minimum wage in MA was $3.55 and hour.
Here's another angle that's hard to quantify: What happens if you decide to publish another book? The fact that you've distributed all those free copies along side of the pay-for editions means you've got a *LOT* of people who know your name. This fact alone should give your next book a big head-start if you ever decide to publish again, either through a "vanity press" or through a more conventional channel.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Also there's the opposite example of the man who earned ~$10 million by selling his books for just one dollar each.
And that guy would be? It's amazing that this opposite example comes with absolutely no citation!
I'm a bit puzzled - in TFA he says that publishers weren't interested:
"Nobody was interested. The profit margin is too low on cheap books, they said."
He then concludes:
"I’ve had worse salaries in my life, and I’m very grateful, but I know total royalties would probably have been higher had I gone through the traditional route of working with a mainstream publisher."
The publishers weren't interested, so it seems that he'd have saved the 3 months and not written the book. Once you start thinking that a book, had it been the sort of high profit book the publishers are looking for, would have made more money than the actual, low profit book you self published, you're off on a tangent. IMHO, of course.
1) Niche book.
2) Gave away copies, instead of charging a buck or two.
3) Seems to equate the amount of people who'd download it for nothing (many of whom will probably never even read it) to people who spent money on it in print. Repeat after me: DOWNLOADING A FILE FOR FREE COSTS NOTHING, SO EVERYONE DOES IT EVEN IF THEY ARE ONLY SORT OF INTERESTED. IT HAS NO BEARING ON THE ACTUAL 'POPULARITY' OF YOUR BOOK.
Obviously you've never written a book.
ya, I heard the story about the guy who was making money at a rate that projected to about half a million a year if he kept selling books but 10 million? nonsense.
Something I'd like to see more of are those stiff plastic cards that provide a quick reference for something. You see those for "Algebra I" in most bookstores. Ones for programming languages and programs would be useful.
Writing one of those cards is a useful exercise for designers. If you can't cram the essential instructions onto one card, the interface probably needs a redesign or something needs to be automated.
No, seriously, why?
If you were a decent writer, you'd write an iPad eBook or a crippled version for the Droid.
Let me guess, you included lots of glossy pictures too, right?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I published a computing book through a conventional publisher (Addison Wesley), and the amounts of money we made were roughly comparable. It's considerably sub minimum wage, given the years I put into writing it (including months full-time, away from a paying job writing software at a wage substantially higher than minimum.)
Which was, in fact, the point. It wasn't going to make me rich; it was going to make me famous. (You've heard of me and my book Programming for the Java Virtual Machine, right? Right?) I wanted to write a book, so I did. The publisher put it in a lot of bookstores and even translated it into Korean. (I've always wanted to lay my hands on a copy of the Korean translation.) It helped that this was a major Java publisher; my book is shelved next to big-name authors, some of whom were involved in reviewing it. That's a kind of expertise I couldn't have purchased.
At the time, it wasn't really practical to self-publish on the web; the print-on-demand services didn't exist and a real printing run had a high overhead. There's literally something buried in my contract about buying the printing plates once it went out of print, but it's still in print, and they send me a small but welcome check twice year.
My book had a limited target market, and even if I kept 100% of the gross it would still have been less money than I would have made at the job. But it's proving useful as an introduction: I'm now working on a different book in a completely unrelated field and can tell potential interview subjects that I wrote a book when I cold-call them.
They do care: if they're going to take the time to talk with me, they want to know that the book is likely to be published. They'd be even happier if I had a contract, but it's getting me into doors I need so that I can write the submission. Some of them might have turned me down if I told them I was going to self-publish.
That may change. The fame-producing aspects of a major publisher are less and less relevant. The money won't get any better, and may get worse, but if you're in it for the money you really should go back to writing code anyway.
If it took him 3 months to write, you have to weigh that against the time to write a longer book. 9 months? 12 months?
I don't know what book royalties work out to be, but if it's 1/4 the time to write for 1/2 or 1/3 the paycheck, it's not bad ... he just needs to find another cheap book to write to fill the rest of the time.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
>>>Obviously you've never written a book.
I have not.
But Isaac Asimov did: 500+. Even if he only made $9000 per book, that's about 7 per year, or $63,000. He'd be doing "better than a guy at McDonalds or Walmart". Approximately $30 an hour.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
This idea is great for something like a childrens book. Nobody wants to read to their kids from a laptop or e-book reader. You kill the experience and look like a douche. So you release the book as an E-book so the parent can read the story before buying a nicely bound book you can read with your child.
On the other hand, IT books are probably the WORST to do this with. Your target crowd knows better than most how to pirate your book and are perfectly happy referring to the PDF, which is searchable, over a dead-tree which you have to put sticky notes in to have any sort of indexing past the TOC.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I have also self-published a book: my most recent book, Value-Driven IT (http://ValueDrivenIT.com). Prior to that I had published three books through traditional publishers (Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley). I will note that the term "self-publish" is a little ambiguous, since anyone who gets an ISBN number and publishes a book with that number is a publisher, by definition.
I also "gave away" the content, by putting it on a wiki, and also making hard- and soft-cover versions available from Amazon.
Unlike many who self-publish, I went through all of the steps that I would have had to go through had I published the traditional way. These included extensive review by subject matter experts, extensive editorial feedback and revision, professional layout (including an index, legal permission for graphics used, etc.), forewords by industry luminaries, and pre-publication commentary (known as "advance praise") by industry experts.
Some of the things I learned from the self-publishing experience are:
Also, books that are "cross-over" books - i.e., interdisciplinary - are very hard to market, whether one uses an established publisher or self-publishes. This is because people generally read IT books when they want to learn about something that they heard about, and if something doesn't fit into an established niche, then one will not have heard about it. My most recent two books (High-Assurance Design and Value-Driven IT) are both cross-over books and therefore are hard to market.
There is also a misconception that people who write technical books do it for money, and that their motivation is book sales. My first book was a big hit (sold about 30,000 copies: that is a-lot for a technical book). However, if I calculate the money I made on an hourly basis given the amount of time it took to write the book, I earned at the rate of about $30/hour. Not very good, especially considering that I earn about five times that in the other work that I do. The reasons for writing a book (for me) have always been that (1) a book establishes one as a recognized thought leader in the industry, it (2) helps one to organize one's thoughts about something, and (3) it serves as a "calling card" when one does consulting (which I do). Royalties are not a very good reason for writing a technical book.
I have downloaded a lot of pdf and other files, only to delete them after 5 minutes because it was not what I was looking for or I did not like the style. Think of a download like someone picking up a book in a book store and looking through it. Sometimes it results in a sale, but usually not (at least in my case). One thing missing from comments is how good is the book that the author gave away for free. Can someone who has read it comment on this ? Just because a book has been written does not mean it automatically has to make money.
My company, a large IT_Company has their own publisher for employees to author books. However, this process would well over a year and would require me to submit my draft in msword, instead of Framemaker which is what I was writing it in. The publisher would then convert it from word into framemaker for use with their templates... I dealt with 4 different editors and decided to go the self-publishing route.
I used lulu.com, a 'on-demand' printing/publishing company. They charge a bit for each physical copy to cover printing/shipping/handling etc.. I was able to easily get an ISBN number, and then set a price for the book, which my profits get automatically deposited into a paypal account every month.
The book is listed on Amazon/BarnesnNoble/Borders/GoogleBooks etc...
The whole lulu.com effort took about 3 weeks, which most involved waiting for my proof copies to arrive (i didn't want to pay for expedited printing/shipping).
My next book isn't going through my companies publishing company either. I really have no interest in justifying when I think my 1500th copy will be sold.
Especially since I give away the .pdf for free and only charge for hard copies.
You'd be lucky to make that $9k in the traditional publishing world. Your book would have to do very well. Most technical books are only printed in runs of 1 or 2 thousand at a time because overall demand is not that high and the relevancy of the book declines over time meaning shelf supply becomes dead weight, unlike other (non-technical) works which can maintain relevancy for decades.
For an unknown author like me, I can attest that a combination of free and sales is a great strategy. Making 9k isn't bad for a book. I've been doing something similar with my novel, Betrayal. I am releasing the whole book, a chapter at a time, with a link to Smashwords.com, where I have it for sale ($.99). Before I started giving the book away, I had less than 10 sales. On Smashwords, the first 20% was available for free, but I still didn't see the sales. However, once I started posting more free chapters, I've had 50 sales a week! Not sure how sales will hold up once I finish releasing the whole thing, but I am hoping for a result similar to this guys experience. With a .99 sale price, I have been getting enough reviews and sales to make it onto the sales charts at Smashwords.
The main point is that without giving it away for free, no one would have ever heard of me. I would have made fewer sales by only giving away a small portion, than I am by giving away the whole book.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/37846
I do something similar with the book Modern Perl. Electronic versions are free and freely redistributable. Download numbers are at least 10 or 20 times the number of sales of the printed version, but I've made more in royalties than I'd ever see from a so-called "traditional" publisher, as I earn at least eight times as much per copy sold than I would.
If you can find a reputable publisher who won't give you the awful 10-15% of wholesale, or if you can find a credible editor and copyeditor to look over your work, self-publishing or small-press publishing is a much, much better way to make money writing books, even if you give away electronic versions.
how to invest, a novice's guide
So in order to make ends meet, authors should be required to match the pace of one of the most prolific authors in history? Some one like Asimov deserves to be a millionaire, not merely "better than a guy at McDonalds".
Well, here again we see that those guys cannot see things clearly from both sides. They just want free stuff.
Suppose the pro-piracy guys are wrong, and cannot see things clearly from both sides. It does not follow that they just want free stuff.
Not every case of someone being wrong is because of an ulterior motive.
I don't even concede that much, by the way. I demand that publishers use alternative ways to get money simply because piracy is not going away, and the cost of fighting piracy is too high for society in general. DRM is a burden on everyone. But I also don't think giving it away is the only other option here.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I had published two books and sold them as consignment to computer retail stores with huge success. I also used them in my teaching classes and thus kept all the profit to my self. I wrote these books because no book I had used showed me to crawl, walk and then run. That is, the author assume lots of thinks that is not stated explicitly. Thus, almost all books(text books too) tell us how the writer did something say, in a programming languages, rather than go into all missing details necessary for an average person to go through all the intermediate steps to complete a learning assignment.So, if you need an instructor to explain the material in a text book, you don't need that book or if the book is very clearly written you don't need a teacher. I have completed a few more books and will be publishing them through my company . Web publishing with a reasonable purchase price will be the way to go.
There's never been any question I've had about Ubuntu that couldn't be answered with about thirty seconds worth of grepping around the internet. That is, unless it was so esoteric that no pocket guide would have the answer anyway. The reality is, pocket guides like this just aren't relevant in today's environment. Certainly not in a paper-print format. Searchable PDF is far more useful to begin with. I would definitely question the assertion he would have made more money with a traditional publisher. More likely you'd have seen the books lining the ninety-nine cent bargain bins in liquidation marts - that is if they weren't being trucked to recyclers sans covers.
There are more forums, wikis, blogs, and articles on Ubuntu than I could possibly read in a century. A pocket book on Ubuntu failing to make the author rich is newsworthy like a chocolate factory startup failing in Hershey Pennsylvania. My advice to the author is take the nine grand and run. I think he made out like a bandit on this.
Perhaps a more lucrative way to sell more copies of the printed version would be to make freely available a limited version as an eBook, one that has the table of contents and enough useful chapters to be interesting and to motivate readers to want more after they find the first material useful. It's like what used to be a social norm: a girl who gives it all up right away doesn't always generate the motivation for a guy to marry her, so while some back-seat grappling was okay, some withholding was in order until the ring was on the hand. And there you have the engine that fueled the 1950s drive-in movie industry.
Literature, even non-fiction, is highly subjective in nature. Whereas one person may like a bit of sarcastic wit, another might find it boring.
Given this, establishing a brand is highly important. Giving out copies of a book just establishes your brand... the next book will leverage on the brand, while you still may get royalties for the first book.
The basic method, as with any entrepreneurial endeavor, is to invest lots of time into building the company/brand, release something, then keep doing it over and over with successive releases, allowing experience to guide you to better works/products.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
"I could use Amazon S3 for hosting the file, so it would cost me just a few dollars per month." You can use free rapidshare or hotfile instead. Anyway on hotfile you can meet copyright problems even if you are an author ;)
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
50% of the retail price goes to the book seller. The seller can of course discount the price to stimulate interest, out of this.
The other half goes to the publisher, who must pay:
Print and Production costs (on a 500-page, casebound, colour-illustrated book on a short print run, this can be high)
Distribution (shipping, warehousing, delivery).
Overheads of running the business: staff, rent, heating, lighting, advertising, etc
8%-12% goes to the author.
So a book that has projected sales of under 5,000 copies is not a safe bet for a publisher.
If you self-publish, you get a larger share of the retail price -- but then you also have to pay for the costs yourself. It's also worth pointing that even the most erudite author benefits from a good editor.
I like that the PDF is laid out in such a way that it's still readable in full page view on my phone - that right there makes it much more likely that I'll use and refer to it.
fencepost
just a little off
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I know someone who has sold 1200 copies of his software book in 1 week using facebook.
http://www.mudroombenches.info