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The 'Adventure' In Self-Publishing an IT Book

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-dangerous-to-go-alone-take-this dept.

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.'"

8 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Yep by viablos · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Yep by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Success story?! Only as much as you'd consider a bimbo telling you that she had to give it up to 446 guys before she could find one who'd actually marry her as being a success story.

      This idiot author allowed himself to be gang-raped by the greedy, free-loading, unethical majority of people. (Where Slashdotters are just a cross-section of the exact same.) While he got something out of it and is overall glad he tried, he's feeling like his dignity's been ravaged by a thousand pricks. Because it has.

  2. That wasn't smart. by lwsimon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The guy missed out - he could have made a fortune by charging a couple of bucks for it.

    --
    Learn about Photography Basics.
    1. Re:That wasn't smart. by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I believe the mentality goes like this:

      "I'm not sure I'd really want a $0.99 'tech' book. However, something free is worth at least looking at - hey this is pretty good I'll tell my tech friends." And some of them buy it.

      There was just a guy who lowered his published his fictional eBook from $2.99 to $0.99 and made more money due to higher sales - linky. I think the difference is spending a dollar on recreation is fine for people, but if it's for 'work', I'm going to want to spend a decent amount to make sure I'm getting a quality product. The 'free' stuff gets noticed but the 'super cheap' stuff is still viewed as being lower quality.

      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
  3. I wonder by Haedrian · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I wonder by HungryHobo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      " The only way you would be restricted is by your own ignorance."

      as long as you're outside america.
      Inside you'd also be restricted by the laws which make it illegal to circumvent copyright restrictions.

  4. Re:Say what?! by b0bby · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It took him 3 months to write, so he considers that he has so far made $3k/month. Better than minimum wage.

  5. Re:It's more than that by oatworm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The trouble, as this guy learned, is that middlemen do add value. Why is his eBook only sold at Amazon US? Because he didn't have a middleman that he could go through to negotiate contracts with Barnes & Noble, Powell's, Borders/Waldenbooks, or overseas bookstores. To his credit, he did a decent job of doing his own marketing, hitting his target audience quite nicely, but, since it didn't have a cute animal on the front and a brand that sounds like "Oh really?", a lot of people might have taken a pass on his book because they didn't think it came from a trusted source of quality technical publications. This sort of dynamic holds true in the music and film industry, too.

    Making stuff is easy. Getting stuff into people's hands is hard.

    Now, are some middlemen overpaid? Could they use some real competition, instead of the cozy oligopoly they've been able to maintain thus far? Almost certainly. I'd love to see media distribution become commoditized because, when things become commodities, they become cheap and fungible, which is good for consumers of that product. Since artists are the consumers of media distribution networks (we're the product), I definitely can understand why this is an exciting moment for them.