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.'"
The guy missed out - he could have made a fortune by charging a couple of bucks for it.
Learn about Photography Basics.
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.
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
It took him 3 months to write, so he considers that he has so far made $3k/month. Better than minimum wage.
They may not have paid for it, but they are adding value to slashdot with their information. What value are you adding to Knight Rider by watching it?
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Actually, there are plastic cards for Java, C, C++, C#, and many other languages. Check out most university or college bookstores.
My fave is the one for Perl.
-- 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.
Future sales of Knight Rider movie merchandise? Yeah, probably not. They'll just pirate that stuff, too.
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.
"What value are you adding to Knight Rider by watching it?"
The same value slashdot is adding to their ebooks and blog. Advertising. By watching Knight Rider I am exposing those around me to the show and the brand. This provides them more opportunities for sales.
Mr. $4500 a year is the bread and butter of the publishing industry. That is far more than most authors see on their first book. If most of that is from the first year they would stop printing the book about now and the content would basically disappear.
Instead, he is probably still selling the material and even if he weren't the PDF content will continue to be available as long as anyone wants it.
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.
They may not have paid for it, but they are adding value to slashdot with their information. What value are you adding to Knight Rider by watching it?
If David Hasselhoff overacts in a forest, and no-one is around to see him (or they're watching Airwolf on the other channel), does Knight Rider exist?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Of course everybody wants free stuff. That's why giving stuff away works. Cory Doctorow gives all his books away for free in dozens of formats at craphound.com, and he credits his status as a New York Times best seller to this.
One publisher last year wanted to know how much he was losing to sales in piracy, so he commissioned a study to look at sales figures. Pirated books take a few weeks to be scanned and hit the net, and the publisher was astounded to learn that rather than a dropoff in sales wjhen the book hits the net, there was actually a spike in sales.
Face it, there's little chance of being on Opera Winfrey, especially with a nerd book. Nobody's going to buy a book from an author they've never read. Had it not been for the public libraries, I'd never have bought an Asimov book, and there are now a couple dozen of his titles on my shelf.
Free sells.
Speaking of Asimov, I've been rereading the Foundation series. In Foundation and Earth he writes that the Hugo Award winning trilogy was first published by Gnome Press, who was cash-strapped and couldn't market it properly. Asimov didn't make a dime on it until Doubleday bought the rights ten years later.
In light of this. $9,000 for a niche book with no publicity except an Amazon account is testament to the fact that IT WORKED, and a very strong indication that your views on the matter are faulty.
BTW, The Paxil Diaries is (so far) only available on BitTorrent; I haven't published a paper version yet. I hope I'm as lucky as the submitter when I finally do get around to it. Anybody know a good publisher?
Free Martian Whores!
That is the point of the free version. How else do you get people to read and talk about your book in the sea of crap. If it is worth reading it will get noticed because there is no cost barrier. Those, like me that want bound versions of good books will pay for the paper.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
No, that doesn't solve the problem. You now have an ocean of free crap from which you need to find the stuff that's worth reading. Furthermore, if this trend takes hold, every Tom, Dick, and Harriet is going to think they can write, which would make the ocean of free crap out there now look like a puddle in the wide, wide world of craptasticness.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
As a reference guide to newer and fast changing languages, maybe.
For more in depth studies on theory, language fundamentals, algorithms, and more complex topics and / or well written primers? Not so much.
I also find that it's still easier to browse a reference tome - much the way one browses a dictionary - than it is an electronic reference. It's not quicker to get to a specific topic, but it's easier to find new topics.