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What puzzles me is why most people writing book-length technical work in 2019 should use a traditional publisher at all. The premise that a publisher deserves t

What puzzles me is why most people writing book-length technical work in 2019 should use a traditional publisher at all. The premise that a publisher deserves to keep the vast majority of sales revenue because of the value they add seems like it belongs in another time. In the modern digital and online market, the idea of publisher as some sort of gatekeeper with established channels through distribution networks and into bricks and mortar bookstores is largely obsolete. And what publisher today provides a new author with enough technical editing resources or marketing power or administrative support to justify taking the rights and keeping most of the revenue? Maybe someone has already done this, but it seems to me there's an obvious opportunity for some sort of small-scale broker service that connects authors with independent professionals who can offer the necessary skills in editing, design, illustration, ecommerce, printing and distribution if physical copies are wanted, and so on.

ghaff 7y ago
Because the money involved is often not much and there’s still some cred associated with traditional publishers.
drongoking 7y ago
Speaking as another O'Reilly author, I'd agree with this and add that for tech books the publisher is even less necessary. If you've written papers with Latex/MD/asciidoc, and drawn figures and tables, you're already doing most of what you'd do with your publisher's toolchain anyway. Hook up with Amazon's on-demand publishing service and (except for the nice cover) you've got it almost end-to-end. [I assume you can write and organize thoughts decently well, and have some people who can proofread for you. If not, a publisher really won't help too much with that anyway.] So what does a publisher provide? Marketing, promotion, distribution, reputation. No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will. They can arrange promotions through conferences and email distribution that you probably can't. I wouldn't underestimate this, but I also wouldn't necessarily think it's worth their 80%-90% cut either.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will. Perhaps, but as they say, credibility doesn't pay the rent. What matters in commercial terms of how much money the book ends up putting in your pocket. If a publisher is keeping 90% of the revenue, the services they offer had better generate at least an order of magnitude more sales to break even, less anything it would have cost you to obtain any other relevant services they provided directly instead. Does anyone here believe that this is in fact the case with the level of marketing that a typical tech publisher will do for a new work from a previously unknown author?
  - wtracy 7y ago
    For a lot of the authors of technical books, credibility is the whole point. The goal is not to write a book that directly makes money. The goal is to write a book that gets the author hired or promoted, or to land consulting gigs, or to get VC backing. So, yes, credibility does pay the rent.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    I have heard authors making as little as $500 and very rarely someone making more than $5000 from technical/programming books (outside of top 1% books). Given you easily put 500 hours of work in a book, the best possible outcome for vast majority of authors is literally minimum wage payment. Most authors are competent enough to make 5X more on their regular jobs so they are certainly not writing book for money.
    - zwischenzug 7y ago
      I've made more than $5000 (each) from three books (two self-published, one '1st tier'). I don't think it's that rare, or maybe I"m lucky. Agree on the minimum wage comment, though. I did it for career progression, personal life goals, and passive income.
      - cerberusss 7y ago
coliveira 7y ago
I wrote technical books through traditional publishers, and one reason I can tell is that they do some of the difficult parts of the process, which I consider extremely boring: proofreading, formatting, book cover, indexing. All of these are activities that can be better done by specialized people and are boring as hell. Even if you have the patience to do this part, most probably the book design will look amateurish. On the other hand, self publishing will only be financially rewarding if you are willing to do the marketing, in other words, if you want to make this a full-time gig, which is not the case for most technical writers. As for your last remark, most technical publishers are already nimble operations that connect professionals and designers. It just happens that these small companies are owned by large corporations in order to benefit from the access to market channels. So, unless you're willing to make this a full time job, I don't think it is such a great deal to self-publish your technical books.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >I wrote technical books through traditional publishers, and one reason I can tell is that they do some of the difficult parts of the process, which I consider extremely boring: proofreading, formatting, book cover, indexing. You can hire people to do all that -- if you expect to sell your self-published book, and still make more profits than with a publisher.
  - mgkimsal 7y ago
    you can, but then need to know how to vet them, and ideally they can work together well (professionally, on time, etc). you're taking on more risks and/or more managerial work by doing it. certainly possible, but not without cost.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >you can, but then need to know how to vet them Or you just ask someone who know, and whose books you like, which ones they use...
  - coliveira 7y ago
rmason 7y ago
There were a few publishing startups that only published electronically and let the author keep 60% of the title's price. I can't find them anymore so perhaps the experiment failed.
- marvindanig 7y ago
  Up to 85% of the title's price. Meet Bubblin @ https://bubblin.io https://bubblin.io Discl.: founder here.
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    Interesting idea. FYI, the layout of your home page breaks if your browser default font size isn't 16px, leaving most of the important text unreadable.
    - marvindanig 7y ago
      Can you send a screenshot what you see/inspected to my mail? marvin@bubblin.io Edit: I understand the issue now. Thanks!
      - Silhouette 7y ago
        Sorry, I'm commenting pseudonymously, so not really. But if you just change your browser default font size to say 20px you can't miss it.
- peterarmstrong 7y ago
  At Leanpub, authors keep 80% of the title's price. We've paid over $7.5M in royalties to authors, and we're alive and well :) Write in Markdown, click a button, get a book (PDF, EPUB, MOBI). Click a different button and your book is for sale with an attractive landing page, etc. You can even create a MOOC with one click, again based on Markdown... (disclosure: cofounder)
  - sytelus 7y ago
buckminster 7y ago
By the time you've paid these professionals the typical book is making a loss. A publisher profits from the hits. This is much more of a gamble for a lone author.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  This is a reasonable argument, but an unfortunate corollary is that the author of a really successful book is losing out because they're subsidising all the commercial failures that the publisher took a punt on. The bookie always wins, but no-one else is guaranteed to.
dmje 7y ago
In my experience (author of "technical" book about digital strategy), you need publishers for two things: 1) there's still some kudos in having something commissioned, edited and published by a known entity and 2) the imposition of a hard deadline. If you can cope on your own without either of these, sure, self publish. It is a hard slog, and as others say here, it's unlikely to earn you a reasonable wage - but it's hugely satisfying to see it through knowing how much discipline it takes.

ghaff 7y ago

Because the money involved is often not much and there’s still some cred associated with traditional publishers.

drongoking 7y ago

Speaking as another O'Reilly author, I'd agree with this and add that for tech books the publisher is even less necessary. If you've written papers with Latex/MD/asciidoc, and drawn figures and tables, you're already doing most of what you'd do with your publisher's toolchain anyway. Hook up with Amazon's on-demand publishing service and (except for the nice cover) you've got it almost end-to-end. [I assume you can write and organize thoughts decently well, and have some people who can proofread for you. If not, a publisher really won't help too much with that anyway.] So what does a publisher provide? Marketing, promotion, distribution, reputation. No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will. They can arrange promotions through conferences and email distribution that you probably can't. I wouldn't underestimate this, but I also wouldn't necessarily think it's worth their 80%-90% cut either.

Silhouette 7y ago
No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will. Perhaps, but as they say, credibility doesn't pay the rent. What matters in commercial terms of how much money the book ends up putting in your pocket. If a publisher is keeping 90% of the revenue, the services they offer had better generate at least an order of magnitude more sales to break even, less anything it would have cost you to obtain any other relevant services they provided directly instead. Does anyone here believe that this is in fact the case with the level of marketing that a typical tech publisher will do for a new work from a previously unknown author?
- wtracy 7y ago
  For a lot of the authors of technical books, credibility is the whole point. The goal is not to write a book that directly makes money. The goal is to write a book that gets the author hired or promoted, or to land consulting gigs, or to get VC backing. So, yes, credibility does pay the rent.
- sytelus 7y ago
  I have heard authors making as little as $500 and very rarely someone making more than $5000 from technical/programming books (outside of top 1% books). Given you easily put 500 hours of work in a book, the best possible outcome for vast majority of authors is literally minimum wage payment. Most authors are competent enough to make 5X more on their regular jobs so they are certainly not writing book for money.
  - zwischenzug 7y ago
    I've made more than $5000 (each) from three books (two self-published, one '1st tier'). I don't think it's that rare, or maybe I"m lucky. Agree on the minimum wage comment, though. I did it for career progression, personal life goals, and passive income.
    - cerberusss 7y ago

coliveira 7y ago

I wrote technical books through traditional publishers, and one reason I can tell is that they do some of the difficult parts of the process, which I consider extremely boring: proofreading, formatting, book cover, indexing. All of these are activities that can be better done by specialized people and are boring as hell. Even if you have the patience to do this part, most probably the book design will look amateurish. On the other hand, self publishing will only be financially rewarding if you are willing to do the marketing, in other words, if you want to make this a full-time gig, which is not the case for most technical writers. As for your last remark, most technical publishers are already nimble operations that connect professionals and designers. It just happens that these small companies are owned by large corporations in order to benefit from the access to market channels. So, unless you're willing to make this a full time job, I don't think it is such a great deal to self-publish your technical books.

coldtea 7y ago
>I wrote technical books through traditional publishers, and one reason I can tell is that they do some of the difficult parts of the process, which I consider extremely boring: proofreading, formatting, book cover, indexing. You can hire people to do all that -- if you expect to sell your self-published book, and still make more profits than with a publisher.
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  you can, but then need to know how to vet them, and ideally they can work together well (professionally, on time, etc). you're taking on more risks and/or more managerial work by doing it. certainly possible, but not without cost.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >you can, but then need to know how to vet them Or you just ask someone who know, and whose books you like, which ones they use...
- coliveira 7y ago

rmason 7y ago

There were a few publishing startups that only published electronically and let the author keep 60% of the title's price. I can't find them anymore so perhaps the experiment failed.

marvindanig 7y ago
Up to 85% of the title's price. Meet Bubblin @ https://bubblin.io https://bubblin.io Discl.: founder here.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  Interesting idea. FYI, the layout of your home page breaks if your browser default font size isn't 16px, leaving most of the important text unreadable.
  - marvindanig 7y ago
    Can you send a screenshot what you see/inspected to my mail? marvin@bubblin.io Edit: I understand the issue now. Thanks!
    - Silhouette 7y ago
      Sorry, I'm commenting pseudonymously, so not really. But if you just change your browser default font size to say 20px you can't miss it.
peterarmstrong 7y ago
At Leanpub, authors keep 80% of the title's price. We've paid over $7.5M in royalties to authors, and we're alive and well :) Write in Markdown, click a button, get a book (PDF, EPUB, MOBI). Click a different button and your book is for sale with an attractive landing page, etc. You can even create a MOOC with one click, again based on Markdown... (disclosure: cofounder)
- sytelus 7y ago

buckminster 7y ago

By the time you've paid these professionals the typical book is making a loss. A publisher profits from the hits. This is much more of a gamble for a lone author.

Silhouette 7y ago
This is a reasonable argument, but an unfortunate corollary is that the author of a really successful book is losing out because they're subsidising all the commercial failures that the publisher took a punt on. The bookie always wins, but no-one else is guaranteed to.

dmje 7y ago

In my experience (author of "technical" book about digital strategy), you need publishers for two things: 1) there's still some kudos in having something commissioned, edited and published by a known entity and 2) the imposition of a hard deadline. If you can cope on your own without either of these, sure, self publish. It is a hard slog, and as others say here, it's unlikely to earn you a reasonable wage - but it's hugely satisfying to see it through knowing how much discipline it takes.