6 ms·

So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?

77 points by there 16y ago

noahc 16y ago
What I would be more interested in is not how much money he made, but what opportunities opened up to him. To me, the goal of putting out good content is leverage it to get awesome job offers, bigger projects, higher paying consulting gigs. Anyone have any experience with this? Has a blog post or ebook created opportunities for you?
- jeremymcanally 16y ago
  I built the initial foundation for my Ruby/Rails consulting career on the back of my eBook. That opened up the opportunity to work some awesome people (directly, as in "I read your book, work with us") and to write a book for a "real" publisher. Of course these opportunities opened up more work and conference speaking opportunities. And again this past year with the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook. I was invited to speak at like 5 conferences based off my work on that along with some other opportunities. So yes, getting information out there in a cohesive way that people are interested in is a great way to open up opportunities for yourself, whether it's a blog, book, documentation project, etc.
  - patio11 16y ago
    Ditto here, particularly with regards to blogging. Community participation also has helped me, although it was one of those "overnight success in five years" stories.
- flyosity 16y ago
  My iPhone user interface tutorial site that I launched a few weeks ago has already spawned 3 book offers: 2 from O'Reilly, 1 from another publisher. I politely turned them down: I'm fortunate to have a fairly sizable audience, so traditional publishers can't offer me much. I'm not going to lie, telling editors at large publishing houses that I'm more interested in self-publishing was more than a little satisfying.
- rbxbx 16y ago
  While not specifically about eBooks, the 'Conclusions' section of this post http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ by Peter Cooper does a good job detailing why one might - and might not - want to write a book.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  I was offered a gig being the co-writer of a book on Python by Manning. I turned it down ultimately for a variety of reasons, but in part because I thought it would be a lot of work for the likely pay, and partly because there were (what I considered to be anyway) several good and free alternatives already. Looking back, I might have accepted and done it, because I have heard it leads to more publicity and helps you get more paying work, which indirectly compensates for it. You asked about whether blogging might have created opportunities. In my case, I think it has, I know I've had folks look both at my writing and the rest of my online presence and that was a big factor in getting new paying work and opportunities. Everything helps. Just giving tangible evidence that you Have Skills and can Get Things Done, in whatever field, is huge.
jordanb 16y ago
It's worth observing that the title he published was one that was turned down by all the publishers as being commercially nonviable. It'd be interesting to see what the outcome would be if he repeated the experiment with a title they were dying to publish. That would help determine if they're worth the huge percentage they take because they're good at promotion, or if all they're doing is detecting titles that will sell well on their own.
jeremymcanally 16y ago
I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org http://hlrb.org. Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as sales began to slope off, I ran a $6 sale for some time (stated as a celebration of Rails 3 stable I think and then just continued on just because), and wouldn't you know, sales soared for a while. I plan on implementing a pricing structure similar to what he's done here once Rails 3.1 hits next month; we'll see what that experiment yields. My eBook on writing eBooks (http://authoringebooks.com http://authoringebooks.com) hasn't sold well by most mainstream standards, and I can almost guarantee the $49 price tag is partially to blame. Unfortunately, it'd be really problematic to have a print edition of a book on writing eBooks, so I'm just going to have to figure out a better way to market it. :) Maybe one day soon people will be willing to pay more for eBooks, but at this point I can't blame them. You don't get a tangible good that you can give specific value to. With current rights scehemes, if you delete the file on accident or something, it's possible that you're hosed for good. The medium in general still isn't a solved problem, but maybe one day soon it will be...
- ashearer 16y ago
  I'm sure there are many kinds of authors curious about entering the e-book market, and those with the most to learn would be traditionalists who don't themselves buy e-books. So I wouldn't entirely dismiss the idea of a printed book on writing e-books. (It's bound to generate a few snickers. But then again, you could use that sentence to promote it.)
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  As a data point: I'm reluctant to pay too much for ebooks, because they have no resale value. There are plenty of print books that I've happily spent $30-100 for, because I know that I can resell them for most of the cost (typically $5 less, at most) if I don't consider them worth keeping. Arguably, this makes their effective cost more like $5-10, give or take - mostly shipping. I'm quite willing to pay more for books that are worthwhile, but it's hard to tell upfront. I really like the MEAP subscription model of, "free trial chapter(s), subscribe and get further chapters as they're written, get the book when it's done". Plus, it works even better for serial fiction. Also: I have a kindle, and I use the hell out of it (citeseer!); I'm in no way opposed to ebooks. Just, pricing them is tricky. I've bought several. I also worked in a library for several years. Make what of that you will.
kjksf 16y ago
I think that giving the PDF for free was a mistake. I would sell the PDF for the same price as print (or slightly cheaper) and try 2 other ways for generating publicity/traffic. 1. Serialize the book as blog post i.e. post each self-contained part as spaced blog posts, with a link to buy the whole PDF at the end of each post. 2. Publish the whole book as html, but at any given time only part of the book would be available. I would (automagically) change which part e.g. every week. Both those tactics are meant to drive search traffic, give away some of the value of the book but not all of it, so that people have a reason to buy the whole thing, either as PDF or as paper version.
- eustatius 16y ago
  I suppose if he were to sell the PDF, it would automatically turn his "encourag[ing] redistribut[ing] the PDF, including via BitTorrent" into piracy. If you see piracy as a necessary evil, you might grumble at that; if, like Minecraft's creator, you see piracy as a nullity: http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-says-minecraft-creator http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-sa... and say "there's no such thing as a lost sale", then you might not care in the slightest. But the nature of the ecosystem surrounding your book will inevitably change: as someone said elsewhere in this thread, you can't loan an eBook; a solution to that would be sending someone the PDF, but you've just turned them into a pirate. There's no easy solution. Upselling blogposts might be a better idea; even then, it would be good to have figures. An even more radical alternative would have been Mark Pilgrim's approach to Dive Into Python. You could give your book a Creative Commons licence and expect people to copy and remix it: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point but then Pilgrim admits he's not in it for the money, so in the absence of reliable financials: who knows?
  - chc 16y ago
    If you publish on Kindle or Nook, you actually can loan an ebook. Both platforms allow for lending.
spatten 16y ago
My cofounder at Leanpub wrote up his experience publishing "Flexible Rails" here: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=266 http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=266 Here's the tl;dr: * Peter made $48k from Flexible Rails. * $34k of that was from sales of the PDF. I'm biased, but it seems to me that giving away the PDF (where you make close to 100% profit) to sell a paper book (where you make much less -- The 40% profit from the article is by far the highest I've ever seen) is crazy. If you have an audience and a good book, you should be able to do well on an e-book. Keir Thomas in the article has both, but he gave away 500 000 copies of his ebook and only made $9k on the paper book. Yikes! He could've sold the book for 2$ a pop and got 1% of the downloads and still made the more. Keir is right that you have to give away something for free. So, give away a good chunk of the book (say, 1/3 or so) as a PDF and sell the full thing. Or, give away the whole book for free as HTML and sell the PDF. That's what Eric Ries http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned and Nivi and Naval from Venture Hacks are doing (http://leanpub.com/venturehacks http://leanpub.com/venturehacks) and they're doing quite well. Really, I don't meant to be too hard on Keir. It was a good post, with interesting data. I think he has shown that giving away the e-book and selling the print book is not necessarily the way to go. I'd love to see a lot more experiments and write-ups about this. I truly believe that authors can and will soon be able to make good money self publishing technical e-books.
mkramlich 16y ago
He climbed a bit steeper hill than he would have had to climb otherwise because he chose to create something that has lots of free acceptable alternatives already easily findable and useable, and it's (effectively, though not strictly speaking) a commodity product. It might be a pretty darn good one, but it's still something that just fills a commodity need, for most people. On a related note, I myself have developed a rule of thumb policy to don't buy technical books anymore because there is almost always an acceptable free way to get the info I need, and therefore this frees up more cash for getting things I can't get for free otherwise, or at least, to get higher quality or more convenient things. Like food, shelter, computer equipment, etc. I am still very willing and do frequently buy fiction books, in part because I know how hard it is to write fiction, how poor the pay often is, and because my interest is not a commodity/generic interest but rather a specific one for a particular story or author that is attractive. (I gladly pay for Stephenson, Scalzi and Simmons, for example.) Also, I don't like to handle dirty/secondhand books, and I've read a pretty big percentage of old public domain literature that I'm interested in -- if I haven't read something written before say 1850 there's a pretty good chance I never will because I've passed on it several times already, whereas there are still tons of books written even in the last 20 years that sound attractive from a distance but I still haven't gotten around to reading yet. When I want to Get Something Done I can often do tactical lookups in man pages, help docs, online pages, Googling around, asking somebody, etc. and very rarely have no other recourse than a retail book. I'm also coming from the perspective of someone who did previously frequently buy technical books and build up a pretty large library of computer/software-related ones, and found that only a small percentage of them were fundamental enough to still be useful and must-keepable today (think Stevens TCP/IP Illustrated, many Addison-Wesley UNIX/Internet tomes). Whereas a lot of them were too tied to transient/temporary/version-specific technology (most of my O'Reilly buys, for example -- even though I love O'Reilly) such as Java 1.2-era books, old versions of Perl, early HTML books, books on Solaris (heck just saying a book on Solaris is antique and useless makes me feel old, I remember when I ran into it at lots of companies before the coming of the Linux wave), etc. Book buying is also a highly discretionary line item in my budget. Whenever there's any sense of a cash crunch or big upcoming need to spend money on more important things, book buying is one of the first things to disappear. Gas prices up 75%? A few less technical books bought and you're back in balance for quite a while. All this said, I admire writers because I know how hard it is. And I think there will always be a non-zero-dollar market demand for quality written technical books, even if only in purely electronic form. I just think writers will need to increasingly be aware of what their competitors are, because there's going to be an increasing number of good free alternatives to their work, as well. And an increasing percentage of people are going to be giving away portions of their work for free on the web as a sort of resume++ and lead generator.
GeneralMaximus 16y ago
Offtopic: why does this website need JavaScript to display content?
atgm 16y ago
I'm currently trying to self-publish my (non-IT) ebook on Amazon, Lulu, and Barnes & Noble through www.branchrock.com. Here's my impression: 1. Lulu is the easiest to work with. They accept the widest variety of files, don't require any special formatting, allow you to choose your price and discounts, and most importantly, update changes almost instantly. The only down side to using Lulu is that they don't have the same mindspace as Amazon or Barnes & Noble. 2. Amazon is the next-best. They'll accept .doc files and convert them for you, which means it's extremely easy to just write and upload. Their conversion is also very accurate; I didn't have to fuss with the file once I read the guidelines. On the down side, they take forever to update, so you need to check your information and read your entire book in the little preview window to make sure everything is perfect before you submit, otherwise you'll be waiting another 24-36 hours before you can submit a change that won't go in for ANOTHER 24-36 hours. They also don't allow you to download a copy of your own ebook to verify locally or on a Kindle before it goes live. 3. Barnes & Noble is the worst of the three, in my experience. They operate the same way as Amazon, but with some caveats. The first is that their conversion is nowhere near as good as Amazon's; I ended up copying all of the text out of my book and manually formatting it using CSS and HTML tags to get a book that looked the way it was supposed to, with images, line breaks, indentation, and text alignment. The second is that they, like Amazon, take a long time to update your listing. On the up side, however, they do let you download a copy of your ebook so you can look at it locally or on your Nook. That having been said, how have sales worked out for me? Over 60% of my sales so far have gone to Amazon. I attribute that to both the name (Amazon is a trustworthy brand) and also to the popularity of the Kindle. The remaining 40% have gone to the PDF version on Lulu. Both versions are DRM-free and the PDF version is slightly more expensive than the Amazon version ($1.53 compared to $0.99). If you look at the site I'm using to advertise (www.branchrock.com), the Amazon button comes first, followed by the B&N button, then the Lulu button, which is simply labeled "PDF" to bypass any PC/Mac confusion. Perhaps the positioning of the Amazon button has also contributed to the number of sales from there. I don't, unfortunately, have any statistics on how many people are reading on a Kindle vs computer. I hope this helps other people who are looking into publishing ebooks themselves.
- gjm11 16y ago
  60% of your sales by number, or by revenue? (60:40 * 0.99:1.53 is pretty much 1:1. But maybe the fraction of that money that you actually get is difference in the two cases.)
code_duck 16y ago
Interesting results. Thanks for sharing them! Why is S3 so important for file distribution? Couldn't you do about the same with some cheap shared hosting?
- eustatius 16y ago
  Content Delivery Networks offer good scaling opportunities. In my limited experience, pricing of bandwidth and storage space scales better with S3 than most shared hosting alternatives. Amazon's CDN also takes care of the actual resource scaling for you, whereas shared hosting would max out. With S3: if nobody turns up, you just pay storage for the PDF (less than pennies, $.14 per GB); if everybody turns up, Amazon handle the extra load and you pay a proportional amount in bandwidth fees. With shared hosting: if nobody turns up, your hosting fee remains the same size (pounds or dollars); if everybody turns up, the shared host falls over and the hosting company invokes some clause in their contract with you to force you to host with S3 instead.
- gte910h 16y ago
  >Couldn't you do about the same with some cheap shared hosting? Hit Events, i.e. your item is suddenly a hit, come fast and die fast many times. If you're not scalable, when you do get hit with a publicity event, your infrastructure can melt and then you miss out on a huge majority of sales.
  - code_duck 16y ago
    Sure, I understand that I guess. My question is whether the demands on the servers hosting the OP's book ever met the level where S3 was really necessary or not. It doesn't really sound like it did, judging from the numbers.
acangiano 16y ago
For a highly successful alternative to giving away the PDF, you can read my interview with Michael Hartl: http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/09/interview-with-michael-hartl-author-of-the-rails-3-tutorial/ http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/09/interview-with-michael-...
lazyant 16y ago
I went to look at his "Working at the Ubuntu Command-Line Prompt", I was interested but there's no information whatsoever (not even table of contents) about this book in his web site or in the Amazon page.

77 points by there 16y ago

noahc 16y ago

What I would be more interested in is not how much money he made, but what opportunities opened up to him. To me, the goal of putting out good content is leverage it to get awesome job offers, bigger projects, higher paying consulting gigs. Anyone have any experience with this? Has a blog post or ebook created opportunities for you?

jeremymcanally 16y ago
I built the initial foundation for my Ruby/Rails consulting career on the back of my eBook. That opened up the opportunity to work some awesome people (directly, as in "I read your book, work with us") and to write a book for a "real" publisher. Of course these opportunities opened up more work and conference speaking opportunities. And again this past year with the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook. I was invited to speak at like 5 conferences based off my work on that along with some other opportunities. So yes, getting information out there in a cohesive way that people are interested in is a great way to open up opportunities for yourself, whether it's a blog, book, documentation project, etc.
- patio11 16y ago
  Ditto here, particularly with regards to blogging. Community participation also has helped me, although it was one of those "overnight success in five years" stories.
flyosity 16y ago
My iPhone user interface tutorial site that I launched a few weeks ago has already spawned 3 book offers: 2 from O'Reilly, 1 from another publisher. I politely turned them down: I'm fortunate to have a fairly sizable audience, so traditional publishers can't offer me much. I'm not going to lie, telling editors at large publishing houses that I'm more interested in self-publishing was more than a little satisfying.
rbxbx 16y ago
While not specifically about eBooks, the 'Conclusions' section of this post http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ by Peter Cooper does a good job detailing why one might - and might not - want to write a book.
mkramlich 16y ago
I was offered a gig being the co-writer of a book on Python by Manning. I turned it down ultimately for a variety of reasons, but in part because I thought it would be a lot of work for the likely pay, and partly because there were (what I considered to be anyway) several good and free alternatives already. Looking back, I might have accepted and done it, because I have heard it leads to more publicity and helps you get more paying work, which indirectly compensates for it. You asked about whether blogging might have created opportunities. In my case, I think it has, I know I've had folks look both at my writing and the rest of my online presence and that was a big factor in getting new paying work and opportunities. Everything helps. Just giving tangible evidence that you Have Skills and can Get Things Done, in whatever field, is huge.

jordanb 16y ago

It's worth observing that the title he published was one that was turned down by all the publishers as being commercially nonviable. It'd be interesting to see what the outcome would be if he repeated the experiment with a title they were dying to publish. That would help determine if they're worth the huge percentage they take because they're good at promotion, or if all they're doing is detecting titles that will sell well on their own.

jeremymcanally 16y ago

I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org http://hlrb.org. Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as sales began to slope off, I ran a $6 sale for some time (stated as a celebration of Rails 3 stable I think and then just continued on just because), and wouldn't you know, sales soared for a while. I plan on implementing a pricing structure similar to what he's done here once Rails 3.1 hits next month; we'll see what that experiment yields. My eBook on writing eBooks (http://authoringebooks.com http://authoringebooks.com) hasn't sold well by most mainstream standards, and I can almost guarantee the $49 price tag is partially to blame. Unfortunately, it'd be really problematic to have a print edition of a book on writing eBooks, so I'm just going to have to figure out a better way to market it. :) Maybe one day soon people will be willing to pay more for eBooks, but at this point I can't blame them. You don't get a tangible good that you can give specific value to. With current rights scehemes, if you delete the file on accident or something, it's possible that you're hosed for good. The medium in general still isn't a solved problem, but maybe one day soon it will be...

ashearer 16y ago
I'm sure there are many kinds of authors curious about entering the e-book market, and those with the most to learn would be traditionalists who don't themselves buy e-books. So I wouldn't entirely dismiss the idea of a printed book on writing e-books. (It's bound to generate a few snickers. But then again, you could use that sentence to promote it.)
silentbicycle 16y ago
As a data point: I'm reluctant to pay too much for ebooks, because they have no resale value. There are plenty of print books that I've happily spent $30-100 for, because I know that I can resell them for most of the cost (typically $5 less, at most) if I don't consider them worth keeping. Arguably, this makes their effective cost more like $5-10, give or take - mostly shipping. I'm quite willing to pay more for books that are worthwhile, but it's hard to tell upfront. I really like the MEAP subscription model of, "free trial chapter(s), subscribe and get further chapters as they're written, get the book when it's done". Plus, it works even better for serial fiction. Also: I have a kindle, and I use the hell out of it (citeseer!); I'm in no way opposed to ebooks. Just, pricing them is tricky. I've bought several. I also worked in a library for several years. Make what of that you will.

kjksf 16y ago

I think that giving the PDF for free was a mistake. I would sell the PDF for the same price as print (or slightly cheaper) and try 2 other ways for generating publicity/traffic. 1. Serialize the book as blog post i.e. post each self-contained part as spaced blog posts, with a link to buy the whole PDF at the end of each post. 2. Publish the whole book as html, but at any given time only part of the book would be available. I would (automagically) change which part e.g. every week. Both those tactics are meant to drive search traffic, give away some of the value of the book but not all of it, so that people have a reason to buy the whole thing, either as PDF or as paper version.

eustatius 16y ago
I suppose if he were to sell the PDF, it would automatically turn his "encourag[ing] redistribut[ing] the PDF, including via BitTorrent" into piracy. If you see piracy as a necessary evil, you might grumble at that; if, like Minecraft's creator, you see piracy as a nullity: http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-says-minecraft-creator http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-sa... and say "there's no such thing as a lost sale", then you might not care in the slightest. But the nature of the ecosystem surrounding your book will inevitably change: as someone said elsewhere in this thread, you can't loan an eBook; a solution to that would be sending someone the PDF, but you've just turned them into a pirate. There's no easy solution. Upselling blogposts might be a better idea; even then, it would be good to have figures. An even more radical alternative would have been Mark Pilgrim's approach to Dive Into Python. You could give your book a Creative Commons licence and expect people to copy and remix it: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point but then Pilgrim admits he's not in it for the money, so in the absence of reliable financials: who knows?
- chc 16y ago
  If you publish on Kindle or Nook, you actually can loan an ebook. Both platforms allow for lending.

spatten 16y ago

My cofounder at Leanpub wrote up his experience publishing "Flexible Rails" here: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=266 http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=266 Here's the tl;dr: * Peter made $48k from Flexible Rails. * $34k of that was from sales of the PDF. I'm biased, but it seems to me that giving away the PDF (where you make close to 100% profit) to sell a paper book (where you make much less -- The 40% profit from the article is by far the highest I've ever seen) is crazy. If you have an audience and a good book, you should be able to do well on an e-book. Keir Thomas in the article has both, but he gave away 500 000 copies of his ebook and only made $9k on the paper book. Yikes! He could've sold the book for 2$ a pop and got 1% of the downloads and still made the more. Keir is right that you have to give away something for free. So, give away a good chunk of the book (say, 1/3 or so) as a PDF and sell the full thing. Or, give away the whole book for free as HTML and sell the PDF. That's what Eric Ries http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned and Nivi and Naval from Venture Hacks are doing (http://leanpub.com/venturehacks http://leanpub.com/venturehacks) and they're doing quite well. Really, I don't meant to be too hard on Keir. It was a good post, with interesting data. I think he has shown that giving away the e-book and selling the print book is not necessarily the way to go. I'd love to see a lot more experiments and write-ups about this. I truly believe that authors can and will soon be able to make good money self publishing technical e-books.

mkramlich 16y ago

He climbed a bit steeper hill than he would have had to climb otherwise because he chose to create something that has lots of free acceptable alternatives already easily findable and useable, and it's (effectively, though not strictly speaking) a commodity product. It might be a pretty darn good one, but it's still something that just fills a commodity need, for most people. On a related note, I myself have developed a rule of thumb policy to don't buy technical books anymore because there is almost always an acceptable free way to get the info I need, and therefore this frees up more cash for getting things I can't get for free otherwise, or at least, to get higher quality or more convenient things. Like food, shelter, computer equipment, etc. I am still very willing and do frequently buy fiction books, in part because I know how hard it is to write fiction, how poor the pay often is, and because my interest is not a commodity/generic interest but rather a specific one for a particular story or author that is attractive. (I gladly pay for Stephenson, Scalzi and Simmons, for example.) Also, I don't like to handle dirty/secondhand books, and I've read a pretty big percentage of old public domain literature that I'm interested in -- if I haven't read something written before say 1850 there's a pretty good chance I never will because I've passed on it several times already, whereas there are still tons of books written even in the last 20 years that sound attractive from a distance but I still haven't gotten around to reading yet. When I want to Get Something Done I can often do tactical lookups in man pages, help docs, online pages, Googling around, asking somebody, etc. and very rarely have no other recourse than a retail book. I'm also coming from the perspective of someone who did previously frequently buy technical books and build up a pretty large library of computer/software-related ones, and found that only a small percentage of them were fundamental enough to still be useful and must-keepable today (think Stevens TCP/IP Illustrated, many Addison-Wesley UNIX/Internet tomes). Whereas a lot of them were too tied to transient/temporary/version-specific technology (most of my O'Reilly buys, for example -- even though I love O'Reilly) such as Java 1.2-era books, old versions of Perl, early HTML books, books on Solaris (heck just saying a book on Solaris is antique and useless makes me feel old, I remember when I ran into it at lots of companies before the coming of the Linux wave), etc. Book buying is also a highly discretionary line item in my budget. Whenever there's any sense of a cash crunch or big upcoming need to spend money on more important things, book buying is one of the first things to disappear. Gas prices up 75%? A few less technical books bought and you're back in balance for quite a while. All this said, I admire writers because I know how hard it is. And I think there will always be a non-zero-dollar market demand for quality written technical books, even if only in purely electronic form. I just think writers will need to increasingly be aware of what their competitors are, because there's going to be an increasing number of good free alternatives to their work, as well. And an increasing percentage of people are going to be giving away portions of their work for free on the web as a sort of resume++ and lead generator.

GeneralMaximus 16y ago

Offtopic: why does this website need JavaScript to display content?

atgm 16y ago

I'm currently trying to self-publish my (non-IT) ebook on Amazon, Lulu, and Barnes & Noble through www.branchrock.com. Here's my impression: 1. Lulu is the easiest to work with. They accept the widest variety of files, don't require any special formatting, allow you to choose your price and discounts, and most importantly, update changes almost instantly. The only down side to using Lulu is that they don't have the same mindspace as Amazon or Barnes & Noble. 2. Amazon is the next-best. They'll accept .doc files and convert them for you, which means it's extremely easy to just write and upload. Their conversion is also very accurate; I didn't have to fuss with the file once I read the guidelines. On the down side, they take forever to update, so you need to check your information and read your entire book in the little preview window to make sure everything is perfect before you submit, otherwise you'll be waiting another 24-36 hours before you can submit a change that won't go in for ANOTHER 24-36 hours. They also don't allow you to download a copy of your own ebook to verify locally or on a Kindle before it goes live. 3. Barnes & Noble is the worst of the three, in my experience. They operate the same way as Amazon, but with some caveats. The first is that their conversion is nowhere near as good as Amazon's; I ended up copying all of the text out of my book and manually formatting it using CSS and HTML tags to get a book that looked the way it was supposed to, with images, line breaks, indentation, and text alignment. The second is that they, like Amazon, take a long time to update your listing. On the up side, however, they do let you download a copy of your ebook so you can look at it locally or on your Nook. That having been said, how have sales worked out for me? Over 60% of my sales so far have gone to Amazon. I attribute that to both the name (Amazon is a trustworthy brand) and also to the popularity of the Kindle. The remaining 40% have gone to the PDF version on Lulu. Both versions are DRM-free and the PDF version is slightly more expensive than the Amazon version ($1.53 compared to $0.99). If you look at the site I'm using to advertise (www.branchrock.com), the Amazon button comes first, followed by the B&N button, then the Lulu button, which is simply labeled "PDF" to bypass any PC/Mac confusion. Perhaps the positioning of the Amazon button has also contributed to the number of sales from there. I don't, unfortunately, have any statistics on how many people are reading on a Kindle vs computer. I hope this helps other people who are looking into publishing ebooks themselves.

gjm11 16y ago
60% of your sales by number, or by revenue? (60:40 * 0.99:1.53 is pretty much 1:1. But maybe the fraction of that money that you actually get is difference in the two cases.)

code_duck 16y ago

Interesting results. Thanks for sharing them! Why is S3 so important for file distribution? Couldn't you do about the same with some cheap shared hosting?

eustatius 16y ago
Content Delivery Networks offer good scaling opportunities. In my limited experience, pricing of bandwidth and storage space scales better with S3 than most shared hosting alternatives. Amazon's CDN also takes care of the actual resource scaling for you, whereas shared hosting would max out. With S3: if nobody turns up, you just pay storage for the PDF (less than pennies, $.14 per GB); if everybody turns up, Amazon handle the extra load and you pay a proportional amount in bandwidth fees. With shared hosting: if nobody turns up, your hosting fee remains the same size (pounds or dollars); if everybody turns up, the shared host falls over and the hosting company invokes some clause in their contract with you to force you to host with S3 instead.
gte910h 16y ago
>Couldn't you do about the same with some cheap shared hosting? Hit Events, i.e. your item is suddenly a hit, come fast and die fast many times. If you're not scalable, when you do get hit with a publicity event, your infrastructure can melt and then you miss out on a huge majority of sales.
- code_duck 16y ago
  Sure, I understand that I guess. My question is whether the demands on the servers hosting the OP's book ever met the level where S3 was really necessary or not. It doesn't really sound like it did, judging from the numbers.

acangiano 16y ago

For a highly successful alternative to giving away the PDF, you can read my interview with Michael Hartl: http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/09/interview-with-michael-hartl-author-of-the-rails-3-tutorial/ http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/09/interview-with-michael-...

lazyant 16y ago

I went to look at his "Working at the Ubuntu Command-Line Prompt", I was interested but there's no information whatsoever (not even table of contents) about this book in his web site or in the Amazon page.