Good article and then a data-rich comment from Kristen McLean. This article makes me feel better as an author. 30 years ago, the first 2 books I wrote for the s

Good article and then a data-rich comment from Kristen McLean. This article makes me feel better as an author. 30 years ago, the first 2 books I wrote for the scientific publisher Springer-Verlag didn’t sell many copies, although I have received a lot of nice feedback about the first book over the years. After writing 10 books for traditional publishers, all fairly niche technical books, I switched to self publishing and my readership has gone up dramatically (I think). When my publisher returned book rights to me, I released the second edition of my Java AI book under a Creative Commons license. For the 5 years that I tracked downloads from my web site (https://markwatson.com https://markwatson.com) I averaged 300 downloads a day over 5 years, and the book PDF was also downloadable from many other sites. I imagine that most people downloading a free PDF only read a small part of my open content books, but I have no data on that. Currently I distribute on the leanpub.com platform (which I recommend!!) and I get about 50 free downloads for each time a person decides to voluntarily pay for one of my open content books. The exception is my Common Lisp book for which about 1 in 20 people choose to pay for it. Writing is a lot of fun and it has opened the door to meeting and sometimes becoming friends with some amazing people.