6 ms·

It is surprising to see a blog post like this published in 2014. Admittedly is refers to a 9 year old book, but the point it makes has been rendered moot by dev

It is surprising to see a blog post like this published in 2014. Admittedly is refers to a 9 year old book, but the point it makes has been rendered moot by developments since. A publisher recently contacted me to explore the possibility of me writing a book for them. The terms, which I believe are fairly standard, are you make about $1 for every book sold, or about 5% of the total revenue. A technical author can expect to make about $10'000 if their book sells well. The publishing house makes about $200'000 on this, with the rest going to distribution and book stores. Now compare to people like Brennan Dunn who have made $100'000 or more from their books, by publishing online and capturing 90%+ of revenue. You don't need a publisher for distribution. You don't need a publisher for typesetting. If you need an editor or proof reader you can hire one for maybe $10K. In short, publishing houses serve no necessary function in modern technical publishing.

jeremysmyth 12y ago
In short, publishing houses serve no necessary function in modern technical publishing. ...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution. There's also the risk mitigation that happens when you get an advance that you can't deal with yourself. There's a world of difference between "publishing on the Internet" and "publishing in the age of the Internet".
- deleted 12y ago
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- sly010 12y ago
  > ...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution. Most of which you don't care about, unless you have to edit, typeset, review, market, format 100s of books. They are one time costs and with the internet they are becoming very cheap already. The important number is copies_sold * my_income_per_copy. Publishers might raise one of the number 2-5x but lower the other to 1/10. Cost of editing is a very small factor. edit: typo
  - jeremysmyth 12y ago
    Most of which you don't care about, unless you have to edit, typeset, review, market, format 100s of books. They are one time costs and with the internet they are becoming very cheap already. Maybe you didn't mean it the way it sounds, but I think any author cares about what their reader gets, and if I buy something I certainly care about its quality. I know for a fact that no matter how much effort I put into writing a book, there are always things that can be improved because I missed something I didn't know, or didn't know about a particular design or grammatical principle, or simply made a mistake. More eyeballs make a better product, and eyeballs cost money. Breaking it down: Let's say I write a 1200 page technical book. Roughly speaking, services charge on a pages-per-day rate. Sake of argument, let's guess 250 pages per day for proofreading, 100 per day for graphical layout and enhancement, 150 per day for technical review. That's roughly 20 days, for which we could elance out separately for $100 per day. That's $2000. Up front. ...which brings me to my next point. The important number is copies_sold X my_income_per_copy. Publishers might raise one of the number 2-5x but lower the other to 1/10. I'm guessing you're estimating with these values (which is OK, because I'm estimating too). However, a quick look at Amazon and other online bookstores shows that ebooks tend to sell for a fraction of the price of paper books. $1.21 seems to be a common price point, and even for more expensive books (for which there is already a large demand) the price point seems to be about half that of a paper book. Continuing our assumptions, let's say a published book sells 10,000 copies. Assuming the self-published book is 50% as popular as an equivalent published book (your most generous estimate) and therefore sells 5,000 copies, it still looks like 90% of a smaller price (let's say $1.21, so a total of $5,445 from 90% of 5000 * $1.21) works out at less than 10% of the larger value (assuming the parent post's assumption of $1 per copy, so 10,000 * $1). All handwavy values based on various people's assumptions of popularity, but useful for a starting point. Now, back to the one time costs: When compared to my $5,445, that $2,000 sounds really bad now, doesn't it?
    - sly010 12y ago
      From a quick search, Higher Order Perl actually costs more on kindle than on paperback. But you are right, I am sure we could tweak those numbers either way.
    - 12y ago
- sjcsjc 12y ago
  Not vouching for him, but Aaron Shepard, a children's author, maintains you can self-publish efficiently and profitably these days. "In fact, by aiming at Amazon, I was able to sell close to 30% the number of copies sold by one of those nationally-distributed competitors including its bookstore sales. And because the profit from my publishing system is so high -- generally half or more of the cover price -- I was earning about twice as much in total as that author would make with a normal royalty."[0] He has a site on the subject[1], which looks like it was designed by me (it wasn't - I don't know him). [0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aiming-Amazon-Publishing-Marketing-Amazon-com/dp/093849743X/ref=pd_cp_b_0 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aiming-Amazon-Publishing-Marketing-A... [1] http://www.newselfpublishing.com/ http://www.newselfpublishing.com/
  - louhike 12y ago
    The problem is that he is biased. He is selling books explaining how to self publish on Amazon. So it is better for him to say that you will earn more money doing so.
    - sjcsjc 12y ago
      Fair point. One more thing while I remember. He recommends a firm called Lightning Source[0]. I got the impression (when I read his book a few months ago) that they weren't too keen on dealing with small scale stuff, but just looking there now it seems they have another brand or a partner called Ingram Spark for dealing with independents. Might be useful for someone here, maybe. [0] http://www.lightningsource.com http://www.lightningsource.com
    - reboog711 12y ago
      Nathan Barry has the same problem with his Authority course.
  - dminor 12y ago
    This is pretty well known now in the publishing world. There are a large number of authors in genre fiction making a living self-publishing, and many more that do some mix of traditional and self-publishing. You don't really need this guy's book though, there's plenty of information out there on how to do it (KBoards' Writers Cafe is a good place to start).
- munificent 12y ago
  > ...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution. I don't think there is much economy of scale in many of those. Publishers that have "house styles" can reuse a lot of layout to speed that up, sure. But editing, type-setting, technical review, etc. is just page-by-page grunt work. I'm not sure having a full-time staff for those is much more efficient than freelancers.
- DennisP 12y ago
  As someone who once tech-reviewed a Microsoft Press book, I don't see how there's any economy of scale there. They just hired me as a freelancer, after seeing a post I made on a forum.
vladtaltos 12y ago
Assuming writing a technical book will at least take 3 months of your time (probably 4-6 months more realistically for a good book), making ~$10K is outrageous. And this is in case the book sells well. Who'd accept any other job if someone comes to you and tells you 'look I'll give you a single shiny dollar for every twenty dollars you make for me'. This is slavery. Publishing houses need to be more realistic. long live the internet... authors everywhere - self publish!
- bphogan 12y ago
  I've written for PragProg numerous times and will continue to do so. Full disclosure: I also edit books for them. The royalty rate is 50% of the profit. The other 50% goes to pay the editor for his or her time, and other production fees. It's incredibly fair, the help authors get is great, and I earn a lot more than $1 per book sold. I think self publishing is great but it's not for me. I am happy to give up 50% if I can focus on writing and delivering quality content while someone else spends the time making it look good, indexing it, helping me develop the content (development editor) and helping me fix mistakes (copy editing.) Just my .02.
  - jeremymcanally 12y ago
    The Prags' deal and commitment to actually, you know, helping their authors is unfortunately a beautiful unique snowflake amongst publishers. I've been involved with projects with all the major tech publishers in some form or another, and they're all horrible terms (usually 12-15% of proceeds [i.e., post-costs] or less). Even worse, they do almost no work for you these days. The editors they find are 99% completely non-technical and on contract, so they're just trying to squeeze hours out of reviewing something they know zilch about. The publisher will stick your book on a website and put it in bookstores, but outside of that, don't count on any marketing or sales help. PROTIP: They don't want big reputation authors because they're better writers. They want them so they can do minimal work and ride off the authors' social media and conference speaking coattails to sell copies with next to no investment. Then they'll sell your work to places like Safari for a pittance (on the order of the cost of about 100 print copies if I recall correctly) and give you as small of a piece of the pie as humanly possible. I understand they're a business trying to survive these days, but seriously, the whole thing needs to be re-evaluated. As GP or someone said, self-publishing is way more profitable if you can find a niche that's not being served. I've made about 10x more money off my self-published works as I have my "published" works, and that's a very sad statistic given how big the book industry really is. Not saying all publishers will end up with figures like that, but the industry as a whole is wrapped up in an author-hostile business model and a crappy, slow process.
coliveira 12y ago
The problem is that you assume that everyone wants to make a business from book writing. Most technical authors don't want the trouble of book production and sales because they already have a good paying job. They are just interested in having their names in the cover of a book. For this purpose, publishers do a reasonably good job -- certainly better than having to do all by yourself and end up with a low-quality, low-selling "book" in the Kindle store.
bphogan 12y ago
I think the point you make about an editor is incredibly important. I've gotten quite a few books from self-published authors - including some pretty big names in the programming world - who are adamant that they can do it all themselves, and the prose is a train wreck. It's not just about catching typos - it's the actual developmental editing that needs to happen. Ensuring things are in the right order. Ensuring there's a common voice in the book. Things like that. As an author, I've never actually asked for a refund for these terrible books, because I know how hard it is to write one. But I don't buy self-published books anymore unless I have incredibly strong recommendations from others.
- thret 12y ago
  Even good - even great - writers need an editor. When you already know what you have written it can be easy to miss what is actually there.
adrianhoward 12y ago
"A publisher recently contacted me to explore the possibility of me writing a book for them. The terms, which I believe are fairly standard, are you make about $1 for every book sold, or about 5% of the total revenue. A technical author can expect to make about $10'000 if their book sells well. The publishing house makes about $200'000 on this, with the rest going to distribution and book stores." I'm not directly in the publishing industry, but I've been a technical reviewer on several books and have a fair number of friends who are authors/editors - mostly in the non-fiction market. From what I've experienced those publisher profit numbers don't make sense. Let's assume 5% author royalties (which, in my experience, is the low end 5-15% is the normal range, upper end for track record very successful folk — more for some publishers in some contexts), so that $10k = $200,000 total sales for the book. Typically the publisher will take around 45-55% of that $200k (including what they pass onto the author). The rest will go to distributers & retailers. Let's take the upper end of that. So 55% of $200l = $110000 to the publisher. - the author royalties = $100k - 10% printing costs = $90k - 15%ish for pre-production = $75k So absolute best case it's more like $10k vs $75k. Then there's marketing, the fact that most authors don't earn out their advance, the shenanigans over book discount, etc. So the profit to publishers coming out of that is often significantly lower. See http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost... and http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-of-physical-book-publishing/ http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-... for some examples of real world publisher cost breakdowns. (The slice taken by marketing in the first example above seems high from what others have told me. Its also a somewhat simplistic breakdown since it ignores some of the long-term costs from publishers that aren't related to "books" directly. e.g. the advances to authors who never get published, etc. - so the potential publisher profits aren't quite as large as they appear here - there's other overhead outside the printing/distributing/selling books bit) It's also something Charlie Stross has posted about a fair bit see this collection of posts http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m... "Now compare to people like Brennan Dunn who have made $100'000 or more from their books, by publishing online and capturing 90%+ of revenue. You don't need a publisher for distribution. You don't need a publisher for typesetting. If you need an editor or proof reader you can hire one for maybe $10K." That's the best-case success case. Which is nice. But not common. Almost everybody I know who has gone the self-publishing route has ended up with the high-hundreds and single-digit-thousands. They'd have got more from a publisher advance. They'd have also learned a lot more about how to write a good book from the publishers — since they're in the business of helping their authors be profitable. Is a traditional publisher the right route for everybody. No. But neither are they the rapacious idiots who are exploiting authors that some folk portray them as. Almost everybody I know who went the traditional publisher route felt they got value out of it. Many of them are more than technically literate enough to go the self publishing route if they had wanted to (and some of them have for other kinds of product/market).
deleted 12y ago
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jeremysmyth 12y ago

In short, publishing houses serve no necessary function in modern technical publishing. ...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution. There's also the risk mitigation that happens when you get an advance that you can't deal with yourself. There's a world of difference between "publishing on the Internet" and "publishing in the age of the Internet".

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sly010 12y ago
> ...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution. Most of which you don't care about, unless you have to edit, typeset, review, market, format 100s of books. They are one time costs and with the internet they are becoming very cheap already. The important number is copies_sold * my_income_per_copy. Publishers might raise one of the number 2-5x but lower the other to 1/10. Cost of editing is a very small factor. edit: typo
- jeremysmyth 12y ago
  Most of which you don't care about, unless you have to edit, typeset, review, market, format 100s of books. They are one time costs and with the internet they are becoming very cheap already. Maybe you didn't mean it the way it sounds, but I think any author cares about what their reader gets, and if I buy something I certainly care about its quality. I know for a fact that no matter how much effort I put into writing a book, there are always things that can be improved because I missed something I didn't know, or didn't know about a particular design or grammatical principle, or simply made a mistake. More eyeballs make a better product, and eyeballs cost money. Breaking it down: Let's say I write a 1200 page technical book. Roughly speaking, services charge on a pages-per-day rate. Sake of argument, let's guess 250 pages per day for proofreading, 100 per day for graphical layout and enhancement, 150 per day for technical review. That's roughly 20 days, for which we could elance out separately for $100 per day. That's $2000. Up front. ...which brings me to my next point. The important number is copies_sold X my_income_per_copy. Publishers might raise one of the number 2-5x but lower the other to 1/10. I'm guessing you're estimating with these values (which is OK, because I'm estimating too). However, a quick look at Amazon and other online bookstores shows that ebooks tend to sell for a fraction of the price of paper books. $1.21 seems to be a common price point, and even for more expensive books (for which there is already a large demand) the price point seems to be about half that of a paper book. Continuing our assumptions, let's say a published book sells 10,000 copies. Assuming the self-published book is 50% as popular as an equivalent published book (your most generous estimate) and therefore sells 5,000 copies, it still looks like 90% of a smaller price (let's say $1.21, so a total of $5,445 from 90% of 5000 * $1.21) works out at less than 10% of the larger value (assuming the parent post's assumption of $1 per copy, so 10,000 * $1). All handwavy values based on various people's assumptions of popularity, but useful for a starting point. Now, back to the one time costs: When compared to my $5,445, that $2,000 sounds really bad now, doesn't it?
  - sly010 12y ago
    From a quick search, Higher Order Perl actually costs more on kindle than on paperback. But you are right, I am sure we could tweak those numbers either way.
  - 12y ago
sjcsjc 12y ago
Not vouching for him, but Aaron Shepard, a children's author, maintains you can self-publish efficiently and profitably these days. "In fact, by aiming at Amazon, I was able to sell close to 30% the number of copies sold by one of those nationally-distributed competitors including its bookstore sales. And because the profit from my publishing system is so high -- generally half or more of the cover price -- I was earning about twice as much in total as that author would make with a normal royalty."[0] He has a site on the subject[1], which looks like it was designed by me (it wasn't - I don't know him). [0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aiming-Amazon-Publishing-Marketing-Amazon-com/dp/093849743X/ref=pd_cp_b_0 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aiming-Amazon-Publishing-Marketing-A... [1] http://www.newselfpublishing.com/ http://www.newselfpublishing.com/
- louhike 12y ago
  The problem is that he is biased. He is selling books explaining how to self publish on Amazon. So it is better for him to say that you will earn more money doing so.
  - sjcsjc 12y ago
    Fair point. One more thing while I remember. He recommends a firm called Lightning Source[0]. I got the impression (when I read his book a few months ago) that they weren't too keen on dealing with small scale stuff, but just looking there now it seems they have another brand or a partner called Ingram Spark for dealing with independents. Might be useful for someone here, maybe. [0] http://www.lightningsource.com http://www.lightningsource.com
  - reboog711 12y ago
    Nathan Barry has the same problem with his Authority course.
- dminor 12y ago
  This is pretty well known now in the publishing world. There are a large number of authors in genre fiction making a living self-publishing, and many more that do some mix of traditional and self-publishing. You don't really need this guy's book though, there's plenty of information out there on how to do it (KBoards' Writers Cafe is a good place to start).
munificent 12y ago
> ...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution. I don't think there is much economy of scale in many of those. Publishers that have "house styles" can reuse a lot of layout to speed that up, sure. But editing, type-setting, technical review, etc. is just page-by-page grunt work. I'm not sure having a full-time staff for those is much more efficient than freelancers.
DennisP 12y ago
As someone who once tech-reviewed a Microsoft Press book, I don't see how there's any economy of scale there. They just hired me as a freelancer, after seeing a post I made on a forum.

vladtaltos 12y ago

Assuming writing a technical book will at least take 3 months of your time (probably 4-6 months more realistically for a good book), making ~$10K is outrageous. And this is in case the book sells well. Who'd accept any other job if someone comes to you and tells you 'look I'll give you a single shiny dollar for every twenty dollars you make for me'. This is slavery. Publishing houses need to be more realistic. long live the internet... authors everywhere - self publish!

bphogan 12y ago
I've written for PragProg numerous times and will continue to do so. Full disclosure: I also edit books for them. The royalty rate is 50% of the profit. The other 50% goes to pay the editor for his or her time, and other production fees. It's incredibly fair, the help authors get is great, and I earn a lot more than $1 per book sold. I think self publishing is great but it's not for me. I am happy to give up 50% if I can focus on writing and delivering quality content while someone else spends the time making it look good, indexing it, helping me develop the content (development editor) and helping me fix mistakes (copy editing.) Just my .02.
- jeremymcanally 12y ago
  The Prags' deal and commitment to actually, you know, helping their authors is unfortunately a beautiful unique snowflake amongst publishers. I've been involved with projects with all the major tech publishers in some form or another, and they're all horrible terms (usually 12-15% of proceeds [i.e., post-costs] or less). Even worse, they do almost no work for you these days. The editors they find are 99% completely non-technical and on contract, so they're just trying to squeeze hours out of reviewing something they know zilch about. The publisher will stick your book on a website and put it in bookstores, but outside of that, don't count on any marketing or sales help. PROTIP: They don't want big reputation authors because they're better writers. They want them so they can do minimal work and ride off the authors' social media and conference speaking coattails to sell copies with next to no investment. Then they'll sell your work to places like Safari for a pittance (on the order of the cost of about 100 print copies if I recall correctly) and give you as small of a piece of the pie as humanly possible. I understand they're a business trying to survive these days, but seriously, the whole thing needs to be re-evaluated. As GP or someone said, self-publishing is way more profitable if you can find a niche that's not being served. I've made about 10x more money off my self-published works as I have my "published" works, and that's a very sad statistic given how big the book industry really is. Not saying all publishers will end up with figures like that, but the industry as a whole is wrapped up in an author-hostile business model and a crappy, slow process.

coliveira 12y ago

The problem is that you assume that everyone wants to make a business from book writing. Most technical authors don't want the trouble of book production and sales because they already have a good paying job. They are just interested in having their names in the cover of a book. For this purpose, publishers do a reasonably good job -- certainly better than having to do all by yourself and end up with a low-quality, low-selling "book" in the Kindle store.

bphogan 12y ago

I think the point you make about an editor is incredibly important. I've gotten quite a few books from self-published authors - including some pretty big names in the programming world - who are adamant that they can do it all themselves, and the prose is a train wreck. It's not just about catching typos - it's the actual developmental editing that needs to happen. Ensuring things are in the right order. Ensuring there's a common voice in the book. Things like that. As an author, I've never actually asked for a refund for these terrible books, because I know how hard it is to write one. But I don't buy self-published books anymore unless I have incredibly strong recommendations from others.

thret 12y ago
Even good - even great - writers need an editor. When you already know what you have written it can be easy to miss what is actually there.

adrianhoward 12y ago

"A publisher recently contacted me to explore the possibility of me writing a book for them. The terms, which I believe are fairly standard, are you make about $1 for every book sold, or about 5% of the total revenue. A technical author can expect to make about $10'000 if their book sells well. The publishing house makes about $200'000 on this, with the rest going to distribution and book stores." I'm not directly in the publishing industry, but I've been a technical reviewer on several books and have a fair number of friends who are authors/editors - mostly in the non-fiction market. From what I've experienced those publisher profit numbers don't make sense. Let's assume 5% author royalties (which, in my experience, is the low end 5-15% is the normal range, upper end for track record very successful folk — more for some publishers in some contexts), so that $10k = $200,000 total sales for the book. Typically the publisher will take around 45-55% of that $200k (including what they pass onto the author). The rest will go to distributers & retailers. Let's take the upper end of that. So 55% of $200l = $110000 to the publisher. - the author royalties = $100k - 10% printing costs = $90k - 15%ish for pre-production = $75k So absolute best case it's more like $10k vs $75k. Then there's marketing, the fact that most authors don't earn out their advance, the shenanigans over book discount, etc. So the profit to publishers coming out of that is often significantly lower. See http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost... and http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-of-physical-book-publishing/ http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-... for some examples of real world publisher cost breakdowns. (The slice taken by marketing in the first example above seems high from what others have told me. Its also a somewhat simplistic breakdown since it ignores some of the long-term costs from publishers that aren't related to "books" directly. e.g. the advances to authors who never get published, etc. - so the potential publisher profits aren't quite as large as they appear here - there's other overhead outside the printing/distributing/selling books bit) It's also something Charlie Stross has posted about a fair bit see this collection of posts http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m... "Now compare to people like Brennan Dunn who have made $100'000 or more from their books, by publishing online and capturing 90%+ of revenue. You don't need a publisher for distribution. You don't need a publisher for typesetting. If you need an editor or proof reader you can hire one for maybe $10K." That's the best-case success case. Which is nice. But not common. Almost everybody I know who has gone the self-publishing route has ended up with the high-hundreds and single-digit-thousands. They'd have got more from a publisher advance. They'd have also learned a lot more about how to write a good book from the publishers — since they're in the business of helping their authors be profitable. Is a traditional publisher the right route for everybody. No. But neither are they the rapacious idiots who are exploiting authors that some folk portray them as. Almost everybody I know who went the traditional publisher route felt they got value out of it. Many of them are more than technically literate enough to go the self publishing route if they had wanted to (and some of them have for other kinds of product/market).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]