Why my book can be downloaded for free
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Why my book can be downloaded for free
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Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#2It 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.
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#3It 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 exp…
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".
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#4It's an excellent book, too, even if you don't know Perl.
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#5Cory Doctorow has a strong argument in the same direction, but with slightly different expression: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/#freedownload
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#6It 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 exp…
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 worl…
[deleted]
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#7It 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 exp…
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 worl…
> ...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
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#8Of course the case would be very different if you wanted to publish your book as audio, which is probably much more expensive to produce.
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#9It 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 exp…
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 worl…
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-A...
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 worl…
> ...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…
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?