41–50 of 67 posts
Of course the case would be very different if you wanted to publish your book as audio, which is probably much more expensive to produce.
> if you wanted to publish your book as audio Higher-Order Perl as an audiobook would be quite an experience!
This is a very good thought! It's important for an author to break the barrier to entry for the potential readers of his/her work. It's not always easy or practical. Another way of doing this is publishing something in book form what you have already published elsewhere, e.g. your blog. After all, what a reader of free books, user of free and open source software is spending is the often neglected non-renewable sourc…
"For stable businesses it is perhaps a straightforward thing to name the price of a creation, but I imagine it would be hard for an author to come up with the price of her book."
Pricing is an extraordinarily difficult problem in any business endeavor, be it publishing, software, semiconductors, or lightbulbs. Obviously it's easier in long-standing industries, or in quasi-monopolistic markets. But it's never straightforward or easy.
Pricing is even harder in content businesses. First, because at least in the big-business side, so many parties have a finger in the pie, and need to be accounted for in the margin. Second, because there is no generally accepted consumer "spectrum" of price/length, price/format, price/category, price/perceived-value, etc. The guessing process is 50% science (SQL, Excel, R, benchmarks, etc.) and 50% art ("WTF will Segment A consider a decent price for Version X? Or Segment B for Version Y?")
Of course, the other big constraint is rigidity. You can't really test, adjust, or offer promotional pricing on most publishing platforms or book markets. (And to whatever extent you can, you risk consumer backlash and confusion.) So whatever you decide right out of the gate, you're usually stuck with for awhile. A promising practice -- as the author of this blog post alludes to -- is to offer different prices (and sometimes, slightly different versions) to different audiences, who might come across the book at different touchpoints. One size does not fit all, and I suspect we'll see a lot more recognition of that fact in the book market in the coming years.
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 exp…
"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…
For what it's worth, I self-published my programming book[1] about a month ago and I'm beyond that threshold already. This is (depending on how you look at it) despite the the fact that the book is also freely available on the web, or in large part because of it. (I believe the latter.)
Either way, I'm very happy I self-published now. Not only did I get the satisfaction of feeling in control of every aspect of production, but it turns out that getting a larger slice of the royalty pie is a really nice bonus. I figured that pie would be pretty small so it didn't matter much, but I've been pleasantly surprised at the number of sales.
I don't have anything against traditional publishers and can see myself using one in the future. But one thing that feels strange to me is that most of what they provide: editing, layout, type-setting, proof-reading, is a fixed quantity of work, but they are compensated for that with a fairly high percentage of ongoing royalties.
If you think of a publisher as providing those services to the author, then it means over the long lifetime of the book, they can end up costing you quite a lot.
Self-publishing basically means you accept a bit of risk by paying for those up-front (either by hiring freelancers or doing it yourself). But, in return for that, you get a larger share of the long tail of the revenue. That's a worthwhile trade-off for me.
Maybe his book is still relevant today because Perl didn't evolve much during these past years ? (no troll, I just read a few articles about Perl, I have no "insider" knowledge about the language situation except they're all waiting for Perl 6). Imagine a book about web development from 10 years ago, I guess nothing would be usable without a lot of modifications and side researches.
Web development? Well, HTTP and the underlying technologies are roughly the same as they were 10 years ago; HTML, too. Relational databases haven't changed much. The underpinnings are probably going to be as recognizable 10 years from now. But web development as a whole is incredibly fashion driven. What will be popular in the future? I'm not even going to try to guess.
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 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…
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.
Part of this is that it's an unusually good book. But I think the longevity is partly because it is available as a free download. Imagine that person A asks a question on an Internet forum, and person B says that HOP has a section that could help with the question. If B wants to follow up, they now must find a copy of HOP. If the book is out of print, this can be difficult. It may not be in the library; it almost cer…
Attributing the book's longevity to "availablity of new copies" is tautologous.
Maybe his book is still relevant today because Perl didn't evolve much during these past years ? (no troll, I just read a few articles about Perl, I have no "insider" knowledge about the language situation except they're all waiting for Perl 6). Imagine a book about web development from 10 years ago, I guess nothing would be usable without a lot of modifications and side researches.
* The concepts of functional programming that he discusses in the book are over 30 years old but still very relevant today.
* The syntax of languages don't change that dramatically at the core. Libraries, yes, but this book is about concepts using the core language not specific libraries.
* Nobody is "waiting for Perl 6". The Perl 5 community has generally moved on (or left). We are still writing Perl 5 everyday and don't think about Perl 6.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...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 writin…
eBook pricing is very different between fiction and technical non-fiction. The former (due to, I think, a large supply) has had prices driven down to a couple of bucks for all but big-name authors. The latter, since the supply is lower and readers can see tangible financial value from reading it, is much higher and not that different from print pricing.
My programming book is $25 in eBook form, and I priced it competitively with other game programming eBooks. If it was a novel, I'd have to do something much lower.
+ CPAN
+ YAPC -- a progenitor of the "just cover expenses", do it yourself un-conference
+ Frequent, and sometimes surprising, contact with the luminaries. I remember the ongoing bait and switch BS at a few Microsoft events I attended.
I don't know... I was always on the margins, not in the midst. But Perl, as a community, was always willing to show you how, and to lend a hand and a few resources as appropriate/helpful. Very generous.
This is a very good thought! It's important for an author to break the barrier to entry for the potential readers of his/her work. It's not always easy or practical. Another way of doing this is publishing something in book form what you have already published elsewhere, e.g. your blog. After all, what a reader of free books, user of free and open source software is spending is the often neglected non-renewable sourc…
I don't think of my book as necessarily my life's work, but it's certainly one of the most significant things I've done. People can read it online without paying cash, but I don't think of that as being "free".
I do get compensated, even then. Every time someone tells me they liked my book, or enjoy my writing style, or finally understand something they've struggled with, it feels absolutely fantastic. Given how much money we spent purchasing good feelings, in many ways I feel like I just cut out the middle man. :)
> A related point that I have always wondered about is deciding the price of your creation. For stable businesses it is perhaps a straightforward thing to name the price of a creation, but I imagine it would be hard for an author to come up with the price of her book.
I just did the obvious thing: looked at a bunch of similar products and priced it in the same ballpark.