Your book may be the reason I decide to take Perl seriously :) Thank you for the share.
Why my book can be downloaded for free
31–40 of 67 posts
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#32I have yet to go wrong taking advice from Philip Greenspun. The whole idea that YC has been espousing recently about domain-specific knowledge often being more valuable than pure technical ability, which was brought up in the context of the female founder interviews, is something that Philip has been talking about for 10+ years.
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#33Maybe 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.
Not really; the techniques are still relevant in Perl 6 (which you can try out today, no need for waiting), even though the syntax changed slightly.
In fact they are pretty much relevant in all dynamic programming languages that have a convenient closure mechanism/syntax. There's also a "Higher Order Javascript" page somewhere, which translates the Perl examples to javascript. (EDIT: link: http://interglacial.com/hoj/hoj.html)
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#34Maybe 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" isn't a programming language. I'd imagine most decent books on reasonably mature languages from 10 years ago would be pretty usable today.
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#35Maybe 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.
Perl 5 has evolved quite nicely lately, and I don't wait for Perl 6 (the biggest problem with Perl 6 is that "6" is bigger than "5").
While I haven't read this book (only skimmed parts), this book is not affected by the language evolution. Of course, it doesn't follow 'modern Perl' practices, but mostly it wouldn't need to.
It is more concerned about concepts that can be applied regardless of language.
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#36It 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…
Thanks for adding the detailed breakdown. I was concentrating on my side of the deal so I probably misremembered their side.
> Almost everybody I know who has gone the self-publishing route has ended up with the high-hundreds and single-digit-thousands.
A technical book should be selling for about $50, more if you bundle correctly like the Rails Tutorial (https://www.railstutorial.org/). 1'000 copies sold is income of about $40K (accounting for processing fees) if you self publish and don't bundle. About $100K if you bundle and have an average sale price of ~$100. I was told a typical advance is ~$5K. To earn that you'd need sales of just over 100 copies, which seems very achievable.
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#37Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ear…
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.
Nathan Barry has the same problem with his Authority course.
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#39Earlier 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…
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 ear…
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).
Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free
#40This 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 source of energy -- her/his time!
Sometimes however, authors consider their book(s) as their 'life's work'. It's hard to imagine giving it away for free. Psychologically speaking, though best things in life are often free, some people think that something that is 'expensive' is 'good' -- they somewhat erroneously believe that 'cheapness and quality don't go together'.
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. By making it free on the website and leaving it up to the publisher to do the hard work seems like a reasonable way to get around this problem.