So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
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So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
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Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#2What I would be more interested in is not how much money he made, but what opportunities opened up to him. To me, the goal of putting out good content is leverage it to get awesome job offers, bigger projects, higher paying consulting gigs.
Anyone have any experience with this? Has a blog post or ebook created opportunities for you?
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#3It's worth observing that the title he published was one that was turned down by all the publishers as being commercially nonviable.
It'd be interesting to see what the outcome would be if he repeated the experiment with a title they were dying to publish. That would help determine if they're worth the huge percentage they take because they're good at promotion, or if all they're doing is detecting titles that will sell well on their own.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#4I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org. Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were.
I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as sales began to slope off, I ran a $6 sale for some time (stated as a celebration of Rails 3 stable I think and then just continued on just because), and wouldn't you know, sales soared for a while. I plan on implementing a pricing structure similar to what he's done here once Rails 3.1 hits next month; we'll see what that experiment yields.
My eBook on writing eBooks (http://authoringebooks.com) hasn't sold well by most mainstream standards, and I can almost guarantee the $49 price tag is partially to blame. Unfortunately, it'd be really problematic to have a print edition of a book on writing eBooks, so I'm just going to have to figure out a better way to market it. :)
Maybe one day soon people will be willing to pay more for eBooks, but at this point I can't blame them. You don't get a tangible good that you can give specific value to. With current rights scehemes, if you delete the file on accident or something, it's possible that you're hosed for good. The medium in general still isn't a solved problem, but maybe one day soon it will be...
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#5What I would be more interested in is not how much money he made, but what opportunities opened up to him. To me, the goal of putting out good content is leverage it to get awesome job offers, bigger projects, higher paying consulting gigs. Anyone have any experience with this? Has a blog post or ebook created opportunities for you?
I built the initial foundation for my Ruby/Rails consulting career on the back of my eBook. That opened up the opportunity to work some awesome people (directly, as in "I read your book, work with us") and to write a book for a "real" publisher. Of course these opportunities opened up more work and conference speaking opportunities.
And again this past year with the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook. I was invited to speak at like 5 conferences based off my work on that along with some other opportunities.
So yes, getting information out there in a cohesive way that people are interested in is a great way to open up opportunities for yourself, whether it's a blog, book, documentation project, etc.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#6What I would be more interested in is not how much money he made, but what opportunities opened up to him. To me, the goal of putting out good content is leverage it to get awesome job offers, bigger projects, higher paying consulting gigs. Anyone have any experience with this? Has a blog post or ebook created opportunities for you?
My iPhone user interface tutorial site that I launched a few weeks ago has already spawned 3 book offers: 2 from O'Reilly, 1 from another publisher. I politely turned them down: I'm fortunate to have a fairly sizable audience, so traditional publishers can't offer me much. I'm not going to lie, telling editors at large publishing houses that I'm more interested in self-publishing was more than a little satisfying.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#7I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org . Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as…
I'm sure there are many kinds of authors curious about entering the e-book market, and those with the most to learn would be traditionalists who don't themselves buy e-books. So I wouldn't entirely dismiss the idea of a printed book on writing e-books. (It's bound to generate a few snickers. But then again, you could use that sentence to promote it.)
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#8What I would be more interested in is not how much money he made, but what opportunities opened up to him. To me, the goal of putting out good content is leverage it to get awesome job offers, bigger projects, higher paying consulting gigs. Anyone have any experience with this? Has a blog post or ebook created opportunities for you?
While not specifically about eBooks, the 'Conclusions' section of this post http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ by Peter Cooper does a good job detailing why one might - and might not - want to write a book.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#9I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org . Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as…
As a data point: I'm reluctant to pay too much for ebooks, because they have no resale value. There are plenty of print books that I've happily spent $30-100 for, because I know that I can resell them for most of the cost (typically $5 less, at most) if I don't consider them worth keeping. Arguably, this makes their effective cost more like $5-10, give or take - mostly shipping. I'm quite willing to pay more for books that are worthwhile, but it's hard to tell upfront. I really like the MEAP subscription model of, "free trial chapter(s), subscribe and get further chapters as they're written, get the book when it's done". Plus, it works even better for serial fiction.
Also: I have a kindle, and I use the hell out of it (citeseer!); I'm in no way opposed to ebooks. Just, pricing them is tricky. I've bought several. I also worked in a library for several years. Make what of that you will.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#10I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org . Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as…
People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet)
People make a lot of money selling eBooks, including to programmers. (Indeed, the recent change in the market is that thanks to the Kindle you can actually do well selling books which don't cost ~$50 and/or fiction.) Ask Amy Hoy, who cowrote a fairly successful one with her husband about JS performance. Your problem is not your pricing. Your problem is that your marketing does not communicate value sufficient to justify a higher pricing.
If you hear someone on HN or demographically similar say "That's too much money!", file them away in the pathological customer bin.
Look at the difference between your site and these sites, then optimize accordingly:
http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/
http://peepcode.com/products/meet-rails-3-i <-- not an ebook, but similar