"unless you’re a celebrity, publishers do nothing that you can’t do on your own just as well or better for a fraction of the cost."
Man that is a powerful takeaway for authors.
I'll add a few points:
(1) I learned you can buy your way onto the New York Times best seller list for $50 - 70k.
(2) We saw Tim Ferris A/B test his title for the Four Hour Workweek with astonishing results.
(3) A self-published title became the best selling book (in the UK) since they started measuring.
(4) Amazon sells more digital books than paper books.
Not sure what my point is, other than I am a student of marketing and am enjoying watching how the traditional value of publishers, having channel access, is being massively disrupted.
(1) You can also make much more profit per copy as a self-publisher.
(2) As a self-publisher, you can afford to produce small niche books that a publisher wouldn't touch. The increased profit per copy makes it worth your while even at very low sales volumes.
As a self-publisher (on Amazon) myself, there's another advantage. Your book never goes out of print. It's always there. So the sales of it remain fairly steady, month to month. While I haven't been doing this long term, I suspect the background level of sales should remain constant, rather than a huge blip tapering off to nothing.
It's more interesting to me that people are picking the books they want to read by looking at a list of what everyone else wants to read.
With fiction, that makes some sense to me. (Although, if I hate vampire books why would I care that a million people bought them last month?)
With nonfiction, it doesn't make sense at all. If you are interested in a topic, look for a book about it. If you aren't interested in the topic, why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?
Jumping on the "why nonfiction?" bandwagon, most popular nonfiction books aren't "A Deep Look At The Mathematics Of Widgets, With Special Attention to Foozles, For The Reader Well-Versed In Chrono-Widget-Dynamics". Most nonfiction books are "A Gentle Introduction To Widgets, With Many Wonderful And Heartwarming Anecdotes, For People With No Particular Need For Any Real Understanding".
Think "Born to Run", or "1421".
Second, not all nonfiction books are true and correct accounts of science and history. That gives them quite a bit of leeway for being exciting and enjoyable.
Third, there is actually a nonfiction audience. Some people don't like fiction
They just can't bring themselves to care about the lives and deeds of people who don't exist. Then again, you can only do so much focused, specialized reading on a single topic like astronomy or Russian history unless your brain is broken in that special way that makes you a fantastic researcher. So there is a large audience of people who relax by reading an essentially random nonfiction book on a topic they know nothing about simply because it's supposed to be an enjoyable read. And best seller lists are good places to find enjoyable reads.
You have a great point about fluffy feely goody low effort broader appeal sell. I enjoyed Born to Run, but not sure how deeper one can go on barefoot running; he had a good story, anthropol-culture tie in with smatterings of kinesio-podiatric science. Sure seller! Irrationally predict that :-) Here's to gooey non-fiction with all the recent expert studies neatly conclusive in one $9.99 package.
> why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?
Maybe the author has something to do with it? :) People like good books, and good books make dull topics seem interesting.
A good author can make a dry topic really interesting. "The Other God" for instance--how many people are going to be interested in a book about the history of dualist religion? But it turns out to be a real page-turner.
A good author can apply their skills in a surprising area and create a very interesting book. For instance, "The Cleanest Race" isn't just about North Korea, it's also about doing comparative analysis on propaganda. To me, this doesn't make the topic narrower, it makes it broader. People like me who aren't interested in comparative analysis find out it's an interesting tool when applied to something I'm interested in, and I imagine if you were the other way around you'd enjoy the book too.
I found out about "The Rise of Christianity" from a Catholic friend of mine, and now it's one of my favorite books, despite not being a Christian. The author took a pretty dry topic (the early history of Christianity) and made it interesting by applying modern sociology and anthropology to it. That he writes well and comes to interesting conclusions makes it a good book.
With nonfiction, it doesn't make sense at all. If you are interested in a topic, look for a book about it. If you aren't interested in the topic, why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?
I think it makes more sense within a category/genre. Once you are looking for say books on programming language x, have a way to select the books which are most popular is definitely valuable, and even better if you can select the books which are most popular with a certain population that you respect or with particular people you respect in that area. Perhaps publishers will transition away from providing channel access to recommendation and search engines. I suppose with Amazon taking over you could say this transition has already started but it has a long way to go yet.
I work with a lot of publishers and they're still frozen, looking at the headlights rapidly approaching, and unsure which way to jump. One thing is for sure though - paper media (ephemeral or books) is going to be massively disrupted over the next decade, and this disruption is only just beginning, everyone can see this but its hard to see exactly which way this is going. My personal bet is that the web will take over completely from all these paper products, and be served on all sorts of devices, but making money on that content is far from a sure thing.
why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?
Not feeling left out, conversational one-upsmanship (upspersonship?), being able to intelligently banter with strangers who are reading the same thing (since it's so popular), ...
That is the opposite of what I'd think. Nonfiction includes current topics like books on political figures. Fiction is all over the map and, with the exception of crossover titles like Primary Colors that were about current political figures but written as fiction, typically isn't tied to a current event in such a way that it matters what week it was on the NY times bestseller list for others to see that they might want to read it and buy it.
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Offtopic: everyone reading this stuff up here- scroll down to Tim O'Reilly's comment below before you jump on the O'Reilly bashing train.
Off-topic only regarding the "self-publish or not" question. O'Reilly's comments should be required reading for anyone planning to jump on the "O'Reilly bashing train".
Some of the things he said made sense though. Basically, if this guy wanted such rigid requirements, he should have stuck with a high-end custom publishing house. O'Reilly has never tried to make its name synonymous with a quality publishing house; they are known because they gave a voice to smart people in the tech world. Since then, it has expanded, mostly because techs no longer buy books in print as much as they did, and because to be profitable in a down market, you have to cut corners. The problem that plagued this author is that he associated the O'Reilly name with "high design quality" and that just isn't true. O'Reilly should be used when you want a recognizable publisher for tech books and to be included in their collection. If you are smart, you will also use the standard cover with an animal on it, such as a chinchilla.
I happen to have hard data on why people buy books from Bowker/Nielson. So online 3.5% of people buy a book because it is on the best seller list, but offline the number is 5% and being a best seller list is important offline because that means the book will actually be in the store so it can be bought. The best seller lists are important but not to the degree they were a few years ago.
> With nonfiction, it doesn't make sense at all. If you are interested in a topic, look for a book about it.
I think it is more complicated than that. I am interested in many topics, but at many different degrees of interest, and I don't have time to look for high-quality books on all of them, especially the lesser ones. However, I may see a book on a bestseller list that happens to coincide with one of those interests, especially one that I haven't read much on recently, and it may make me interested in reading that book when I might not have come across it otherwise.
(Edit: I realize high-quality != popular, but it's often a reasonable proxy for casual interests.)
>If you aren't interested in the topic, why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?
Most bestselling non-fiction falls into the popsci category. Think: *A brief History of Nearly Everything, Freakonomics, Blink, Tipping Point, etc. So by all means, people who want something slightly factier than a novel while still being accessible might well turn to thed non-fiction bestseller list.
If you are interested in a topic and you find a number of titles through casual browsing, how do you decide which one to try first? It's popularity with the general public may be a factor you consider.
I feel like you're making an unfair comparison between fiction and non-fiction.
But isn't fiction the same as nonfiction? I don't only read a small set of nonfiction books that come from a pointed search on a single subject. I read what is interested and related to my fields of interest (which is identical to what I do with fiction).
Either the fiction results will suck ("People who like Fantasy also like Harry Potter -- have you tried it?" i.e. not targeted to the subgenre and thus useless) or nonfiction results are possible.
The take home is this: Have a more granular ability to present social lists for both fiction and non-fiction.
If you can detect what type of fiction I like based on others, you can do the same for non-fiction. You can tell that I like certain subjects and people who share those likes might have some overlap that I would also enjoy.
Complete aside, but as a student of marketing who reads HN, care to reach out to our company? I'm not a student of marketing, and I'm kind of bad at it but need to get good quickly. I'm curious about you as a person, and want to understand that world better so we can either acquire the right skills ourselves, or hire someone who can help us understand.
Care to shoot me an email? Email is in my profile.
Now, are there any "new" publishers around, which work based on 1/2/3/4? Or let's say publishing-server providers?
I just don't think many authors want to do A/B testing, find editors, illustrators and not to forget coordinate marketing, PR, book tour on their own.
Working professionals usually have so many things on their table, that keeping some basic outreach on social media sites intact is demanding enough. This "you can do it on your own" is such an superficial argument. If I want to fly cross country, I don't want to assemble the plane myself - even if there are perfectly good options out there on different DIY aircrafts. Arguing, that there are now ready made components for DIY kit out there that some successful hobbyists have used with very much success, doesn't make it any easier.
I've got a book idea on the permanent back burner. One day I'd like to finish it (It's outlined but not written... lots of work left).
I can guarantee you I am not particularly interested in the publishing process. I want to be an author, not a soup-to-nuts businessman about it. I want to write a very nice book and give a publishing house a cut in exchange for them handling the messy business. Maybe if the book is very popular (doubtful), I would be interested in doing it again, and maybe myself. Probabilities suggest that I'll wind up getting a small check every month, even if I did do the business part myself.
The point Stephen Few makes (and I would second from my much more limited experience) is that the publisher takes a very large cut (not untypically 85-90% of the gross) and in return does very little. One, they do the editing, contracting that out to people you never talk to. Disagree with an edit? too bad. Two, they do layout and typesetting, but again, with little consultation or input from you. Don't like how they placed your examples or formatted your code? tough. Three, they do the small paperwork of obtaining an ISBN. Four, they contract with a printer, again without input from you; and as Few describes, if the quality of the paper, the print, or the binding displeases you, deal. Five, they list it on their website and fulfill orders as they come in from the web and from the wholesalers.
That's it; they don't do significant marketing for any but an expected blockbuster. Stephen King or Bill Gates they'd market. You? Nope. If you want your book marketed YOU have to do it, on your time and dime. If you give classes or lectures, you sit at a table in the lobby afterward and flog books. Tout them at conferences. Link to the amazon listing (which you can get even when you self-publish).
In any decent size town you can find competent editors on craig's list, or anywhere in the world via the web[1], to edit your text as a shared google doc (for example). People who will work with you one-on-one to lay out a book in Illustrator are to be cheaply found, if you don't have that skill yourself. Illustrators to work up a snappy cover design from your sketch. You might end up paying a few $K to bring a book to completely professional standard. You don't do it all, you act as manager and QC. Then you upload it to an online publisher [2] and you can start selling it -- on exactly the same terms methods as you'd start selling one made by a publisher, but you keep a lot more of the gross.
I'd love to see the numbers for "average" authors. Somehow I suspect, that there are very few non-fiction books that make actual money based on the amount of work that goes into them compared with a regular hourly rate for a subject-expert.
Based on $50/h, a book with 100 pages and 2h/page(research, structure, writing, etc) we are at $10.000 just to break even - without considering any external fees/time invested in editing, layout, design - or promotion.
Even based on a 100% earings rate, it seems save to assume that most "profitable" books are just a tool for personal promotion/expert positioning.
And/or personal fulfillment? Maybe not everyone likes the consulting or employed work that would earn the hourly rate. Plus it isn't scalable. Granted, the chance of the book breaking even may be slim, but it affords one to dream and to do what one enjoys.
Same as in music or movie industries. They squeeze all they can from the common folk. I hope more authors will go independent and help further disrupt the monstrous middle man.
I went back and forth with Springer about publishing my book (Essentials of Metaheuristics). It was a completed, edited, typeset, and ready to go volume, and my rep really wanted it, but couldn't convince her higher-ups of the one requirement I had: that I retain copyright on electronic copies. The reason was that I intended to release new versions of the book once every two months or so, constantly modifying and updating the book, and didn't want to go through the hassle of Springer approval for new editions every month.
This was of course a non-starter. Springer believes that in the coming years it will make nearly all of its money on electronic volumes. Heck, they'd be glad to give me the rights to the bound volumes, but no way will they release the electronic volumes.
So I put out electronic versions for free and bound volumes for people who want to buy them at minimal cost through Lulu. It's been a moderate success in a very narrow field: maybe about 6000 downloads a year.
Oh, only a few here and there, but that was expected. The paper version exists largely because people asked me for it, and because in some academic circles you've not published a book unless it's an actual "book" (much less "a book by a publisher").
Interestingly, I get kickback from Amazon not just for book sales but for other purchases people made while visiting Amazon via my link. :-) So someone will click on my website link to my book, then get distracted by something else, and wind up surfing over and buying an iPad. And I get the kickback for that! Amazon has a strange business model.
I guess that explains the batteries, baby chair, toothbrushes, foaming anti-bacterial hand-wash, moisturizer, wireless router, keyboard, soap dish, air conditioner, spatula, shoe laces, and copy of Portal 2. And lots of other books of course.
I run a website for writers. Very often we get the question, "Why should I bother chasing a big publisher if I can self-publish?"
Then, people often turn around and call self-publishing companies "scams" because everything can be done by hand by the author for free or for cheap.
How to reconcile these views, and those of this article?
The answer is, companies provide value to a certain type of customer.
If you're the type of person who is comfortable doing all of the marketing yourself, submitting to all the right places in all the right formats, hand-designing your book's layout, going so far as to demand a certain thickness of paper, well--traditional publishing is not for you. You're very correct to claim that you will get a raw deal from traditional publishing, in your case.
However, 95% of authors know zero about that kind of stuff. They have no idea how to market their writing. They don't know epub from mobi. They don't know that they can submit to B&N as well as the Amazon store. They don't know how to format their ebooks. They don't know how to handle cover art, how to find an artist, how to find a good editor. Do you think submitting your book to the Kindle marketplace and the B&N marketplace and the Apple marketplace is simple? Maybe it is--but most authors just can't handle it. They'd rather be writing.
The same can be said about self-publishing outfits. Many authors call them scams because they charge money for things you could do yourself or cheaper. Well, that's fine, if you know what to do and how to do it, and you have the time and patience. But many authors don't. That's why self-pub outfits aren't necessarily scams, because they provide genuine value to a lot of people. The important part is being aware that self-publishing mean you're going to be doing much of the legwork of marketing your book yourself, without the cachet of being able to say that someone is publishing you.
My point here is--don't expect to be happy with a business arrangement if you're not the business's target customer. The author of this post by all means should have self-published. Does that mean O'Reilly, or any other publisher, traditional or self-pub, is a horrible scam and not worth it? Hardly. They're very much worth it for the right kind of author. It's up to you to know what kind of author you are and if the profit tradeoff is worth it. For the entrepreneurial-minded HN crowd, self-publishing would be the way to go.
Edit: I should add that it is also on O'Reilly to realize that he's not their target customer. It looks like they obviously didn't figure that out despite his seemingly long and demanding contract.
You make an excellent point that I fully agree with. Different companies have different target audiences and will therefore provide value in different ways. The value that O'Reilly can provide many other authors is likely not the kind that the OP needs given the amount of control he likes to maintain; and there's nothing wrong with that.
With that said though, it's very important that you fulfill your contractual obligations, which if I take the article at face value it appears O'Reilly did not (although I don't know their side of the story of course). If I enter into a contract filled with a long list of technical details, but include a clause that demands a bowl of M&Ms with all brown ones removed, then on pain of legal action there better be a bowl of M&Ms with all brown ones removed [1]. The author no doubt had specific reasons for his requests that he felt were important to the success of his book. During negotiations there is nothing requiring O'Reilly or any other company to give someone any special considerations. They could just as easily walk away. However once both parties sign a contract agreeing to the terms, both parties are legally required to provide what they agreed to. According to the post that did not happen in this case.
[1] http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp - According to David Lee Roth the reason for the M&M clause effectively boils down to he who doesn't pay attention to the small details probably won't pay attention to the truly important ones either; like making sure your arena floor can actually support the weight of the concert equipment (whoops).
Let me get this straight: the article says that O'Reilly maed no marketing effort so that's out. The rest you mention (layouting, uploading etc) is a one time effort. And yet, the publisher wants to keep the significant portion of profits ongoing. Is something wrong here? (Yes.)
Printing, warehousing, distribution, handling remainders, the privilege of having your book on O'Reilly's market website, coordinating distribution of updates to ebooks, etc. are not one-time efforts. All of this invisible stuff eats out of your percentage and out of O'Reilly's. In fact in traditional publishing schemes books rarely make a profit. Publishing is a hits-based industry even though the publisher appears to take so much from the author, precisely because everyone glosses over the long-term invisible costs.
The author is the one doing the one-time effort. After the author finishes, he turns it over to the publisher, who takes the one-time writing effort, adds to it editing, layout, graphics, printing, reprinting, inventory management, etc., creates a product out of a manuscript, then has their sales force sell that product on an ongoing basis from then on. While the publisher's work never ends, the author's ongoing task amounts to cashing royalty checks and complaining.
Or that's how publishers see it. Having said this, I should add that I'm both an author and a publisher, meaning I self-publish. I think traditional publishers take so outrageously much (in money and control) and deliver so ridiculously little that I'd never let them turn my writing into their product unless I were a celebrity.
Well said. Don't forget either that publishers have existing relationships with distributors, and that's definitely a foot in the door compared to having to find the wholesale contacts for each distributor you want to go with.
My mother ran a bookshop and was a small-time publisher, and few people outside the industry have even the faintest idea of the work involved in publishing (and distribution).
Not to say that there aren't scummy publishers out there, but the article author said he's already self-published once and had a good time of it - the only benefit he could reasonably get at that stage is the distribution and maybe marketing contacts. The benefit of a reasonable publisher for the author is a much smaller step than for someone who's never published.
You have to consider O'Reilly's niche. I'd imagine that there is a lot of overlap with the "entrepreneurial-minded HN crowd", which you just said should definitely self-publish. If the large bulk of O'Reilly's writers would be better off without them, what does that say about this arrangement specifically, not necessarily the publishing industry as a whole? What you've said probably has a lot of validity for novelists, but O'Reilly doesn't publish novels.
Is there a way for O'Reilly to reorient such that they provide real value at a reasonable price to their current niche, based on industry evolutions like the ability to self-publish ebooks, or does O'Reilly need to start courting the next J.K. Rowling?
You can still get a lot of value from what O'Reilly provides if you're in their niche. Imagine the CS professor writing a book on the latest hot language. He'll need an editor; how does a CS professor go about finding a trustworthy one? He'll need cover art; he'll need to know how to create ebooks (computers are a wide field and just because you're an expert in Dart doesn't mean you know how to create an epub file). You'd have to deal with printing your book and knowing all the lingo there. Typesetting, etc. Maybe you have amateur HTML knowledge; you could put together an epub, but would it look professional?
All of this is learnable. Does that mean everyone should do it themselves? Or that everyone has the time or inclination to do it themselves? No. Maybe the CS professor could learn it all, but they're too busy teaching classes or doing research. Or maybe the minutae of self-publishing doesn't interest them. Publishers like O'Reilly exchange part of your profit for bringing their domain knowledge to the table and doing it all for you. For this hypothetical CS professor, he's exactly in their target market, even though he could do it himself if he tried hard enough. So with that said, I don't really think the bulk of O'Reilly's (author) market is here on HN.
Right, I guess the question is, "for an authorship capable of self-publishing, is your deal fair enough?" Again, I can totally see how novelists are basically obliged to take the deals offered by the publishing groups, because they are most likely not going to be able to gather the required knowledge to self-publish in anything resembling a timely manner. But with O'Reilly's authors, a publishing house is a convenience, not a necessity, worthy of a fair price, not the total pwnage and incompetence typical in the field and recounted in this piece ("...I was paying for it dearly, allowing O’Reilly to retain all but a small fraction of net sales").
So again, if O'Reilly is going to treat their authors like helpless novelists who've typed out their manuscript on an old-school mechanical typewriter and have no chance of self-publishing without years of effort and training, why don't they just start publishing novels? Is there really a market for a classical publishing arrangement when your authorship is perfectly capable of self-publishing, but would just prefer not to do so?
Why would a novelist be less capable of self-publishing than technical authors? Do technical authors have bigger garages to keep their book stock in? Do they live closer to mail depots? Do they have better sales skills for negotiating with distributors?
Novelists are less likely to be technically inclined than people writing books on programming languages. I was careful to make this distinction in order to avoid this pedantry when I specified the class of novelist that still writes out manuscripts on a mechanical typewriter. Technically competent novelists may well be in the same predicament as O'Reillys' authors. I didn't say all novelists were technically incompetent. Please curb your outrage.
My dual point was that you look down on novelists as being archaic typewriter-users, and that there is a lot more to publishing than the technical aspects of layout or ebook formats. Please curb your prejudice.
Please read more carefully. Your "dual point" is meaningless noise. I didn't say all novelists were archaic typewriter users. The class of novelists that are not "helpless ... typewriter [users]" are not included in my statement which was specifically restricted to "helpless ... typewriter [users]". Novelists, however, are definitely more likely to be helpless typewriter users than the authorship of O'Reilly's publications, however. Please curb your outrage. It's trite pedantry.
You are still missing my main point: publishing is more than ebook conversion or maybe a bit of layout. Significantly more - and your painting of 'typewriter users' as being technically helpless, even if correct, does not bleed through to the other aspects of publishing. Please curb your prejudice.
Novelists, however, are definitely more likely to be helpless typewriter users than the authorship of O'Reilly's publications, however.
Yes, I agree - 0.1% is more likely than 0.0%, given that pretty much no-one uses typewriters these days, except perhaps the archaic stereotypical 'novelist' in your head. Take your accusations of pedantry elsewhere if you're going to make an argument based on an effectively non-existent demographic.
Edit: a significant part of what a publisher does, which you may not realise, it editing. Technical authors aren't better than any others when it comes to writing well (and the stereotype is that they're worse). Good editing has turned many a pig's ear into a silk purse.
As I mentioned, for those with the skill, time, patience, and determination, any traditional publishing deal, including O'Reilly, isn't worth it. But I think you're overestimating the amount of O'Reilly authors who can do (and are interested in doing, and have time for) every little thing required to produce, market, and distribute paper and ebooks.
Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves; but O'Reilly's vast catalog isn't all written by hackers. I doubt even a majority is. O'Reilly doesn't need to start selling novels because their authors appear to be happy with the traditional tradeoff. If more weren't, then O'Reilly wouldn't exist today. After all self-publishing is nothing new. Vanity presses have been around for centuries.
Just like we'd chuckle at the guy who says, "You want how much to make a web site? Don't you just put a picture at the top and write some text?" so too would O'Reilly chuckle at us for saying, "They want how much for their percentage? Don't they just turn on a printer and convert a .doc file to .mobi with Calibre?"
Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves
I think you're very right about this, but there's even more to it. When O'Reilly started, getting a book published was like getting a chip design fabricated. You had professionals who worked with software that cost thousands of dollars producing "camera ready" pages for printers, whose enormously expensive equipment required very special formats. And the end product had to go through a channel as a physical product being moved to tens of thousands of bookstores, because those incredibly fragmented physical sales locations were almost the only places books were sold.
It just didn't matter how much of a "roll up your sleeves" guy you were in that world (which I remember like it was yesterday.)
But that world is gone. These days, you can create your book entirely with free software as you sit on a beach, and you can sell it in electronic form off your own website to the entire planet (without leaving the beach.) You can do all the marketing, all the selling, collect your paychecks, and use them to buy stuff, all from that little spot in the sand.
O'Reilly is still needed by some, but for "roll up your sleeves hackers", I think their time has past.
All the things you list, marketing, formatting, etc, you would have to pay yourself out of pocket if you couldn't do it yourself. I hired a designer for my book and it cost me roughly $1500. I haven't paid for marketing yet but at least if I released the book myself, I would have that option, and it would be worth it to me because I would be taking in the bulk of the income instead of a publisher. The saddest part about this article is that his publisher seemingly did NOTHING to promote his book. That would be the main reason I would go with a publisher at all.
This is tough. I've known Tim for a long, long time and he's always been a stand-up guy with amazing ethics and vision. I also know Laurie and worked with her briefly when I was helping to co-author a long-forgotten O'Reilly book on Mozilla applications. She's a good editor.
I also tremendously respect Stephen Few's body of work and own all of his books. There is no doubt he's a leader in the field of information visualization.
What I think Stephen is missing here is a discussion about or the acknowledgement that the printed book industry is one of very low margins. It's entirely possible that the issues he is complaining about are a result of the O'Reilly print production managers choosing lower-quality sources and suppliers -- something O'Reilly doesn't have a history of. They pioneered the RepKover lay-flat binding, which costs a lot more than traditional binding. The cost of producing Stephen's book to the standards he expected was probably far too high for O'Reilly to have been able to make any profit on it at all without literally doubling the price. There is a reason that beautifully printed and produced architecture books, art history books and specialty books cost between $50 and $200 each.
O'Reilly must have recognized by Mr. Few's demands that these expensive details mattered to him or else they would not have signed the contract. But they did. Belly-ache all day about the margins and practical difficulties inherent in printing a book to Mr. Few's standards, but they signed it to get the deal and then broke their word. What is he missing about that, the central theme of this piece?
P.S. $50 to $200? O'Reilly sells their poorly bound books at the low-to-middle of that range. You are not helping them by mentioning what a nicely printed book costs.
I'm sure it's not what you're suggesting but low margins aren't an excuse for breaching a contract or doing a poor job of printing. If it can't be done at the right quality economically, it's better to not do the job at all which is what the contract seems to have been trying to guarantee.
Print media is in decline and will only lose more ground now to digital media, which of course has a significant cost advantage. Perhaps publishers should recognise that now and aim towards a niche of fewer very high quality prints that are as much aesthetic as practical. The price increase which is inevitable in any case as volumes drop might not look so bad then.
I will confess to being somewhat concerned regarding the author's legal plight. He's making a claim of bad faith on the other party to his contract and saying, "due to it many breaches of contract, O’Reilly has no choice now but to surrender its rights to the book, so I’m free to publish the second edition of Information Dashboard Design through Analytics Press."
While I believe that he would probably prevail, the author is building his future plans on the assumption that O'Reilly won't sue him for breach of contract and, if they do, the courts will rule in his favor. If I were Analytics Press, I'd be very uneasy being the third wheel in this sort of relationship with the unresolved matter of breach of contract still in play.
> He's making a claim of bad faith on the other party
The way I read it, the author never made a claim of bad faith. The sentence: "I doubt that any breaches of contract were willful" indicates the author assumed they were dealing in good faith (just incompetently).
> and saying, "due to it many breaches of contract, O’Reilly has no choice now but to surrender its rights to the book, so I’m free to publish the second edition of Information Dashboard Design through Analytics Press."
From what I read, the author wasn't just saying "they breached the contract, therefore I get my rights back"; he had this written into the contract via an amendment after the first breach: "an amendment to the contract was written to prevent this from happening again, or in the event that it did, to make sure that O’Reilly surrendered its rights to the book, posthaste".
> If I were Analytics Press, I'd be very uneasy being the third wheel in this sort of relationship with the unresolved matter of breach of contract still in play.
Were I Analytics Press, I would certainly want to examine the facts in question to make sure the author held the rights to the book. If I were able to verify:
a) The author had a valid provision in his contract that caused the rights to revert to him in the event of a breach, AND
b) Clear evidence of a breach of contract by the previous publisher
I'd likely be willing to take on the risk in this situation. The important thing is to acknowledge the risk, and do your due diligence to verify that the party has the rights they are providing you.
Their stopping print and electronic publication of the first edition is significant. Certainly not enough to be sure they won't sue, but they'd have to have gone way beyond "lost their soul" to go that far and generate a massive amount of negative publicity.
He claims the rights have reverted back to him. They would be stupid to risk a lawsuit by continuing to sell the book. Especially since based on the tone of the article, it doesn't sound like it was doing particularly well anyway.
I think he has some valid points about O'Reilly, but stopping the sale of the book is a move about avoiding risk of lawsuit with someone who has made it clear that he will take action if need be. Saying that it was out of spite is only his personal interpretation.
Yes, and I think this means that they let him know that he may proceed, and that he doesn't also have legal issues hanging over his head. If it were me I'd prefer to have a clean break from the publisher before publishing a new book, than to have a book that's still being printed by a publisher who used to assert exclusive control of it while trying to print the next edition of it myself.
I think he's counting on the part of the contract that he describes as being roughly "If O'Reilly fails to do X, Y and Z, the rights automatically revert to me." It sounds like he is confident that it is O'Reilly that breached the contract, not him.
In publishing contracts I've entered into with major publishers, it usually says the rights revert back to me after 2 years of it being out of print. Not immediately.
We won't do anything without your knowledge and consent. We regard the relationship between editor and author as one of two people working together to create the best possible product. If the two of you can't agree, we may give the editor the final say because we know our editors are all reasonable people! But this doesn't mean that we'll run roughshod over your material and surprise you in print.
Marketing:
at O'Reilly & Associates, we publish only one book per topic, and we promote it as long as there is still a need for it. Our books complement each other, so the sales of one book help the sales of others on related topics. While we do sell a lot through bookstores, we don't think our job is over once the bookstore has ordered. We continue to support the book with clever promotions, advertising, and publicity.
One important aspect of our marketing strategy is that we work to create demand with the ultimate consumer--the reader--rather than just with the bookstore. Mail order advertising through pieces like our award winning catalog, ora.com, is an important part of that demand creation.
Royalties:
We will pay you a royalty of 10% of all net income we receive as a result of our distribution of the book, in any form, printed, electronic, or other, or from the license or sale to third parties of any rights in a derivative work.
That page hasn't been updated for a long time: "In fact, Borders, the most respected and successful bookstore chain in the country, reports that ORA is their top publisher."
10% of net income does not sound like a good deal at all. 10% of gross revenue for the product would be much better, but still why so little?
It's also 10% of any form, even electronic:
"as a result of our distribution of the book, in any form, printed, electronic, or other, or from the license or sale to third parties of any rights in a derivative work."
Especially since "net income" is basically a made up number. If they buy a new factory to print books out of, they can divide up the cost however they want amongst their authors. Stuff like that. "Net income" is entirely under their control.
I've been reading a lot about publishing and self-publishing, and the core themes around going the traditional route keep repeating themselves.
The negatives of traditional publishing:
1) Unless you're a known commodity/celebrity, you're basically writing for your advance, and that it.
2) There's not going to be a lot of marketing support for your book from anyone other than you.
3) You don't have as much control over the product as you think you do.
There are a lot of positives, too -- there's the ego aspect, as you have to get past a gatekeeper; if you're a writer, you don't have to worry about all the stuff that happens to go from manuscript to book; they handle distribution; etc. But this guy didn't really gain or care about those factors. And some factors which would be a positive for many writers (i.e. the design of the book itself) are a HUGE negative for him.
I'm really not surprised that his experience was negative.
Actually, his chief complaint is that they willfully disregarded their contract with him. That has less to do with "traditional publishing wasn't right for him" than "O'Reilly didn't honor a contract."
I wrote my first book for a traditional publisher and unlike the norm, my book earned out its advance and gave me several royalty checks.
If you take into account the confs I traveled to giving talks, it's probably a wash.
I think the problem with his case is that he did it somewhat backwards. He already had the brand identity and market to not necessitate needing O'Reilly.
My publisher didn't do anything other than sending out some promo copies I asked for and sponsoring a giveaway or two. Going through a traditional publisher is a good way to learn the rules. I tried to soak up as much as I could from my editors so when I tried to do it on my own (as I'm doing now with an experimental project), I wasn't so lost.
Too many people look at O'Reilly as the brass ring that will suddenly make them tech-famous. The hustle is the same whether you are self-pub or trad-pub. The only difference is your royalty and control.
There are two issues here: a particular dispute between O'Reilly Media and one of our authors, and the relative advantages of using a publisher versus going it alone. I'm only going to address the former here, but if you read between the lines, you can see the signs of an author who imagines the upside of self-publishing, but is not prepared to accept the costs on the downside.
I'm the last person to suggest to any author that self-publishing is not a good idea, since I started out as a self-published author who then took on other authors, and grew a real publishing company. But in the course of that odyssey, I learned why publishing is not as easy as it looks, even today when the options for self-publishing have proliferated.
Let me respond to the particulars of this case.
As reasonable people know, there are two sides to every story. Far from being the story of a heartless publisher running roughshod over an innocent author, the O'Reilly Media side is a story of a particularly demanding author, for whom we've bent over backwards.
In response to a bad printing job, which as Steven Few notes, did produce a substandard printing of the book, we not only took the bad copies out of distribution and reprinted it to Steven's exacting specifications, which included a specific, very expensive paper, we foolishly agreed to let him inspect each print run. (As he notes, we didn't always follow through on this agreement, but he continued to buy the reprinted copies, which came from the same printer, from the same files, on exactly the same paper, without complaint.) When the Kindle edition (which we had every right to produce) turned out to be substandard, we took it out of print.
When he asked us to revert the rights, it is true that our publisher did assert, as we believe, that we had the rights to produce the second edition. But when Steven was clear that he did not want to produce the new edition with us, we didn't fight his wish to revert the rights, and agreed to his desire to cancel the contract.
At that point, Steven made clear that he expected us to continue publishing the first edition until such time as he no longer needed it. Given that this is an expensive four-color book for we have been printing approximately twelve months of inventory, we declined to go back to press when we ran out of stock three months short of his planned new edition.
This is fairly standard publishing practice - and it doesn't come from heartless disregard for authors, but rather, from thoughtful regard for customers. Most customers would not be too pleased to buy a book only to discover that there is a new edition available. They would rather hear in advance about a new edition, and wait for it, than buy an outdated version.
Steven's need for books for his seminars is a special case, but one that he could have anticipated and communicated to us in a cooperative way.
We have offered to provide to him all the source files for his book, so that if he chooses, he can arrange to print his own copies. After all, since he plans to self-publish the second edition, there is nothing to prevent him from self-publishing additional copies of the first edition if he requires them. We even offered to help arrange the printing.
What we were not willing to do is to incur the enormous cost of an extremely short run printing of an expensive book, when the need for that short run is driven by the author's own decisions and schedule, and not by ours. We even offered to set him up with a print-on-demand vendor who could produce copies on short turnaround at what we believe is probably acceptable quality, but he is not interested in that option.
When I first heard about this problem, Stephen was threatening litigation unless we printed books for him, despite the fact that he'd already terminated the contract. Let's be clear, he threatened to sue us for not continuing to perform on a contract that he himself asked to be canceled. (The contract did not require us to continue publishing the book in any case.)
When our publisher asked for a phone call to discuss options, he declined to talk with her, insisting that he'd only communicate about his issues in writing. And given that each of his messages seemed to have as a precondition the admission of guilt for various "offenses", that made communication rather difficult.
For what it's worth, when Steven published his blog post, I replied in the comments. He has declined to publish my reply. (I had also thought I had replied when he first contacted me by email twelve days ago, but I discovered the unsent message in my outbox.)
Here's the comment that I wrote for Stephen's blog, but which he did not publish:
Stephen,
While I was not directly involved in your discussions with the editorial team at O'Reilly, I have looked into your allegations, and would like an opportunity to respond.
A couple of salient facts that your readers of this post might want to know:
1. It is our interpretation of your contract that we had the right to produce a second edition, but we also agreed that you had the right to terminate the contract. So when you said you wanted the rights back so you could self-publish the second edition yourself, we accepted that. That is hardly a soulless machine that gives no regard to the interests of authors. Not only that, when we reverted the rights, we agreed to provide you with all the design files so that you could print additional copies of the first edition yourself.
2. Because of your exacting design requirements, the book is a four-color book printed in Italy, with a 6-8 week reprint lead time, and a cost that is highly dependent on the number of copies printed. We have only just run out of stock; effectively, you wanted us to print enough stock for only three months of sales. This would drive up the unit cost dramatically. By the time I even heard about the issue, you were asking for a reprint that has a two month lead time with only three months to go before you were planning to publish the second edition. (You had originally told us that you were going to publish the second edition in June; in your account above, I see that has now slipped to July.)
This is one of the real problems with the old-fashioned printing methods that are the only ones that seem to provide the quality you insist on. You have to buy large print runs, which don't always line up neatly with real-world demand, requiring large investments in inventory. We've moved to print-on-demand for many of our books (even for four-color books such as yours), but that leads to precisely the kind of quality tradeoff that you insist you don't want. Print-on-demand allows for continuous availability as well as for sudden spikes in demand.
But in any case, it is normal publishing practice to let a first edition lapse in the months before availability of a new edition. If you're a consumer, the last thing you want to see is a new, improved edition of a book a few days or weeks after you just paid for what is now the out-of-date edition.
In short, there is no "spite" in the decision not to reprint the book.
I'm sorry you and your students got caught in a squeeze here. Given that we have reverted the rights to you, you can most certainly consider reprinting the first edition yourself, perhaps using print-on demand and accepting some reduction in quality to meet the gap in availability.
I wish you well with your self-publishing endeavor. I started out as a self-published author myself, and built up my company from there. It's more challenging than many authors imagine, but it's most certainly doable. But it does put you in touch with the messy realities (and economics) of manufacturing, inventory management, and distribution that make this kind of difficult situation come up from time to time.
If you want to see if print-on-demand could satisfy your requirements to produce copies of the first edition until the second is ready, I'm sure we could connect you with some appropriate vendors.
There's a third issue here, Tim: a perceived downward trend in the quality of the offerings of O'Reilly Media. My first O'Reilly book taught me sed/awk. Now you print magazines with "How to knit a robot" on the front cover.
I'm all for throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, but you seem spread awfully thin.
O'Reilly hired a pal to speak at RailsConf based on a popular Web 2.0 site he built. Unfortunately he didn't build it. Also the site was written in C#.
Well, there are a lot of people who love Make: magazine. I've seen other comments that it's the best part of O'Reilly, which we lost when we spun it out in December :-) So tastes may differ.
I don't know about your Railsconf issue. Please send more details.
hi tim, it's not about taste, the "a perceived downward trend in the quality" is real. i own my career o'reilly. i have a cherished sortiment of 25 or more o'reilly books, some used and read so often that they more look like an original gutenberg bible than a computer book from the nineties/2000s. sadly i couldn't ad a new book to this collection for years.
for a very long time i believed that there was something like the O'Reilly (animal books) standard, that whenever one of your books is read front to cover you a) know more about the topic at hand than 99.9% the rest of the world and b) a deeper understanding of the topic.
while a) might still be true from time to time, b) is not true anymore -because the books are quite bad. and with bad i mean poorly edited (i.e.: the art of SEO, first edition and a lot more), completely un-structured (couchDB first edition), a scam (the one with the cow on the cover, it was the only book i ever did send back to amazon, just found it, it was the Data Source Handbook, 46 pages, 24 EUR, unbelievable poor "content") or just ... not a good book.
whereby i one stood in the computer book section, studied each oreilly book and decided what to learn this month, i now look into the other direction.
whereby i once recommended every dev-rookie every one of your book, i now point them to pragprog.
i believe you are a bussy man, but well, if you would from time to time pick up one of your books, read it front to cover and then ask yourself if this is really a book worth of having your name in front of it, this would already (probably) help a lot.
>Here's the comment that I wrote for Stephen's blog, but which he did not publish:
From what I can see, he did publish it (yesterday), and responded to it as well. I don't see an easy way to link to it, so search for "By Tim O’Reilly. March 12th, 2013 at 1:22 pm" or just scroll down.
My impression is Stephen refused to make O'Reilly's comment visible until he had a chance to insert his claims into its content. Seems odd that he'd edit the comment to include his responses when he wasn't doing so for other replies, and it really makes it difficult to follow O'Reilly's take on the events.
Further, one of the 9 comments which follow it, excluding Stephen's, would have made reference to it had it been visible since that time, right?
Both sides sound reasonable from their point of view. I wonder if, perhaps, there was a communication issue, and neither side expressed their position well to eachother until now?
Nothing is more disheartening to me than to see companies with formerly good intentions turn to nothing but a burned out husk of their former selves the second the founder takes a less than dominating role in day-to-day operations. It just reaffirms my cynical view that companies are out for profit at any cost.
I haven't bought an O'Reilly paper book in a while, but as a customer, their ebook delivery has been doing a lot of things right for me. They're available in multiple non-DRM formats for computers and e-readers, I get notifications on updates and errata, and they're priced better than the print versions.
Yeah, I absolutely love O'Reilly as a consumer. The prices are great, they use all 4 or 5 major ebook formats, no DRM, "early access" to works in progress (really useful when the current print is on a dated version of the language, but the new edition is not quite done), and they let you "upgrade" a print edition to an electronic version for a very reasonable price.
Corporations "souls" are only as good as their current leadership and "legal" obligations allow them to be. Mostly they are amoral, since the purpose of mostly all corporations is to make money. (Not books or widgets or software...)
Yes but to make money they need to persuide others to cooperate with them. They're certainly no monopoly and don't posess the knowlegde and skills to create their products themselves.
Agreed. Shareholders and Boards of Directors. Even if you have shareholders with a long-term view, if the Board of Directors is thinking short-term, then the senior managers fear for their corporate lives and will (re)act accordingly.
OP makes valid points but there is value to having your "ticket punched" by a major publisher vs. self publishing.
That may change but it still has value today. It's not all about money or how many are sold. Being vetted and accepted by a major publisher can open doors and opportunities to other things. Can get you mainstream media attention which can be parlayed into opportunities as well. Selling a large quantity of books on your own can also obviously (key: large quantity) however don't discount the value of chokepoint.
This is the kernel of every publisher's pitch to every first-time author. But tech publishers run so many books every year by so many random people that their curation value is dubious at best, and certainly not worth the enormous cost of working with them. And, as most of the stories about working first with a publisher and then independently have testified, there's no media attention or promotional value a publisher gets you that you can't build for yourself at a lower cost.
There are still handy boxes they can tick though. I know people who've used being published by major tech publishers as the core of their O-1 visa applications to get into the US.
I swear that I have been hired for jobs several times mainly because I have a book on the shelves of book stores by a publishing company they recognize. Don't underestimate the value of having an O'Reilly book to your name.
I'm pretty sure that 90% of the books published by O'Reilly and the like are written by consultants as self-promotion, with no expectation that they'll provide a return on their own. Presumably O'Reilly has adapted to take advantage of this fact.
It's also possible that writers start out really excited to make a book to help people, and then in the end all they have left is the self-promotion out of it once their publisher didn't do anything to promote it.
Look, I don't doubt that an ORA book is a credential. I just doubt that it's a cost-effective credential. A prominent Github project will serve most people just as well as an ORA book.
While it is understandable that the author is upset about his dealings with O'Reilly, I would have preferred if he left people's names out of the article. Naming the acquisitions’ editor does not affect the article, but makes the author sound (a bit) whiny. No need to get personal, especially since the issue is with the entire company.
I have been purchasing O'Reilly books since the mid '90s. They used to be my goto publisher. Looking back the past few years, the only book I have purchased from them was the Programming Collective Intelligence book, which was published in 2007. Manning has replaced them as my new goto book series. O'Reilly has been publishing many small books. Instead of one good MongoDB cookbook, they choose to publish 5-6 smaller ones, whose prices are almost comparable to a book of "normal" length.
And let's not discuss their conference pricing. What happened to Hadoop World after they took over? I hope that smaller conferences will not be bought out by O'Reilly.
I've never understood why people dance around naming names when calling companies out. Doesn't that help the whole community? Now I know Tim is a good guy, and specific people tried to waste the author's time. If I ever publish a book with O'Reilly, I know to avoid those people. "The issue is with the entire company", which is made up of people. When people get good service, they use names. When they don't get good service, they suddenly avoid names at all? I just don't get it.
I agree, and I would add that people don't avoid names in all cases. The trend against naming names is especially annoying because it basically only emerges when there is a power imbalance, and thus serves only to protect those in positions of power as they continue to act poorly.
As an example, have you ever heard anyone say "I don't want to name names, but a certain local cleaning service has been very disappointing to me." No of course not, they'll say the name of their cleaning wo/man and trash them, because why should they give a shit? I mean it's "just" the cleaner. The waitress at the bar? Screw her, what do they care about her reputation, trash her if you are unhappy with your service.
But deal with someone in a position of authority and suddenly its all kid gloves and politeness. "Oh I don't want to be unprofessional and name names, but I worked for a game company where I did 8 months of unpaid OT and then was laid off after release." Great, that helps exactly no one avoid the same situation you found yourself, so now another college grad can be exploited. If you worked for EA Tiburon and they screwed you, say it! If they treated you well say that too! Bad actors should be named and shamed or else they never have to pay for their actions.
Thanks to this post I can avoid O'Reilly as a publisher, and more importantly I can know that working with the editors named is a good idea as they were honorable people, but if I see that this Laurie person is involved with a potential publisher I can avoid them too.
I have a theory that this excessive deference to authority is why you can see so many people in upper management skate from one failure to the next, as no one has the balls to name them as poor performers, so they never have to reap consequences of their actions.
Good on the author for actually having the integrity to call things as they are.
Avoiding names is polite and professional because there is potential for doubt in any situation, and one report by an injured party can inflate or distort the truth. This is hard to see when you are the injured party, but that's why these are social norms, to give guidance for appropriate behavior in emotionally charged situations.
One of the benefits of there being a company involved is the company can take responsibility for the imperfect acts of its employees. Blaming a bad author experience on a publisher is entirely appropriate. Connecting the names of individuals to a disgruntled report in the public record is usually not.
Disclaimer: I'm a satisfied O'Reilly author. I'm considering self-publishing for my next project, but not because of my experiences with a publisher. For my (non-design-oriented) tech book, O'Reilly did far better by me than other major publishers did by other authors I know.
> Bad actors should be named and shamed or else they never have to pay for their actions.
Sounds good in theory. Just be damned sure that someone is really a "bad actor", and not a good person with their hands tied, being manipulated by an upper management socio-path.
If your goal is to embarrass and piss off the people who have annoyed you, naming names will accomplish that goal.
If your goal is to make a broader point about an industry, naming names will just distract.
If your goal is to criticize a particular company, naming names again distracts from the objective.
I can't read the OP's mind, so I don't know his goals.
There's all the difference in the world between public praise and public criticism. I can't explain it to you, but maybe think back to when you've been on the receiving end of both.
> If your goal is to criticize a particular company, naming names again distracts from the objective.
In this case you couldn't be more wrong. Pointing out to a crowd who mostly knows how awesome Tim O'Reilly is that Tim is still great, but is not really involved anymore, is genuinely useful and constructive criticism.
I'm pretty unhappy with O'Reilly's trend towards tiny books as well. I realize that 80 page books are easier to iterate rapidly on and get out the door while they're still relevant, but they're so short that they feel like glorified (and expensive) blog posts. I read tech books instead of blog posts because I appreciate the overall structure and "big picture" views that they give, not because I have some kind of fetish for paying for information.
I've also found Manning to be a pretty good publisher. In particular, I really appreciate that their books tend to avoid "language reference syndrome", where half of the book walks you through the language syntax and the other half exhaustively details every function in the standard library. Books like that tend to be out-of-date as soon as they come off the (possibly virtual) printing press, and they just aren't as necessary as they were when online documentation didn't exist.
Yeah, I used to love their books, and tended to feel pretty confident that if a book had O'Reilly on the cover, it would be decent.
Then I went and bought an O'Reilly title recently which appeared to have not been edited, at all. The code didn't work as written, and I quickly realized that I'd be better off reading source code on Github. The comments were better than that piece of garbage book.
This is not a new thing. I used to have the same feeling, that the O'Reilly brand was a mark of quality.
That ended when I bought their "Creating Applications with Mozilla" book (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000523.do), which was riddled with misprints and errors, to the point that even the "Hello World" example code at the start of the book didn't work. It was disgracefully bad. I was actually, literally shocked by how bad it was.
That was 11 years ago. And I haven't run into a whole lot of "buy the O'Reilly book" recommendations since.
It kind of sounded to me like the author was pointing out that, though O'Reilly sucks, the editors (including the acquisitions editor) were good. The author didn't seem to get personal in a bad way.
Not true. The part where he contacts Tim O'Reilly directly, he names the name of "the publisher who replaced him", and said they lacked "integrity and good business sense".
Tim Oreilly is distracted and is missing the hunger of the early years. This happens to most people when they age and if it doesn't it's the exception. It also happens to businesses as well. They become complacent fat and lazy. Sometimes a near death experience brings them back sometimes they die.
All the talk of "we will be different this will never happen to us" doesn't change that in most cases.
> I would have preferred if he left people's names out of the article
I wouldn't. I'm sure a very large part of the problem at O'Reilly like any large corporation is the bureaucracy making it easy for individuals to evade personal responsibility.
The author praised the editors who did good work and criticised the publisher on reasonable grounds. Recognising people who do well and making people accountable when they don't are two sides of the same coin.
Besides, I'm sure if I'd poured a couple of thousand hours into a book it damn well would be personal to me in that situation.
He didn't appear to call out anyone. In fact, the only names he mentioned were the ones that he interacted well with. It was the nameless "company" that didn't fulfill their end of their agreement.
Sad to read. Both how poorly the author was treated and how disconnected Tim is from the current O'Reilly. I got to talk to Tim at a conference once and was very impressed with both his ability to see the problem through the symptoms, and his views on publishing.
I was sort of wondering where the Dashboards book had gone, since I was going to refer it to friend and poof it was toast.
I have published my own book, and know quite a bit about the industry. Self-publishing has many pluses, but it also has many disadvantages relative to working with a large publisher, the largest being (for an unknown): building demand in the absence of brand and network.
While O'Reilly may have made some mistakes in this case (I have no idea), the author is unnecessarily personalizing and complicating what appears to have been a normal business transaction, with bumps in the road for both sides.
You can't succeed in business by being this high maintenance.
For right or wrong, it has the effect of making everyone less willing to do business with you, because they don't want to take the risk that any dispute they might have with you will also be publicly aired.
And the thing is, in business, misunderstandings and contract disputes (and flat out mistakes) happen all the time. And, speaking from my own experience, typically neither side is 100% blameless.
The solution is, if you believe the other party is acting in good faith (even when they mess up), you try to work within the framework of a relationship, rather than calling out the lawyers.
>>>Going public with a dispute is high maintenance.
Sometimes that's the only way to effect change. And the only way to warn others who might see you as an example and want to follow your lead into the same damn trap.
So I've been where this author is. I've had a few book deals, and been constantly disappointed with the level of marketing the publisher does for me. "Put it on their website" is about the level of marketing I got too. Some book deals fall through, and sometimes I don't what I think is owed to me.
That being said, I can't imagine trying to negotiate my own custom deal that's different from the standard terms they offered. Having final approval authority for things such as the type of paper it's printed on... wow. I am not surprised O'Reilly is unable to meet those terms because how could they? How would the people running the print operation know that permission has to be asked from the author to change paper types? There's thousands of books, and that type of permission is just not normal. Its logistically not possible. Book publishing (unless you're Stephen King) runs on a standard set of terms for the most part.
The major benefit of working with a publisher is they give you money up front as you're writing the book (an advance). And you don't have to pay even $1 for any of the expenses of printing your book.
That's it. If you can self-publish and handle all the expenses yourself (copy editor, tech editor, indexer, layout, cover art, etc etc etc), then self-publish.
The publisher is taking all the risk here that the book won't sell. If you can take that risk, do it yourself.
I don't have experience in this area, but I dislike when people think this way in general, because it leads to comments like "oh, that's just standard language", and "no one else actually reads it all, I've never had that question before" in rather important contracts.
I often feel like I am signing my life away unnecessarily due to "standard contracts" that are highly asymmetrical, yet no one else cares or pushes back. So, I have to grant overreaching rights to the other party and just trust that they won't actually exercise it, for the sake of getting a deal done.
To me the paper approval seems like an odd request, but not logistically unreasonable. If they can communicate the content to the print operation, they can surely communicate a paper specification. Presumably they already do this for the paper size. More importantly, it doesn't matter. He did the deal because they agreed to his terms, whatever they were. That is them deciding that it's worth accommodating his parameters. If they thought they were logistically infeasible, they would have declined the deal, and both parties would be better off.
Edit: Ah, this is a book about design. That makes the paper approval request pretty reasonable, especially considering he had image bleed issues with the cheap paper.
Soulless? Now, look. O'Reilly has gone downhill, but so has just about everything. The economy made people cut corners and care less about quality or customer service (where the customer in this case is you, the writer). But if they kept the same standards they had before while book sales dwindled, they would be bankrupt. That is the cold hard fact of it, and it is sad. We'd like to think that quality is always rewarded, but paper is becoming less relevant, and ebooks can be hacked and torrent'd + magnet'd or just plain shared. Any data based business whether it is books, music, or otherwise, is in the shitter and looking for a new gig. I by no means think that litigation and DRM are the answer; fear and bad cryptography are never the answer. But, these people don't have many options, and they are going to make bad choices.
In addition, based on what Tim O'Reilly said in response, it sounds like the author was incredibly overdemanding compared to their typical author, and would have benefited from a small high-end custom publishing house. O'Reilly would be a great way to get published for anything that is primarily print; not a book on design with precise requirements, it would seem.
O'Reilly lost to Manning as the top dog in the computer book business some years ago.
It started sometimes around when they published numbers of books sold by technology, confusing the market of technologies with their offer and not realizing that their sales numbers had nothing to do with the popularity of those technologies but with the uninteresting books they published in some fields.
Can anybody explain why tech circles are so prone to doomsday predictions? I don't see so many proclamations of impending demise in other industries, but in tech, a newcomer would be forgiven for thinking that most of the large incumbents are poised to drop dead and 'die' tomorrow. Why so anarchist?
Because we see it happen so often. Technical companies feel much more active than manufacturing, retail and industrial companies. Apple all but disappeared, then surged back to life. GTE grew organically as a telephone company, then ate a bunch of internet companies and split/merged until parts became Verizon and parts Level 3. Software companies mushroom out of nothingness, become buzzwords, then disappear in a morass of infighting and bad decisions.
Not anarchist, but disruptive. The attitude comes from five decades of technology innovation rapidly rendering its competition utterly obsolete without warning. Picasso once said "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge", and the hacker community understands that the urge to create is also a destructive urge.
Um... you realize this is a news site for STARTUPS. The entire point of which is to develop new business models and "kill" incumbent competitors. So I guess we like to focus on the mortality of companies, as it is often a techie who is implementing his own version of doomsday and demise on large incumbents. All through creation (new technology, new media, new models, new information) ironically enough.
I bought 5 books with Oreilly once. Once. The paper quality was surprisingly "VERY CHEAP". I can't highlight it enough, it was really ridiculous.
I wrote complaining to Oreilly, and there response was that "they worked to produce the best quality.. blah blah blah".
Smashing magazine produces much more cleaner, colorful, high quality books for the same price. (And the SM book is written by many authors).
I decided not to buy from them again any paper books. Anyone know a really good publisher (talking about paper quality). If I'm buying a paper book, I want it to standout in my library and last.
There was an article profiling the author of Wool posted here (possibly!) recently. He turned to self-publishing on Amazon and sold on a cost, then had the leverage to say to publishers he was keeping the digital rights and no argument as they were worth significantly more than the print rights. I think publishers as time goes on will become more tuned to that and stop offering any form of contract that doesn't grant them digital exclusive rights as well.
Looks like traditional publishers are going to end up doing more for self-publishing than anyone else.
Are publishers more useful to fiction authors? There is a great deal of work to be done in turning what the author creates into something the public buy and I suspect it may be qualitatively different for technical manuals and fiction.
Charles Stross (of Laundry Files and Merchant Princes fame) has some excellent words about this on his blog (www.antipope.org, look over at the right sidebar on his blog) where he describes and discusses the significant amount of work done by his publishers.
I lost a lot of respect for Tim O'Reilly over the public spat with Mitch Altman, with regard to Mitch not wishing to participate in a DARPA funded event.
This is a really informative post. Thank you - I'm writing a book called Disruptors - www.DisruptorsBook.com
I am considering self-publishing and trying to decide between Leanpub.com vs Amazon publishing. For Leanpub, it is possible to sell an unfinished transcript which helps. Does anyone have advice when it comes to choosing which online publisher to go with and the best ways to market these online books?
I used CreateSpace (Amazon). I discuss it a bit here: http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/02/decisions-i-made-when-p... I wanted a "regular" book including a printed version--it's effectively supporting material for my day job and I needed a physical, as well as an electronic, version. It was all a bit of a learning process but I'm happy with the result. And Amazon's a good platform to be on.
Leanpub's an interesting-looking concept but I'm not especially sold on the value. Why would someone want to buy an unfinished manuscript? If you want to flesh out some ideas, that's probably better done through discussion forums and blog posts before assembling into a book.
I think this is where oreilly shines: Some of their early releases (and even the published ones) permit the authors to provide the content for free on the web.
I haven't seen other publishers or authors from the other publishers do this.
Manning is certainly producing some very good books (most of their in Action series is good), but I just hate the look and feel and usability of their website.
Absolutely. It's like hiring a tour guide rather than wandering around.
If you wander around, you have absolute freedom to discover anything and you'll almost certainly find things that a tour guide wouldn't show you. However, unless you go in with a comprehensive plan (good luck writing one before you know the topic well!), you'll probably also miss things that the tour guide would definitely cover.
If you hire a guide, you're out some money, but you have someone who knows the topic showing you all of the parts that they feel are important. You have structure and a narrative, which makes it easier to see the big picture. You can still explore on your own - but when you do so you'll have a base to start from and some ideas about where to go.
I've found that I learn best with a mixture of the two. I'll read a couple chapters of a book, then do a small project or write some exploratory code to cement the knowledge. In the course of doing that, I'll usually end up reading docs, StackOverflow answers, blog posts, other people's code on Github and other online resources. When I either finish or hit a wall, I read more and repeat.
Of course, there are bad books that make for awful travel guides. There's no point in having a printed copy of the documentation, or a long-winded book that spends 1,000 pages describing the basic syntax of a straightforward programming language. I think that when people think of tech books, those are the ones that come to mind - gigantic tomes full of reference material for outdated software. It's unfortunate, because there are plenty of really valuable books still being published.
Only if you care about high quality learning materials. Find me any set of online materials that is maybe 1/2 as good as SICP (not including the online edition of the book itself). I mean that seriously.
Of course most tech books now show about as much thought as a series of blog posts, but for quality in-depth learning materials we still aren't at a point where books have been surpassed. And when the day comes that they are, I suspect that the result will look a lot like books, just in the form of a webpage.
If you want to do more than troll the API docs, or read your 25th monad analogy tutorial you really can't beat a high quality book.
> Find me any set of online materials that is maybe 1/2 as good as SICP (not including the online edition of the book itself). I mean that seriously.
To the extent that's your standard, I'm not sure that that says anything about the quality of online vs. print materials. I mean, find any set of print materials that is 1/2 as good as SICP, not including the print version of SICP?
Depending on what you mean for a computer programming's book.
If it about a new language or a new version of a language, I probably won't. But there are books with rich content that is very hard to find on the web.
I find that books help provide structure to your learning. Yes, all of the information is out there, but I need to know that it a) exists and b) what order is optimal for learning.
In this era of wikis, online docs, and the like, I definitely find myself reading very few books on programming. And if I do have a problem, Google is faster than thumbing through a book (even if the book is sitting beside me, and how often does that happen?).
Not sure if you are talking about books in printed form or if you are including ebooks as a form of "online docs".
But there are a lot of books/ebooks that worth having as regular reading or just as reference.
Few examples: The art of computer programming, Effective C++, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, OnLisp, among others.
Yeah, you can find a few of them for free as a digital version, but they were written in a book fashion with the regular editorial process that is lacking in a lot of wikis and on-line docs.
I definitely see space for both if the material is good.
I am glad so many devs think this way. It is nice to take over your clients at insane rates when they get fed up and re-write your projects in a 1/8 of the time and 1/4th the cost.
Please, do not read any solid computer science books. That's right, Google will solve all your problems.
You'd be wrong to assume that people who can successfully read (and comprehend) documentation are going to be the first to Google their way to an answer. Quite the opposite, in my experience.
Computer science? Sure, read CS books. When I want to learn a framework, I've got no use for CS books at that moment. I'll use my experience with the language, and my ability to read docs to learn how to do things. For core concepts, where one is entering uncharted waters, I've found that a book can provide some helpful guidance.
Blog posts and wikis are great for finding a quick fix/example on how to solve a small problem. I find books useful for when I'm learning a new concept from scratch.
You can learn how to program ANY language just by browsing a few online articles. But I feel most of the good literature on learning how to program, period, is in textbook, or at least book, form.
If I'm branching out into a new field or learning a new concept where I have minimal knowledge, I'll often check for a book on the subject. Personally, I'm a fan of the Head First books.
If you would choose self publishing and compare with traditional publisher, The Lean Publishing Manifesto (https://leanpub.com/manifesto) may be a good start.
I'm surprised why no one pointed out why O'Reilly is repeated over and over in the article. I feel that he's appealing more to google web crawlers than to the readers.
Man that is a powerful takeaway for authors.
I'll add a few points:
(1) I learned you can buy your way onto the New York Times best seller list for $50 - 70k.
(2) We saw Tim Ferris A/B test his title for the Four Hour Workweek with astonishing results.
(3) A self-published title became the best selling book (in the UK) since they started measuring.
(4) Amazon sells more digital books than paper books.
Not sure what my point is, other than I am a student of marketing and am enjoying watching how the traditional value of publishers, having channel access, is being massively disrupted.
Refs:
1 - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-h...
2 - http://weijiblog.com/2010/10/64-the-4-hour-workweek-escape-9...
3 - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50...
4 - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html?_...