In short, publishing houses serve no necessary function in modern technical publishing.
...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution. There's also the risk mitigation that happens when you get an advance that you can't deal with yourself.
There's a world of difference between "publishing on the Internet" and "publishing in the age of the Internet".
Not vouching for him, but Aaron Shepard, a children's author, maintains you can self-publish efficiently and profitably these days.
"In fact, by aiming at Amazon, I was able to sell close to 30% the number of copies sold by one of those nationally-distributed competitors including its bookstore sales. And because the profit from my publishing system is so high -- generally half or more of the cover price -- I was earning about twice as much in total as that author would make with a normal royalty."[0]
He has a site on the subject[1], which looks like it was designed by me (it wasn't - I don't know him).
The problem is that he is biased. He is selling books explaining how to self publish on Amazon. So it is better for him to say that you will earn more money doing so.
Fair point. One more thing while I remember. He recommends a firm called Lightning Source[0]. I got the impression (when I read his book a few months ago) that they weren't too keen on dealing with small scale stuff, but just looking there now it seems they have another brand or a partner called Ingram Spark for dealing with independents. Might be useful for someone here, maybe.
This is pretty well known now in the publishing world. There are a large number of authors in genre fiction making a living self-publishing, and many more that do some mix of traditional and self-publishing.
You don't really need this guy's book though, there's plenty of information out there on how to do it (KBoards' Writers Cafe is a good place to start).
> ...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution.
Most of which you don't care about, unless you have to edit, typeset, review, market, format 100s of books. They are one time costs and with the internet they are becoming very cheap already.
The important number is copies_sold * my_income_per_copy. Publishers might raise one of the number 2-5x but lower the other to 1/10. Cost of editing is a very small factor.
Most of which you don't care about, unless you have to edit, typeset, review, market, format 100s of books. They are one time costs and with the internet they are becoming very cheap already.
Maybe you didn't mean it the way it sounds, but I think any author cares about what their reader gets, and if I buy something I certainly care about its quality. I know for a fact that no matter how much effort I put into writing a book, there are always things that can be improved because I missed something I didn't know, or didn't know about a particular design or grammatical principle, or simply made a mistake. More eyeballs make a better product, and eyeballs cost money.
Breaking it down: Let's say I write a 1200 page technical book. Roughly speaking, services charge on a pages-per-day rate. Sake of argument, let's guess 250 pages per day for proofreading, 100 per day for graphical layout and enhancement, 150 per day for technical review. That's roughly 20 days, for which we could elance out separately for $100 per day. That's $2000. Up front.
...which brings me to my next point.
The important number is copies_sold X my_income_per_copy. Publishers might raise one of the number 2-5x but lower the other to 1/10.
I'm guessing you're estimating with these values (which is OK, because I'm estimating too). However, a quick look at Amazon and other online bookstores shows that ebooks tend to sell for a fraction of the price of paper books. $1.21 seems to be a common price point, and even for more expensive books (for which there is already a large demand) the price point seems to be about half that of a paper book.
Continuing our assumptions, let's say a published book sells 10,000 copies. Assuming the self-published book is 50% as popular as an equivalent published book (your most generous estimate) and therefore sells 5,000 copies, it still looks like 90% of a smaller price (let's say $1.21, so a total of $5,445 from 90% of 5000 * $1.21) works out at less than 10% of the larger value (assuming the parent post's assumption of $1 per copy, so 10,000 * $1). All handwavy values based on various people's assumptions of popularity, but useful for a starting point.
Now, back to the one time costs: When compared to my $5,445, that $2,000 sounds really bad now, doesn't it?
As someone writing a book, I can tell you I care a lot about the quality of the finished product but it takes far too much time to not care about the financial return as well. (I'm literally breaking off from proof reading to write this comment.)
The up front costs are negligible for most programmers in the Western world. $2K is a few days work for a contractor. If you've gone through University, as most of us have, you'll have been drilled in the rules of writing and probably know people who excel at the written word. In my case my colleagues are assisting with the proof reading. Not everyone has the cash, connections, or training for sure, but most of us do.
Finally the sales model should be very different for a self published technical book. Best practice is to offer bundles, like the Rails Tutorial does, which fall under the "don't give a shit" threshold for individuals and companies. See: https://www.railstutorial.org/ Your average income per sale should be more like $100 than $1.20.
> However, a quick look at Amazon and other online bookstores shows that ebooks tend to sell for a fraction of the price of paper books. $1.21 seems to be a common price point, and even for more expensive books (for which there is already a large demand) the price point seems to be about half that of a paper book.
eBook pricing is very different between fiction and technical non-fiction. The former (due to, I think, a large supply) has had prices driven down to a couple of bucks for all but big-name authors. The latter, since the supply is lower and readers can see tangible financial value from reading it, is much higher and not that different from print pricing.
My programming book is $25 in eBook form, and I priced it competitively with other game programming eBooks. If it was a novel, I'd have to do something much lower.
From a quick search, Higher Order Perl actually costs more on kindle than on paperback. But you are right, I am sure we could tweak those numbers either way.
> ...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution.
I don't think there is much economy of scale in many of those. Publishers that have "house styles" can reuse a lot of layout to speed that up, sure. But editing, type-setting, technical review, etc. is just page-by-page grunt work. I'm not sure having a full-time staff for those is much more efficient than freelancers.
As someone who once tech-reviewed a Microsoft Press book, I don't see how there's any economy of scale there. They just hired me as a freelancer, after seeing a post I made on a forum.
...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution. There's also the risk mitigation that happens when you get an advance that you can't deal with yourself.
There's a world of difference between "publishing on the Internet" and "publishing in the age of the Internet".