I’ve bought a lot of books. Never bought a blog. I don’t pay $40+ a copy just so I can make sure the author get’s a buck. If you don’t think its worth $10, why should I waste my time reading it? As a professional, I should save that much time/money in Google searches alone.
This has nothing to do with whether technical paper books are still viable (although for non-references, I still prefer something I can browse at bed-time), but if you putting out a printed book, the publishers earn their keep.
I want most of that money to go to the author, not the publishing middlemen.
I have to say, this statement rankles me. The “middleman” is the one responsible for editing, typesetting, covers, cover quotes, publicity, selling into bookstores, accounting, printing, legal, distribution, and, of course, returns. More to the point, the author fronts his time, it’s the publisher that fronts the 20-50K to actually get the book out the door and into hands of buyers that is taking the real risk. As a lover of books, you slight the people who make actual books possible.
Can I say yes, yes and yes about 900,000 times. I have written a number of massive books over the years including various Complete Reference books on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, chapters for some O’Reilly books, etc and find much of what you say is sadly too true. The industry as it stands is not fair to the authors in too many cases. Even for those that do well they do well there are downsides sometimes at the expense of other content creators or even their readers with copied or rushed work! To see Resig getting $ smashed is terribly sad. I certainly never did that poorly, but your sentiment and thesis is absolutely correct - the pay is not commensurate to effort at all.
However, despite the economic flaws there is some value to print that has to do with the permanence factor. Long form works are important and need to continue in some medium. That form forces a certain rigor and sustained thought missing from many shorter efforts (not so much yours which is why I love each post). Print publishers with their gamble of paper was quite useful for a long time. One publisher described the book process as “…a loan of production and promotion of your ideas.” Given that view they needed to vet the author, the work, etc. to reduce risk and this often helped improve content quality greatly.
Unfortunately the speed of informational change, trying to be like the Web in paper, and simple economics have ended much of that. Today we are still transitioning between eras. The Web / ePub world simply lacks some of those useful controls of older print efforts, but I believe they will come eventually.
The future is still a bit murky on this topic of content, consumption and compensation. There are plenty of people within information publishing from newspapers to academic journals struggling with this. Tech book authors are just one part of a larger challenge to compensate and respect the toils of content experts for all their hard efforts with at least beer money!
Signing off with a simple thanks for your well considered thoughts in this post and many others. They are always welcome food for my brain!
@Tom West: by and large, “publishers” don’t do any of those things. They hire them done. No major publisher does its own printing, as far as I know. Cover art (and sometimes even editing) is contracted out. Distribution is irrelevant for ebooks. You can upload a book to the Kindle store, the Nook store, and the iBookstore in 15 minutes.
WRT author advances, that’s always struck me as being akin to a super-skeevy payday loan scheme – one that demands the bulk of your paycheck in perpetuity.
It sounds like writing a book didn’t work for you. But if you were to write the book yourself and sell it yourself to the people who know want it, then the story would be different.
Personally, I’ve sold a few hundred copies of Clean Ruby and I’m still working on it. I have no middleman aside from getdpd.com and that’s just for the download service.
Hyperink approached you about this, but how much will you make? Couldn’t you have done this yourself and had all the profits of your writing hit your own pocket?
How good is your Spanish? Check this project out: http://editorialorsai.com/ Orsai, sin nadie en el medio (Orsai, no one in the middle - no intermediates).
A great project aimed to connect both ends of the same string, producers and consumers. This case is about literature but I think could be easily ported to any other field depending only on the size of it’s community.
Lulu.com currently gives another way for authors to publish their work, but is not quite the solution.
Couldn’t agree more. I wrote a book and people seem amazed by it. I tell them all the time, the thing I learned from writing a book is “writing a book sucks.”
Awesome Post.
Bought your book!
I recently finished a book on Fiddler (http://fiddlerbook.com); I ended up starting it years later that I might have but for your 2007 post “Don’t buy this book.” Sales have been slow but steady, and while it took 9 months of work, I’m glad I did it. A few “pluses” to book-writing:
First, it’s something parents and other folks (your “clueless and irrelevant” category?) can tangibly hold and appreciate. It’s probably the only way my grandmother will ever have any idea what the heck a “Fiddler Web Debugger” is and why someone might use one.
Second, it’s tangible. Many people have contributed to Fiddler over the years, and I can inscribe a paperback copy and send it to them as a “Thank you.” The fact that many of my recipients already bought the ebook is nice, but so far they’ve all been happy to get the inscribed “Dead Trees” version.
Third, writing a book makes you think very very hard about what you’re writing about, and with a different mindset. The Fiddler book took quite a bit longer to write because I made hundreds of improvements to Fiddler while I was writing the book, because I was writing the book. Every time I thought of something interesting to explain, I began to explain it, then realized that whatever it was shouldn’t have been so complicated in the first place, and I’d go fix Fiddler itself to avoid the problem. In other cases, explicitly writing out everything you can do with Fiddler made me recognize some important (and in hindsight, obvious) gaps, and go implement those features.
Fourth, I got to choose what to write about. Fiddler is insanely powerful, but after watching people “in the field” use it, it was plain that most of its functionality is completely unknown to the vast majority of users. While some users watch the videos and read the blog posts, it was clear that there are some number of folks for which a complete book with an end-to-end explanation of the tool is the best way to learn it.
Fifth, it gives you an appreciation for other authors that you may never get otherwise. Marathon runners probably have more respect for other marathon runners than the general public ever will, simply because they know how grueling it is to run 26.2 in a way that someone who hasn’t never will. I think the same is probably true for book-writers.
From the financial point-of-view, it’s true that authoring it wasn’t a great use of my time. Having read a bunch of posts like yours and Resig’s, I realized that going the traditional publisher route was a bad deal for both the reader and for me-- the Fiddler book would have been ~$30 and I’d see maybe two or three of that. Instead, I self-published on CreateSpace.com and Lulu.com. It’s a better deal for the reader (the paperback is $18 and the ebook is $10) and it’s a better deal for me (I get about $6 and $8 respectively). While a traditional publisher would have probably netted me an advance of a few thousand bucks (perhaps more than I’ll make) I frankly prefer the “honesty” of being solely responsible for my book’s sales, and the often happy feeling I get when I (obsessively?) check sales stats and found that I sold a handful more copies overnight.
@Tony Hursh: by and large, “publishers” don’t do any of those things. They hire them done. What’s the difference? Either they’re doing it in-house or they’re contracting out, and managing to ensure it’s done right. Either way, it’s paying out.
A paper book is an investment of perhaps $20+K on the part of the publisher with very little guarantee that it will pay out. Jeff’s book cost him time with very little return, as is typical for most books. Think about how he’d feel if he’d been the publisher and lost $20-40K…
Now, the mechanics for e-books are quite different. There, the problem is that if you aren’t already “famous” (for whatever value of famous is relevant to your book), you’re probably looking at double digit sales of your e-book for presumably more work (writing the book as you would for the paper version + management) plus whatever it cost you for cover design, line editing, copy-editing, etc.
Distribution is irrelevant for ebooks. You can upload a book to the Kindle store, the Nook store, and the iBookstore in 15 minutes.
Gaah. I hope it’s taking you 5-10 times longer and you’re ensuring that each type of download works on a variety of platforms. Speaking from personal experience, if you don’t buy your own book from each platform and try it on both Mac & PC & tablets, you’re risking a horrible experience for your customers.
On behalf of e-book readers, please consider some level of professionalism. If your book isn’t worth you spending a few thousand dollars of your time (and perhaps money), why inflict it on the rest of us?
WRT author advances, that’s always struck me as being akin to a super-skeevy payday loan scheme – one that demands the bulk of your paycheck in perpetuity.
BIG difference. If your book doesn’t pay out, you’re not on the hook for the rest of the advance. A publishing deal is a co-investment. The publisher is investing the thousands and you are investing your time. In this world, money is worth a lot more than time.
Given that publishers aren’t making money hand over fist, I’d say that it likely that the balance is roughly right. (And yes, there are terrible publishers who do rip off authors. There are also authors who take the advance, but never produce a book. Neither define the industry.)
The best technical e-books are the ones that release corrections (updates) to the buyer for free. Unfortunately not many do that, but the ones that do have my loyalty and my money. Who wants to refer to an errata page? Not me.
Jeff you have my money. The format, content, and price of your book are just right. The only way it could be better is if HyperLink books would download directly to my Kindle instead of making me take extra manual steps to get it there. They should offer that option for all their .mobi books (and no, the books don’t have to be sold through Amazon).
yes very true, it will be good if all the purchase money goes authors rather than publishers and middle men
I don’t think any new author should “keep score” by the money he or she makes from writing. You don’t make money from blogging either, so why do it? You do it for the fame, of course. I’m not talking about the ego rush you get when you realize that people are reading your stuff. If it’s money you’re after, then you do it to become known far and wide as “an expert” and to position yourself at or near the center of your chosen field. That’s where the money comes into the equation. You write because you enjoy it and you want to gain credibility. The more people who think you’re someone who knows something, the more you’ll be invited to give talks, and the more jobs you’ll be offered, because some clients prefer to send contracts only to the best in the business, and that usually means someone who writes about what they know. Napoleon once said, “Glory may be fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”
The science fiction writer Cory Doctorow has some interesting things to say about writing for money, copyright, DRM and the shift of paper books to e-books were going through in this decade in his collection of essays (the old word for blog) called “Content.” You can get it free in just about every e-book format in existence, and boy, will it make you think! You can get it at Doctorow’s website URL: http://craphound.com/content/download/.
Dude - you’re cool. Congratulations! Please take care of my boy, Jarrod.
Selecting some best posts and organizing them in chapters/sections and preparing a PDF out of them does worth $3 or even more. That’s why I bought a copy. And I’ve read some really nice post that most probably I wouldn’t encounter on the web site, since I’m a new follower of your blog. However I didn’t like the PDF quality. Also the quoted passages which are in gray background on the blog are not even between double-quotes in the PDF. Since it is just copying and pasting, they could do a better job.
I just bought your book and it’s pretty good. It starts with some cliches but becomes increasingly interesting. Thanks, it’s a good read.
Nice to see you made a post about this, along with linking your previous “Books: Bits vs. Atoms” post.
The other week I had sent you a tweet asking you if you had any plans on selling your book in print in which you responded “not that I know of”. I completely understand your reasoning for doing so. I love seeing content creators make the most from their work. Many forms of media (music, video, etc) are going through a transition where the middle man is starting to be cut out and creators are able to directly interact with the users, which is fantastic.
I spend hours on the computer everyday doing work, games, everything but reading. For some reason I can’t sit and stare at my screen to read a book. I don’t have a Kindle/iPad or anything similar (although I’m tempted more and more to buy one). Sometimes I just prefer the physical copy.
Others have suggestions printing the book. Maybe do a limited number of prints? I don’t have any experience so I can’t say how much profit you would make, if any.
Anyway, congratulations and good luck with your upcoming book.
I subscribe to O’reilly’s Safari books online, and can read [Pro Javascript Techniques] from there. How does royalty factor in for John Resig this way?
Great initiative! I just bought a copy.
I want most of that money to go to the author, not the publishing middlemen.
This is exactly what Amazon does through its Kindle Direct Publishing platform. You may want to check this out kdp.amazon.com.
They claim to pay as much as 70% Royalty.
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