The 'Adventure' In Self-Publishing an IT Book

An anonymous reader writes "Author Keir Thomas has blogged about his experiences self-publishing a computing book. Quoting: 'I knew that publicizing the book would be difficult so I hit upon an idea: Why not give away the eBook (PDF) version? I could use Amazon S3 for hosting the file, so it would cost me just a few dollars per month. Sure enough, giving the eBook away generated a lot of publicity. ... Since going on sale at the start of 2009, the book has made me $9,000. ... I’ve had worse salaries in my life, and I’m very grateful, but I know total royalties would probably have been higher had I gone through the traditional route of working with a mainstream publisher. I estimate I have to give away 446 copies of the eBook for every sale of the print edition.'"

Re:That wasn't smart.

[LordStormes]

Agreed - Should have given the first 3 chapters free as an Ebook, then charged $5 for the full Ebook or $X for the print version.

Your next book?

[Bilbo]

Here's another angle that's hard to quantify: What happens if you decide to publish another book? The fact that you've distributed all those free copies along side of the pay-for editions means you've got a *LOT* of people who know your name. This fact alone should give your next book a big head-start if you ever decide to publish again, either through a "vanity press" or through a more conventional channel.

My own experience, on the other side

[jfengel]

I published a computing book through a conventional publisher (Addison Wesley), and the amounts of money we made were roughly comparable. It's considerably sub minimum wage, given the years I put into writing it (including months full-time, away from a paying job writing software at a wage substantially higher than minimum.)

Which was, in fact, the point. It wasn't going to make me rich; it was going to make me famous. (You've heard of me and my book Programming for the Java Virtual Machine, right? Right?) I wanted to write a book, so I did. The publisher put it in a lot of bookstores and even translated it into Korean. (I've always wanted to lay my hands on a copy of the Korean translation.) It helped that this was a major Java publisher; my book is shelved next to big-name authors, some of whom were involved in reviewing it. That's a kind of expertise I couldn't have purchased.

At the time, it wasn't really practical to self-publish on the web; the print-on-demand services didn't exist and a real printing run had a high overhead. There's literally something buried in my contract about buying the printing plates once it went out of print, but it's still in print, and they send me a small but welcome check twice year.

My book had a limited target market, and even if I kept 100% of the gross it would still have been less money than I would have made at the job. But it's proving useful as an introduction: I'm now working on a different book in a completely unrelated field and can tell potential interview subjects that I wrote a book when I cold-call them.

They do care: if they're going to take the time to talk with me, they want to know that the book is likely to be published. They'd be even happier if I had a contract, but it's getting me into doors I need so that I can write the submission. Some of them might have turned me down if I told them I was going to self-publish.

That may change. The fame-producing aspects of a major publisher are less and less relevant. The money won't get any better, and may get worse, but if you're in it for the money you really should go back to writing code anyway.