
Coding Horror: The Book - bussetta
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/coding-horror-the-book.html
======
nicholassmith
I think the whole publishing middlemen part was discussed, at length, by
Charles Stross on his blog and shined a light on what's essentially a hidden
part of the industry. I can't find it but some Google-Fu might get you there.

What I disagree with is where he says: "almost all the profits go directly to
the author. I'm not optimistic this will happen any time soon.", which is
interesting. Technically there's a few authors who've been self-made, self-
published successes through the Kindle store. You lose a percentage to Amazon
so can we class them as a publisher? You could chose to sell an ebook directly
to your audience as a few people have tried (and have been successful, there's
been a few posted on here I've ended up buying very happily).

Publishers at the moment are a necessary evil. Traditionally they publish your
work, handle the distribution and all the stuff that's basically not the
writer sitting their ass down and writing. Digitally they seem to have filled
a similar role of providing a digital shelf space, dealing with payments,
hosting and so on. Until it becomes completely trivially to write it, host it,
charge it and deliver it they'll be needed.

~~~
grey-area
_Publishers at the moment are a necessary evil. Traditionally they publish
your work, handle the distribution and all the stuff that's basically not the
writer sitting their ass down and writing._

You've missed a few vital parts of the publishers' role here with your
handwave about 'all the stuff that's basically not...writing':

Publishers (the good ones at least) provide editorial support, illustrations,
research, design (cover and insides), pr and all the other bits that go into
producing a published book (ebook or printed, there isn't actually a huge
difference in effort). A book without this is often not a very satisfactory
affair. Much as music publishers provide an umbrella under which various
services like recording, mixing, production, pr etc are provided which are
essential for most musicians to produce their work.

A book at manuscript stage is often inchoate and rough at the edges, and the
role of the editor can be critical in suggesting changes or cuts and guiding
the author. This is esp. true of non-fiction, but also true of fiction. Just
like shopkeepers, publishers are a profession which will probably always
exist, as there is a gap between the raw materials and what the public likes
to consume, they're not a necessary evil, they're just an intermediary, which
is sometimes a useful thing to have.

The publishers have of course taken advantage of the dominance they have over
these services to try to wring every last bit of profit out of writers and
leave them with the minimum of money for their efforts, and a correction is
IMHO due, but there may always be publishers who seek to promote, nurture and
improve writers, just as there will probably always be musical
publishers/patrons who pay for the ancillary services up-front which musicians
can't afford/are not skilled in, but which are essential for producing quality
music. That doesn't mean musicians or writers should not have more control and
be more fairly recompensed, but there is more to writing and music than is
dreamt of in your philosophy.

Before publishing we had the system of patronage, which served a similar
function for artists/writers/thinkers but introduced other distortions
(influencing what could and could not be written for example), I'm not
convinced that was better, but the current system will certainly be disrupted
by the web as Atwood implies.

~~~
fogus
I've written a book and explored the landscape for writing another, so let me
offer my experience with each of your points (out of order). This is anecdote,
so all caveats apply:

# illustrations

My co-author and me were 100% responsible for all illustrations. I've heard
tales of publishers dedicating in-house talent to helping with illustrations,
but I do not know how widespread this is.

# research

My publisher was not involved in research whatsoever. I'm not even sure how
they could have helped had they wanted to.

# design (cover and insides)

My publisher was indeed responsible for this, but it was up to my co-author
and me to decide what class of element each section should contain. As far as
I understand most publishers have a house style that the authors have very
little (if any) say in.

# pr

This is a huge question mark. There were time when I felt like knocking my
head against a wall trying to figure the PR strategy (to misuse the term). I
expect some publishers are better than others, but from what I can tell the PR
for for programming books is limited to: some website, occasional discount
codes, a table at a conference here and there and hooking up interviews with
authors on certain websites. As far as I can tell, the weight of a publisher's
name is valuable as marketing also, but that seems a bit complacent to me. Any
other PR strategies that I've missed?

# and all the other bits that go into producing a published book

I don't know what this means, but I suspect it has something to do with
distribution channels.

# provide editorial support

THIS. If I ever write another book the availability of quality editorial
support is the deciding factor in my preference for choosing a publisher. The
editorial process was the most positive experience in the otherwise arduous
book writing process. I understand you can hire third-parties but in going
with a publisher they have an editorial staff that can rotate if you find your
chosen editor unsatisfactory.

~~~
grey-area
I notice you've inverted my order :) I too would put editorial support as top
of the list of things a writer would miss nowadays in bypassing a publisher
(though of course some books also require a lot of design input). There's an
interesting gap there perhaps for publishers to simply supply editorial
expertise, or writers to team up with editors and produce books independently
- though this tends to result in the formation of a small publishing house,
with associated costs.

The other points will vary depending on the publisher and the author of
course, and some areas (like design and pr) which might seem unimportant,
trivial or simply unnecessary to the author might be vital for a successful
book. Re PR for example, this encompasses getting reviews in major trade
publications/newspapers, getting radio interviews, getting web coverage etc
etc, but that'll vary depending on the subject matter - for some books
obviously it'd be minimal, so in your experience it might amount to very
little added value. Re research, depending on the topic, sometimes editors
will do a lot of the work and pull in writers to write specific parts of a
non-fiction book - hard to believe if you're a committed, involved author I
know. Re design, depending on the book this might be more or less involved -
for some books it'll be a simple template where text takes precedence
(fiction, programming), for others each page is unique and the illustrations
are as important as the text (a children's maths textbook for example).

Other bits was just a catch-all for all the other admin which goes on in
publishing a title - buying the ISBN, typesetting, proofreading etc, along
with distribution etc, though frankly I think distribution is the least
important part of the puzzle, and for many books there simply won't be a dead
tree version soon. I suppose my main point was that publishing encompasses far
more than the layperson usually considers, and costs are not solely or even
mainly associated with printing hard copy books.

So publishers will change with the coming of the internet, perhaps becoming
less important, but I suspect they will always be around.

------
fredoliveira
Jeff's points ring close to home. Last year I wrote O'Reilly's Redis Cookbook.
Even though I love the guys at O'Reilly (I really do, these folks are amazing
at what they do), writing a book provides little direct return. It's a great
experience, and I wouldn't say I regret it, but it is far less glamorous than
what it might seem at a first glance.

There's a comment in this thread that talks about publishers as VCs - which is
a correct assessment. Some books do well, some don't. These days, technical
books are often part of the latter group, as the amount of information out
there renders the vast majority of these books useless.

Would I write another book? Sure. In fact, I'm writing the second edition of
Redis Cookbook now. However, my expectations are not high. I don't expect to
make a ton of money with it. I just want the people who buy the book to be
happy with the content, and to contribute to the documentation on Redis. If I
make a bit of cash doing so, perfect.

~~~
haraball
I often postpone buying technical books because I know they will too soon be
dated. Since you're an author and on the other side of the table, what are
your thoughts on offering those who bought the first edition the second book
at a good price? Or to sell the book with some sort of subscription, where
later editions are available for the subscribers?

~~~
fredoliveira
I agree with that completely. I'd love to see it happen. It's the only way it
makes sense for technical books to remain relevant.

------
simonsarris
> Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don't expect
> much.

I think that's good advice.

I'm writing my first book, right now, at 24, on HTML5. (any advice or other
articles like this by the way are vastly appreciated) My advance is larger
than Resig's (!? what?) but I'm not doing it for the money. Money merely
justifies a deadline, not the end product. The end product, to me, is
justified by two things:

1\. Seeing my name "in the wild", in a bookstore, would make me pleased as
punch

2\. If just one person, somewhere, at some point, sends me an email saying
they enjoyed the book then that's enough. That's the only encouragement I need
to help others (for free) on StackOverflow [1], and its the only thing I need
here.

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png>

~~~
huggyface
The #1 justification for authoring any sort of technical tome – and this has
been the case for decades – is that it gains you credibility and respect in a
field. If you want to consult, or are looking for senior positions, etc, get a
book with your name on it out there and you have a foot and a half in the
door. At least with many who are suckers and are looking for short-cut
filtering, which I say because the vast majority of technical books are
_terrible_.

~~~
jseliger
On the other hand, essays like Philip Greenspun's "The Book Behind the Book"
make book publishing seem _less_ prestigious, rather than more (at least in
many instances): <http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html> , but
then he also points out that a lot of the problems come from publishing models
more than the authors themselves.

------
mmcnickle
The problem with the move to ebooks for technical subjects will be the lack of
editorial oversight.

Tutorials, blog posts and a smattering of example code is fine for messing
about with some new technology. But where are the authoritative sources.
Looking at my bookshelf now, where are the websites that contain all the
information I got from (the excellent) "Mastering Regular Expressions" or
"CSS: The Definitive Guide" which sits nicely between the CSS spec and
actually being readable.

These books still need to be written, in the same format, by the same experts
because they contain a lot of value. I agree though that they don't need to be
physical books -- all my new O'Reilly books I read in PDF format.

(Realise there's a lot of O'Reilly naming here, it's only because I really
like the quality of their books. I'm not affiliated with them.)

------
prawn
I contributed a few chapters to a technical book about 10 years ago and hadn't
really thought about whether I regretted having done it until I read this
post. It was definitely a serious pain in the butt but how many of those
trials shape who you are?

Pros:

    
    
      - being abroad in a bookshop and finding 'my' book on the shelf
      - sneaking in a picture of my cat (colour scheme example...)
      - writing a silly bio
    

Cons:

    
    
      - the deadlines
      - near mental breakdown; felt like my brain was melting
      - after the initial writing, the edits arrive
      - shoddy advance
      - no hope of royalties with a book that was quickly dated

------
mikeash
A couple of years ago, I was solicited to write for a traditional publisher. I
contributed a chapter to one book and got partway through writing another
before I realized that everything related to traditional publishers was awful
and jumped ship. I spent a good part of the next year struggling to get paid
for my work according to the contract we had signed, and it _still_ pops up
and irritates me from time to time to this day. (For example, the time when
they accidentally overstated my royalty income to the IRS by a factor of 4 was
really entertaining.)

Later on, I self-published a collection of my blog posts. The experience was
the complete opposite. It was fun, the finished product was much better
(technical publishers, oddly, appear to have approximately no idea how to
create good technical content), and people seem to appreciate it more. I made
as much money, if not more, than I would have selling through a traditional
publisher. Although volume is considerably lower, my share of the proceeds is
_vastly_ higher.

I plan to begin a second self-published book (another collection of more
recent blog posts) soon. I will only consider working with a traditional
publisher again if the only alternative is begging on the streets, and even
then I'll have to take a long while to think about which to choose.

------
spatten
This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve at Leanpub.

1) We pay 90% royalty, not 10% (with a flat fee of $0.50 per purchase)

2) We think you should start selling your book before it's done, so that you
can find out if you have a market for it, and so that you get feedback from
your readers as you are writing.

3) Once someone buys your book on Leanpub, they get updates to the book for
free. This is great for technical books, as you can keep your book up to date
when technology changes.

4) You own your book. You are free to get a publishing deal with a "real"
publisher once the book is done (if you can stomach the hit to your
royalties). Imagine going to a publisher and being able to say: the book is
done. I have sold 2000 copies on Leanpub, and have tons of great feedback.
Here is the manuscript. Oh, and right now I make 90% on every sale. I bet that
gets you a better royalty rate than approaching a publisher with just an idea.
We all know how much those are worth :).

5) We think our workflow is the least painful way to write a book right now,
and it's getting better every day. You write in Markdown in a text editor,
save to a Dropbox folder, and hit the publish button on Leanpub.

~~~
stevejalim
I'm a former journalist and have rejected a traditional-publisher book advance
in the past (£2k for something that'll take me 6 months to write? No thanks!).

Not wishing to sound like a fanboy, but I'm _really_ loving the Leanpub
experience, even though I'm waiting till I'm mostly finished before publishing
v 0.9 of my book [1]. (It isn't the same one for which I was offered and
advance; this one took a about 6 months of a few evenings a week.)

The ability to push updates, etc, does really make a big psychological
difference to me as an engineer-meets-author - I'm creating something which I
plan to evolve/do point releases on, based on user feedback. It's a little
like Agile meets publishing, I guess.

[1] <shameless> <http://leanpub.com/freelancedeveloperbook> </shameless>

------
cfn
Publishers are a bit like VCs. They invest in a number of different books
hoping that one will become a bestseller. All the other ones are either
complete failures or midlisters (books which are not bestsellers but are
strong enough to economically justify their publication).

If you have a bestseller under your belt I guess a publisher makes sense
because you would presumably have earned enough money to let other do the
boring jobs for you. On the other hand, if you don't break out of the midlist,
it may make sense to remove the middle man and go for it alone if you want to
write for a living. All the services provided by publishers can be contracted
out, specially if you go the ebook way.

Finally, I am not a writer but I helped publish several books. Here is a link
to someone with a lot of experience and numbers to back it up:

<http://jakonrath.blogspot.co.uk/>

------
sgaither
Surprised no one's mentioned Zed Shaw or his Learn Python the Hard Way
series...

<http://learncodethehardway.org/>

According to his homepage, his books have been downloaded 500,000 times. Don't
know if those are all paying charges but he also sells online tutorials.

------
taytus
The first 40 chapters are Jeff raging against PHP.

------
hexis
> Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don't expect
> much.

This applies to life in general, as well.

------
nerdfiles
Shouldn't books have github/bitbucket/etc repositories? With readme documents,
etc? Hook ups to PivotalTracker with commits published to the github page or
marketing site, or pushed to Twitter via IFTTT?

