
So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book? - there
http://www.keirthomas.com/Keir_Thomas_professional_website/Blog/Entries/2011/3/18_So_youre_thinking_of_self-publishing_an_I.T._book.html
======
spatten
My cofounder at Leanpub wrote up his experience publishing "Flexible Rails"
here: <http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=266>

Here's the tl;dr: * Peter made $48k from Flexible Rails. * $34k of that was
from sales of the PDF.

I'm biased, but it seems to me that giving away the PDF (where you make close
to 100% profit) to sell a paper book (where you make much less -- The 40%
profit from the article is by far the highest I've ever seen) is crazy.

If you have an audience and a good book, you should be able to do well on an
e-book. Keir Thomas in the article has both, but he gave away 500 000 copies
of his ebook and only made $9k on the paper book. Yikes! He could've sold the
book for 2$ a pop and got 1% of the downloads and still made the more.

Keir is right that you have to give away something for free. So, give away a
good chunk of the book (say, 1/3 or so) as a PDF and sell the full thing.

Or, give away the whole book for free as HTML and sell the PDF. That's what
Eric Ries <http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned> and Nivi and Naval from
Venture Hacks are doing (<http://leanpub.com/venturehacks>) and they're doing
quite well.

Really, I don't meant to be too hard on Keir. It was a good post, with
interesting data. I think he has shown that giving away the e-book and selling
the print book is not necessarily the way to go.

I'd love to see a lot more experiments and write-ups about this. I truly
believe that authors can and will soon be able to make good money self
publishing technical e-books.

------
jeremymcanally
I've had a similar experience with <http://hlrb.org>. Sales flagged until I
gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better
than they were.

I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote
the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but
most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12.
It sold well, but as sales began to slope off, I ran a $6 sale for some time
(stated as a celebration of Rails 3 stable I think and then just continued on
just because), and wouldn't you know, sales soared for a while. I plan on
implementing a pricing structure similar to what he's done here once Rails 3.1
hits next month; we'll see what that experiment yields.

My eBook on writing eBooks (<http://authoringebooks.com>) hasn't sold well by
most mainstream standards, and I can almost guarantee the $49 price tag is
partially to blame. Unfortunately, it'd be really problematic to have a print
edition of a book on writing eBooks, so I'm just going to have to figure out a
better way to market it. :)

Maybe one day soon people will be willing to pay more for eBooks, but at this
point I can't blame them. You don't get a tangible good that you can give
specific value to. With current rights scehemes, if you delete the file on
accident or something, it's possible that you're hosed for good. The medium in
general still isn't a solved problem, but maybe one day soon it will be...

~~~
silentbicycle
As a data point: I'm reluctant to pay too much for ebooks, because _they have
no resale value_. There are plenty of print books that I've happily spent
$30-100 for, because I know that I can resell them for most of the cost
(typically $5 less, at most) if I don't consider them worth keeping. Arguably,
this makes their effective cost more like $5-10, give or take - mostly
shipping. I'm quite willing to pay more for books that are worthwhile, but
it's hard to tell upfront. I really like the MEAP subscription model of, "free
trial chapter(s), subscribe and get further chapters as they're written, get
the book when it's done". Plus, it works even better for serial fiction.

Also: I have a kindle, and I use the hell out of it (citeseer!); I'm in no way
opposed to ebooks. Just, pricing them is tricky. I've bought several. I also
worked in a library for several years. Make what of that you will.

~~~
bemmu
I actually consider physical books to have negative resale value. I recently
moved to Japan so I wanted to get rid of all my heavy belongings. I listed all
my books on an auction site and on bookmooch. All in all I ended up spending
hours thinking about those books, mailing them, meeting people who came to
pick them up etc. and all for some insignificant sum compared to the time
spent. It would have been cheaper to throw them in the trash, but being a
physical thing potentially useful for someone, I didn't have the heart to do
that.

~~~
gte910h
I had a philosophy professor who advocated leaving books of any quality about
where people could find (and ostensibly keep them).

He'd leave books around GT Campus apparently when done with them.

------
kjksf
I think that giving the PDF for free was a mistake.

I would sell the PDF for the same price as print (or slightly cheaper) and try
2 other ways for generating publicity/traffic.

1\. Serialize the book as blog post i.e. post each self-contained part as
spaced blog posts, with a link to buy the whole PDF at the end of each post.

2\. Publish the whole book as html, but at any given time only part of the
book would be available. I would (automagically) change which part e.g. every
week.

Both those tactics are meant to drive search traffic, give away some of the
value of the book but not all of it, so that people have a reason to buy the
whole thing, either as PDF or as paper version.

~~~
eustatius
I suppose if he were to sell the PDF, it would automatically turn his
"encourag[ing] redistribut[ing] the PDF, including via BitTorrent" into
piracy. If you see piracy as a necessary evil, you might grumble at that; if,
like Minecraft's creator, you see piracy as a nullity:

[http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-
sa...](http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-says-
minecraft-creator)

and say "there's no such thing as a lost sale", then you might not care in the
slightest. But the nature of the ecosystem surrounding your book will
inevitably change: as someone said elsewhere in this thread, you can't loan an
eBook; a solution to that would be sending someone the PDF, but you've just
turned them into a pirate.

There's no easy solution. Upselling blogposts might be a better idea; even
then, it would be good to have figures.

An even more radical alternative would have been Mark Pilgrim's approach to
Dive Into Python. You could give your book a Creative Commons licence and
_expect_ people to copy and remix it:

<http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point>

but then Pilgrim admits he's not in it for the money, so in the absence of
reliable financials: who knows?

~~~
chc
If you publish on Kindle or Nook, you actually _can_ loan an ebook. Both
platforms allow for lending.

------
atgm
I'm currently trying to self-publish my (non-IT) ebook on Amazon, Lulu, and
Barnes & Noble through www.branchrock.com.

Here's my impression:

1\. Lulu is the easiest to work with. They accept the widest variety of files,
don't require any special formatting, allow you to choose your price and
discounts, and most importantly, update changes almost instantly. The only
down side to using Lulu is that they don't have the same mindspace as Amazon
or Barnes & Noble.

2\. Amazon is the next-best. They'll accept .doc files and convert them for
you, which means it's extremely easy to just write and upload. Their
conversion is also very accurate; I didn't have to fuss with the file once I
read the guidelines. On the down side, they take forever to update, so you
need to check your information and read your entire book in the little preview
window to make sure everything is perfect before you submit, otherwise you'll
be waiting another 24-36 hours before you can submit a change that won't go in
for ANOTHER 24-36 hours. They also don't allow you to download a copy of your
own ebook to verify locally or on a Kindle before it goes live.

3\. Barnes & Noble is the worst of the three, in my experience. They operate
the same way as Amazon, but with some caveats. The first is that their
conversion is nowhere near as good as Amazon's; I ended up copying all of the
text out of my book and manually formatting it using CSS and HTML tags to get
a book that looked the way it was supposed to, with images, line breaks,
indentation, and text alignment. The second is that they, like Amazon, take a
long time to update your listing. On the up side, however, they do let you
download a copy of your ebook so you can look at it locally or on your Nook.

That having been said, how have sales worked out for me?

Over 60% of my sales so far have gone to Amazon. I attribute that to both the
name (Amazon is a trustworthy brand) and also to the popularity of the Kindle.
The remaining 40% have gone to the PDF version on Lulu. Both versions are DRM-
free and the PDF version is slightly more expensive than the Amazon version
($1.53 compared to $0.99).

If you look at the site I'm using to advertise (www.branchrock.com), the
Amazon button comes first, followed by the B&N button, then the Lulu button,
which is simply labeled "PDF" to bypass any PC/Mac confusion. Perhaps the
positioning of the Amazon button has also contributed to the number of sales
from there.

I don't, unfortunately, have any statistics on how many people are reading on
a Kindle vs computer.

I hope this helps other people who are looking into publishing ebooks
themselves.

~~~
gjm11
60% of your sales by number, or by revenue? (60:40 * 0.99:1.53 is pretty much
1:1. But maybe the fraction of that money that you actually get is difference
in the two cases.)

~~~
atgm
By number.

------
jordanb
It's worth observing that the title he published was one that was _turned
down_ by all the publishers as being commercially nonviable.

It'd be interesting to see what the outcome would be if he repeated the
experiment with a title they were dying to publish. That would help determine
if they're worth the huge percentage they take because they're good at
promotion, or if all they're doing is detecting titles that will sell well on
their own.

------
mkramlich
He climbed a bit steeper hill than he would have had to climb otherwise
because he chose to create something that has lots of free acceptable
alternatives already easily findable and useable, and it's (effectively,
though not strictly speaking) a commodity product. It might be a pretty darn
good one, but it's still something that just fills a commodity need, for most
people.

On a related note, I myself have developed a rule of thumb policy to don't buy
technical books anymore because there is almost always an acceptable free way
to get the info I need, and therefore this frees up more cash for getting
things I can't get for free otherwise, or at least, to get higher quality or
more convenient things. Like food, shelter, computer equipment, etc. I am
still very willing and do frequently buy fiction books, in part because I know
how hard it is to write fiction, how poor the pay often is, and because my
interest is not a commodity/generic interest but rather a specific one for a
particular story or author that is attractive. (I gladly pay for Stephenson,
Scalzi and Simmons, for example.) Also, I don't like to handle
dirty/secondhand books, and I've read a pretty big percentage of old public
domain literature that I'm interested in -- if I haven't read something
written before say 1850 there's a pretty good chance I never will because I've
passed on it several times already, whereas there are still tons of books
written even in the last 20 years that sound attractive from a distance but I
still haven't gotten around to reading yet. When I want to Get Something Done
I can often do tactical lookups in man pages, help docs, online pages,
Googling around, asking somebody, etc. and very rarely have no other recourse
than a retail book.

I'm also coming from the perspective of someone who did previously frequently
buy technical books and build up a pretty large library of computer/software-
related ones, and found that only a small percentage of them were fundamental
enough to still be useful and must-keepable today (think Stevens TCP/IP
Illustrated, many Addison-Wesley UNIX/Internet tomes). Whereas a lot of them
were too tied to transient/temporary/version-specific technology (most of my
O'Reilly buys, for example -- even though I love O'Reilly) such as Java
1.2-era books, old versions of Perl, early HTML books, books on Solaris (heck
just saying a book on Solaris is antique and useless makes me feel old, I
remember when I ran into it at lots of companies before the coming of the
Linux wave), etc. Book buying is also a highly discretionary line item in my
budget. Whenever there's any sense of a cash crunch or big upcoming need to
spend money on more important things, book buying is one of the first things
to disappear. Gas prices up 75%? A few less technical books bought and you're
back in balance for quite a while.

All this said, I admire writers because I know how hard it is. And I think
there will always be a non-zero-dollar market demand for quality written
technical books, even if only in purely electronic form. I just think writers
will need to increasingly be aware of what their competitors are, because
there's going to be an increasing number of good free alternatives to their
work, as well. And an increasing percentage of people are going to be giving
away portions of their work for free on the web as a sort of resume++ and lead
generator.

~~~
wladimir
That's the same distinction that I make;

a) Fundamental technical or scientific books, that will keep their value at
least a few years, preferably longer.

b) Books about a certain version of a program or technology.

I do buy books in the (a) category, even hardcopy. But for (b) I first look
for a free online alternative, and otherwise an ebook. I've also made that
mistake of buying Java 1.2 doorstops back in the time ;) The world of IT moves
too fast for print.

Fiction books I usually buy as ebook, because my bookshelves are already over-
full and most I'll only read once anyway.

~~~
gte910h
To me, that 50 dollar book allows me to earn random thousands of dollars over
the next few weeks usually. I see technical books as zero cost profit making
devices.

------
acangiano
For a highly successful alternative to giving away the PDF, you can read my
interview with Michael Hartl: [http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/09/interview-
with-michael-...](http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/09/interview-with-michael-
hartl-author-of-the-rails-3-tutorial/)

------
noahc
What I would be more interested in is not how much money he made, but what
opportunities opened up to him. To me, the goal of putting out good content is
leverage it to get awesome job offers, bigger projects, higher paying
consulting gigs.

Anyone have any experience with this? Has a blog post or ebook created
opportunities for you?

~~~
jeremymcanally
I built the initial foundation for my Ruby/Rails consulting career on the back
of my eBook. That opened up the opportunity to work some awesome people
(directly, as in "I read your book, work with us") and to write a book for a
"real" publisher. Of course these opportunities opened up more work and
conference speaking opportunities.

And again this past year with the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook. I was invited to
speak at like 5 conferences based off my work on that along with some other
opportunities.

So yes, getting information out there in a cohesive way that people are
interested in is a great way to open up opportunities for yourself, whether
it's a blog, book, documentation project, etc.

~~~
patio11
Ditto here, particularly with regards to blogging. Community participation
also has helped me, although it was one of those "overnight success in five
years" stories.

------
lazyant
I went to look at his "Working at the Ubuntu Command-Line Prompt", I was
interested but there's no information whatsoever (not even table of contents)
about this book in his web site or in the Amazon page.

------
GeneralMaximus
Offtopic: why does this website need JavaScript to display content?

------
code_duck
Interesting results. Thanks for sharing them!

Why is S3 so important for file distribution? Couldn't you do about the same
with some cheap shared hosting?

~~~
gte910h
>Couldn't you do about the same with some cheap shared hosting?

Hit Events, i.e. your item is suddenly a hit, come fast and die fast many
times. If you're not scalable, when you do get hit with a publicity event,
your infrastructure can melt and then you miss out on a huge majority of
sales.

~~~
code_duck
Sure, I understand that I guess. My question is whether the demands on the
servers hosting the OP's book ever met the level where S3 was really necessary
or not. It doesn't really sound like it did, judging from the numbers.

