

A year of Geek Atlas sales (some facts about book royalties) - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/year-of-geek-atlas-sales-or-some-facts.html

======
darklajid
I guess I understand that, while providing a good insight into royalties in
general, the article left out something more directly interesting:

Was it worth, monetary, to write the Geek Atlas? It wasn't written for the
money, I read that. And I understand that the royalties are smallish, compared
to the prices payed by the customers. But I do wonder if a book like that
(targeted at a "minority", more a "novelty" thing from what I can tell) sells
good enough to keep a single guy alive.

So - in the light of the recent talks about salaries around the world in
general and in NYC/the bay area specifically: John - would mind sharing a very
rough estimate of sales for this book?

(I guess the answer is "It's too personal", because otherwise it could've been
part of the blog entry itself to further strengthen the "Not for the money"
part, but hey - I guess it's always okay to ask politely)

~~~
jgrahamc
I have made about 1/12 of my annual salary from the book. This is great, but I
consider the fringe benefits of having the book much more important.

~~~
darklajid
Thanks a lot for responding. This again is interesting in the light of the
salary discussion from yesterday. Thinking out loud here I assume that JGC
isn't living on anything near a minimum wage. 1/12 of that could certainly be
1/6 to 1/4 of a yearly salary elsewhere, again refering to the gap in salaries
for basically doing a similar job. Which changes a lot about the ROI here, for
me.

Not that I want to undermine the effort you had to put into that project. I
seriously cannot imagine or understand the work put into that book by you. And
I certainly don't plan to write a book now...

What really is interesting about this number game is mostly that I come from
the opposite direction of guy that wrote the comment ("Living of your book
royalties") that lead to your blog entry in the first place: I assumed
creating a book would suck in terms of money in general (except for the
obvious exceptional cases like Rowling) and for a minority target group
specifically.

Now, on the other hand, I can better understand why and how one could live off
writing most of the time (obviously with numbers like yours you wouldn't be
able to sustain a life in NYC, but again - the differences in cost of living
and salaries showed that it should be possible elsewhere).

Thanks a lot for sharing this.

~~~
jgrahamc
_I seriously cannot imagine or understand the work put into that book by you_

It was a pleasure to spend the time on the book and if I had the means I would
write another book. But I also need to make a living. If I get the time I'd
like to do "The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer: Annotated Program Listing" :-)

~~~
petercooper
I think most of us would love to see your take on that. However, in case
anyone's interested, a book like that does already exist:

[http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Guidance-Computer-
Architecture-...](http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture-
Exploration/dp/1441908765/)

I haven't bought it yet but it's in my wishlist pending an Xmas purchase ;-)

------
petercooper
It already went round the HN mill last year but just in case anyone finds it
interesting now, I wrote something similar (but about 50x longer, for various
reasons) about my book, Beginning Ruby: <http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-
earned-and-learned/>

Intriguingly, it seems from this post that Apress offers better terms than
O'Reilly..

------
rwmj
I was technical editor of the (dreadful) Practical OCaml, for which I made
£650 (about £450 after tax) for months of work:

<http://blog.merjis.com/2006/11/08/practical-ocaml/>

~~~
jgrahamc
Boy, I'm glad The Geek Atlas didn't get reviews like that! The worst anyone
has said is "An interesting idea, but the author's choices seem overly
idiosyncratic to me."

~~~
petercooper
Ah, that reminds me of something. I was browsing the reviews for your book a
few weeks ago having seen the book linked on your site and noticed the "worst"
review you got (still 3 stars, though!) was written by a "P. Cooper." Paranoid
as I am, I feel the need to note that this is/was _not_ me :-)

~~~
jgrahamc
You are paranoid. Also, if you had written the P. Cooper review I hardly would
have held it against you. I thought his/her opinion was perfectly sensible.

~~~
petercooper
I know. :-) I'm on "be nice and clear the air" alert as yesterday I got a
bizarre e-mail from a HN user over a 2 line comment. Most of it can't even be
reproduced here but the _most pleasant_ bit was the ending: _"Have a horrible
day, and if you see your parents tell them that they did a sXXt job, and
raised a sXXt human being."_

You can't keep everyone happy, it seems, but it's worth a try!

------
all
When considering publishing a book, one must consider how widely applicable
the subject matter is and how widely the publisher can actually disseminate
your work. I just published my fourth book, seventh if you count works that I
have written for hire. I do not expect it to do as well as my previous works
because the publisher is smaller and the domain of application is much more
restricted. The publisher of my first few books is a subsidiary of
HarperCollins and runs bookstores itself, so its channels are much more
pervasive. This is shown in the royalty statements.

Self-publishing naturally boosts the ROI on small runs, but it is not without
its drawbacks. Whenever I have thought of a book that I might self-publish, I
question whether it is worth writing. The major publishers know their customer
better than I could realistically hope to ever know. If they would not take it
on, one must wonder about the market for it. I do not say this to mean one
should not self-publish, but self-publishing is usually reserved for pet
projects that one has developed as a hobby and want to share. If one is
looking for a high ROI on the effort it takes to write a book, the larger
publishers are the way to go.

Also, the longevity of one's work is directly related to how evergreen the
content is. If one writes something sexy or novel, I suspect one would be
lucky to get a year or two of decent sales out of it. I write as evergreen as
I can. so to this day, I am still receiving cheques from a book that I
published 4-5 years ago that are close to the same level as what I received
originally. It remains in the top 3% on Amazon.com. This is highly unusual,
but it can be done. You will seldom get rich off a single title, but you can
develop several streams of passive income if you write well and can engage
readers. My 2¢, fwiw.

------
alastair
A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be harder
to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies. Massive
advantage if your subject matter is skewed towards the web anyway.

~~~
lionhearted
> A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be
> harder to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies.
> Massive advantage if your subject matter is skewed towards the web anyway.

It's not all it's cracked up to be. I just wrote another comment on this.

You can get 15% from a major publishing house for a semi-mainstream project,
and you're looking at 60% from Amazon. The problem is, you're going to have to
pay your own copyeditor, cover design, formatting, presentation, etc with
Amazon. Realistically, you're looking at $1500 to $3000 to self-publish a
quality piece of self-published work, and that's with a lot of hours of grunt
work on your own, and then your work hasn't been shaped by an editor that
knows what the market wants.

Nonfiction really just doesn't sell very well, so there's a realistic chance
you won't recoup your expenses for self publishing. Of course, you could skip
having your book copyedited professionally, but then your quality is going to
be a lot worse. No matter how good of a writer you are, you get too close to
your own work and really should have a professional go over it. When you
publish with a mainstream house, that's part of what they do. When you self-
publish, you're own your own and out of pocket for that.

If you have an opportunity to get paid speaking events or being recognized as
an expert would increase your pay, you actually probably stand to make more
mainstream publishing. Also, it's still probably better for getting your
message out to many people.

You can probably maximize short term cash by self publishing if you don't
worry as much about production quality, if you alreay have a huge fanbase
(like Seth Godin for instance, smart of him to jump into alternate models),
and especially if you can speculatively burn $5000 to $10000 to hire
professionals and spend some money promoting and you could handle taking a
loss or breaking even if it doesn't pan out. If you're already fairly
established and successful, self publishing is very viable. If you're not,
there's a lot of advantages to being signed to a major house.

------
lionhearted
I just did a lot of looking into this. First, yes, you nailed it - if you
publish with a publisher, you do it because they're going to help you with
distribution, presentation, and get you wider reach and impact. It's good for
art and exposure, but not as good for getting cash, especially if you already
know how to promote or have a significant fanbase.

With that said, a couple of things for anyone thinking of getting into this.

1\. You really want your royalties to be based on "suggested retail list
price" if possible. That means you get the same amount no matter what price
people sell it at. Here's a link that explains more:

<http://www.ivanhoffman.com/royalties.html>

> The significant question to ask is: "Upon what figure is the percentage
> royalty rate to be calculated?" In other words, by what number do we
> multiply the royalty rate? Examples range from "net monies received by
> Publisher," "gross cash receipts," "the suggested retail list price,"
> "wholesale price," and perhaps other variations on that theme.

You're on net, which kind of sucks, because the publishing house and your
incentives don't always line up. Generally speaking, publishers want to
maximize their profit across the catalog, and might be happy to "price your
work to move" - I won't get into complicated maths about demand elasticity,
but publishers sometimes prefer to sell lots of books at lower prices, even if
an individual author would make more at higher prices. If you're on suggested
retail price royalties, this is a non-issue and your incentives don't really
clash at all. In fact, then it's a big win for you if the mark the book down
to sell more copies, which they still likely will as it's the current model of
the publishing industry.

2\. I looked into self-publishing, and you can pick up a 60% royalty rate from
Amazon Createspace, but your production quality is going to suck, you're going
to need to eat a lot of upfront fees, thus you're taking on a lot of risk, and
you're going to have make your own connections with distributors and
bookstores and things like that (and you'll be approaching them from a
position of lower credibility - they're still quite wary of self-published
books).

I was going to self publish, but then realizing what Amazon wanted it's kind
of ugly. They want an exactly formatted pdf of what your book would look like,
and then the production quality is very so-so. And IMO, Amazon Createspace is
the best self publishing route because of its tight integration with Amazon.
If you go with a different self publishing company, you're looking at even
more hassle trying to make distribution work correctly.

Geek Atlas looks good - congrats on that. I'll pick up a copy next time I'm
settled down and not on the road. Congrats on that, it's a cool project and
piece of art that I respect, notwithstanding our internet scuffling.

~~~
petercooper
_I was going to self publish, but then realizing what Amazon wanted it's kind
of ugly._

It's not strictly necessary to have your book available in Amazon or at other
bookstores (or even in print form at all) to make a successful "book." HN's
own Amy Hoy (ahoyhere) has made more from
<http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/> \- a $39 e-book - than I have from
selling > 10,000 copies of a print book published with Apress.

~~~
dminor
What are the numbers, roughly?

------
msbmsb
There is the new Barnes & Noble PubIt platform just detailed [1] for digital
self-publishing. Royalties are 65% for the $2.99-$9.99 range and 40% for
$10.00 <= prices <= $2.98. Supposedly with "no additional charges, regardless
of file size" and "no hidden terms or fees".

[1]: [http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/04/barnes-and-noble-opens-
pu...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/04/barnes-and-noble-opens-pubit-self-
publishing-portal-details-co/)

------
napierzaza
"That, by the way, is roughly how Amazon.com sells you books for so little"

What? You mean Amazon makes some sort of "margin" off the sales they make? How
does that system work? I thought they'd make money selling google ads. I
thought they pay the cover price and then get a little from the shipping

