Any reader of Flexible Rails will know that I greatly admire Dave Thomas. He has recently posted an article about the future of traditional publishing, and referenced an article at Dr. Dobbs where he is quoted extensively.
I would like to point out two choice quotes from that article:
“I think that publishing in its current form is dead.”
“authors are free to create information for themselves–a billion potential readers are just a few clicks away, and they no longer need publishers and distributors to get what they write into the hands of readers. Services such as Lulu even allow these new authors to have their work printed as paper books. Publishing has become an individual, not a corporate, act.”
I completely agree with Dave Thomas on both counts.
Furthermore, I think that I have a bit of a unique perspective on this. I had articulated this previously in my “Books as a Service” post. Having gone further into the process of finishing Flexible Rails, I have a slightly more sophisticated (a polite way of saying less naive!) perspective now:
I self-published Flexible Rails in “alpha” form on Lulu when I was a software developer living in Parksville, working remotely for a Silicon Valley startup. I had no name recognition at all; my personal brand was essentially worth $0. However, even for an alpha, the book actually was helpful. (It was essentially the quality of a long, decent quality blog post.) So, word of mouth spread as I revised the book during many evenings and weekends over the period of a year, finishing a content-complete “Beta” of the book and updating it from Rails 1.1 to Rails 1.2.
Flexible Rails climbed to #73 all-time on Lulu. I was selling the PDF at $20 USD per copy (making $16/copy royalty, with Lulu making $4/copy for doing essentially nothing but credit card processing and web hosting). While it was a bit annoying to “give away” about $3.50 per sale to Lulu (compared to if I did everything myself), I liked the legitimacy it provided me (which increased as Flexible Rails moved up the long tail [starting from a rank of over 20,000] toward the short head). I justified the “lost” money to myself as “if I sell 25% more books this way, it’s even”.
Having said all that, is traditional publishing dead? Yes and no. Exploitative, “old Hollywood studio system” style publishing is definitely dying and will be dead–the sooner the better. However, there is room for more progressive publishers such as The Pragmatic Programmers and Manning. Even with all my success on Lulu, I chose to work with Manning to produce the print version of Flexible Rails, and while the process of producing the print book is not yet done, so far I am convinced that I made the correct choice.
I will have a lot more to say about this soon, but I just want to get a few ideas out there now:
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One of the main contributions of self-publishing sites such as Lulu, as Dave Thomas has said, is to shift the balance of power from an oligopoly toward the authors. The negotiating concept of BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) is a way to look at this: if you can make $16 per copy selling PDFs, why should you agree to the abysmal terms of the standard publishing contract? My understanding is that typically if a book sells for $50 in a store, the publisher gets $25 (minus returns) and the standard author royalty of 10% means that the author gets $2.50 (minus returns). So, typically, your $50 book bought the author a (small) coffee. So, if you are an author, Lulu gives you tremendous negotiating power: you don’t need a publisher. You can make about 6x-8x as much money per book selling $20 PDFs yourself on Lulu compared to $50 books with a publisher. So, traditionally you need to sell 6x-8x as many books with a publisher with the traditional royalty rates just to break even.
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The thing about the market is that it is segmented: some people buy PDFs online, some people never will. As an author, if you are interested in making money off of your book, you should attempt to sell as many of the higher-margin PDFs (via Lulu or an equivalent) as possible before selling print books to the remaining people who won’t buy PDFs under any circumstances. Producing and selling print books is one thing a publisher is far better than you at doing: so you should attempt to “have your cake and eat it too”.
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Making a high quality print book is really hard. Typesetting, producing an index, ensuring the manuscript has a consistent tone–all these things are no fun whatsoever. They are horrible chores. So, if you decide to do them by yourself, you will do a terrible job of it. Hence, if you do want the final product to be of the best quality, involving the services of a very good copy editor, typesetter, etc., is a very good idea. You can get them yourself, of course, but this would require more effort on your part. Furthermore, if you contracted a copy editor, you would be in the position of employer, which means that the copy editor would not be as thorough or ruthless as s/he would if s/he was an employee of or contractor for your publisher.
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The actual physical book produced by a print-on-demand place such as Lulu is decent, but it is not as nice as the physical book produced by The Pragmatic Programmers or Manning. (I made a dummy physical book of Flexible Rails and bought it from Lulu as a check: the printing came out fine enough, but the pages were too thick, and overall it seemed a bit amateurish in comparison to the (many) books I have bought from The Pragmatic Programmers and Manning.
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People are impressed by the phrase “a Manning book”. This is still true today. I have had the experience of telling people in my profession about being a self-published author and about being the author of an upcoming Manning book, and there is definitely more implied respect and prestige granted by being the author of an upcoming Manning book. So, I think that every author should do at least one traditionally published book, just to get the respect from the people who will not respect a high ranking on Lulu as much as they should. (This opinion is not correct, but that’s your loss as well as theirs.)
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Lulu is great as a tool for previously unpublished authors who want to be published either via Lulu or a traditional publisher. Once Flexible Rails got past a certain point on the Lulu rankings I got multiple pings from publishers. Publishers aren’t stupid: if something is doing really well on Lulu with essentially almost no marketing, then it is a good candidate for being published traditionally. (On the flip side, if something isn’t selling on Lulu, maybe it shouldn’t be published traditionally at all? This certainly takes a lot of the risk out of the equation for a publisher: just buy and help polish the good and popular Lulu books. Lulu makes talent discovery easier.)
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The crappy economics in #1 above mean that many authors see books as just marketing devices for their consulting practices. (I don’t have empirical proof of this, but I have a strong hunch.) This is a downward spiral: if you can’t make any actual money off of a book, and it’s just a marketing device, then you can’t actually afford to spend as much time to make the book a really good quality book–you have “real work” to do. Hence, you see so many books with 3-5 authors and overlapping content: if you’re not going to make any real money, the “name on a book” glow wears off after a while. So, it only makes sense to contribute a few chapters to a book–anything more would be a bad investment…
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Self-publishing yourself lets you release earlier and/or more often than some publishers would like: you can release as often as you want, without relying on other people in the process. Flexible Rails went through 23 (!) revisions on Lulu. Releasing really early lets you gauge demand: when I released Flexible Rails, I considered the very real possibility that only 5 people in the world would care. If this happened, I could have just sent them their money back (or even double their money back), and I wouldn’t have wasted the time writing a book nobody wanted. Releasing often lets you evolve the book faster and fix bugs more frequently.
Anyway, I don’t have any great sweeping conclusion, but I wanted to jot my thoughts down now. I’m sure I will refine them in the months ahead, as Flexible Rails finishes the “Early Access” program at Manning and becomes a Manning print book…
P.S. I had intended to write this after reading Charles Petzold’s comments, but I didn’t find the time until prompted by Dave Thomas’ post. Hence the title of this blog post…
P.P.S. If you think that this blog post is verbose and needs an editor, you are right. It is itself a demonstration of both the strengths and weaknesses of self-publishing. Oooh, how meta — I’d better stop before I float away…
[edited for clarity on 2007-11-11]