Comment by lukestevens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukestevens | Hacker News Reader

Interesting stats!

14k sales in 6 weeks is great for a tech book (~5k lifetime being the norm), but on the back of 2 million visitors to the web site, and Mark Pilgrim's reputation, it illustrates why publishing is a tough biz.

O'Reilly pays authors 10% of net income, which is usually 50% of retail. Given Mark's book is going for $30 retail and $17.72 at Amazon, that's about ~$0.88 - $1.50 per book for print (for the sake of the argument, let's assume digital is in the same ballpark). Mark's royalty check for $9225, + whatever advance Mark got (say $5k?) equals roughly $1/book sale for the author (assuming that payment was for 14k sales to date). Given it takes 100s of hours to write a book (and hundreds more to write a good one), making $1 per sale, on average sales of 5k lifetime, or 14k sales in 6 weeks for a top tier author like Mark... let's just say technical writing is not exactly something you do for profit :)

Also of note is the 75%/25% print/digital sales ratio. This would suggest that the free online version is cannibalizing digital sales, given O'Reilly usually sells ebooks 2:1 (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/does-digital-cannibalize-pr...), but I guess you could make a case that the loss in digital sales is made up in extra print sales from the book's exposure online.

Interesting deductions! I just wanted to pipe in here to confirm that your math and your stated assumptions are correct. My take is the standard 10%. My "top tier" status, as you flatteringly put it, bought me the freedom to simultaneously publish the book online under a Creative Commons Attribution license. I negotiated for licensing, not money. I have no regrets.

Your story provides some interesting confirmations of the points I raised in my own story of 2009: http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/

Despite being approached to do the 2nd edition of what was a popular book (in its field), my negotiations on the licensing failed and, as anticipated, the 2nd edition has done extremely poorly compared to the 1st due to new competition and a lack of anyone serious recommending the book because it's not available in an open format to "scope out." (And as someone who recommends books, this is key for me. I can't buy every beginners' book that I don't need merely to judge them for others.)

Your post will serve as interesting ammunition in future discussions between many authors and their publishers, I suspect, and I applaud you for putting it out!

I'm sure a company as large as O'Reilly doesn't pay all their authors the same. 10% sounds like a base rate, but everything is negotiable.

What does "net income" mean here? Is that supposed to mean profit? If so, that's a pretty small piece. Why should O' Reilly get 90% of the money merely for their distribution channel and printing press? I realize many companies do this "because they can" or they think they can, but hopefully our industry is not interested in supporting such groups; we should only buy from publishers that operate business under fair terms. Perhaps a fair shake would be 75/25, or even something as low as 50/50, but 90/10 to a group that didn't even produce the content is pretty hard to swallow from an ethical standpoint.

I would really like to know more about what goes into O' Reilly's "net income" figure.

It means the money the publisher gets after the retailer takes their cut (which is usually 50%).

Generally speaking, tech publishers have a sausage factory-like production line books get pushed through. There's editors, designers, marketing, and acquisitions people involved in taking the author's manuscript through to a finished product, so that's where the money goes.

It also gets spent on all the dreck tech publishers (again, in general) pump out -- they work on a hits model, so they publish 20 books and hope one of them takes off. Their main function is to nag authors to get their work done.

I've heard "[book] publishing is broken" over and again, and it's true. Tech publishers only pay peanuts, so authors get pushed to finish the book quickly (if they start at all), so the quality isn't very good, so people don't buy many books, so tech publishers can only afford to pay peanuts...

Sadly, not much has changed for the major tech publishers since the late 90s at least, when Philip Greenspun wrote about his experience in 1997: http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story

That said, there are publishers which give their authors a better deal -- Pragmatic Programmers for one (which Peter Cooper discusses -- see link in his comment), who pay 50% as discussed here: http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2009/10/pragmati... . They may not do the same volume as the majors, but I doubt it's 5x less. Anyway, I agree it would be more healthy if those buying books bought from publishers who gave their authors a fairer deal; however I'd really like to see authors support businesses that support them -- they're the ones with the product after all. The more we can support highly efficient indie publishers, the more the book reading community will grow around them, the healthier the ecosystem on the whole will be, imo.

Failing that, I'd like to see tech giants like Google just give employees who write a book a $5k raise, cover editing/production costs for $5k, and then use the self-publishing infrastructure (with the same $1/book for the author) & free electronic distribution to get the books out there as far and wide as possible - $9 print, $0.99/free PDF/app, free web version, say.

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