Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnick | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's unreasonable that for many people, a publisher with experience and an existing distribution network & agreements, perceived authority as a "real" publisher, and a marketing budget and plan will result in 10x the sales. I've had a friend self publish in another industry and getting books shipped around the world and in stores is a hassle as a lone operator - and that's if people even know you exist.

If you live in the US (she didn't) then Amazon can be a decent option for a lot of reach though.

Amazon and other similar print on demand services also help with this but it's not suitable for all products (full colour can be a problem).

View on HN

>perceived authority as a "real" publisher,

With certain professional books publishing with a known publisher definitely gives the book a certain "gravitas" (deserved or not) that it may not have if you independently publish. And if you're mostly writing a book to burnish your professional reputation (as is often the case) rather than to make money, that may be a pretty good tradeoff even if you could have made more in direct sales if you published yourself.

To be honest, I'm not sure publishers do an awful lot for you directly though you will probably have to pay out of your pocket for things like editing services if you go it yourself, but the name does still often matter.

I was approached by two "real" publishers asking me whether I want to publish my book with them.

I had declined both of them as they only offered 10% royalty rates.

I didn't have to pay for editing. I did everything myself: writing, diagrams, proofreading, marketing.

In fact, I decided to self-publish it after reading this article from Antonio Goncalves about his Java EE 7 book:

https://antoniogoncalves.org/2014/09/16/the-uncensored-java-...

Everyone should obviously do things as they individually see fit. But, in my experience, publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general. All I know is that I find it hard to even publish a blog post without typos if someone else doesn't edit it--and sometimes even then.

(The good news is that it's not really expensive to pay someone to do if you don't really need the services of a full-blown editor who is advising on structure, flow, etc.)

I'm using Grammarly to correct my spelling mistakes. It also provides tips about phrasing.

> publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general.

Agreed, but it's easy to hire a freelance copy editor. In fact, that's often what traditional publishers do too.

Yep. The one time I really wanted one, I just paid an intern working for a magazine editor friend of mine a few hundred dollars and that was fine.

IMO, it's not something you can rely on software for although software catches a lot of course. The one time I didn't do it worked out OK. But I had a co-author and we had sufficiently reworked the (somewhat shorter) book enough times over a fairly long period that I decided it had had enough fresh eyes on it to stand on its own.

And of course publishers aren't perfect either. I've found a few typos in my last book which did go through a traditional publisher even though I also proofread it pretty carefully. (One mistake was in front matter which I added fairly late on which makes me suspect there would have been a lot more errors in the book if I didn't check it carefully myself.)

By far the biggest thing we've missed with the book I mentioned was the distribution and marketing reach. It was a niche craft industry so it was possible to get interest from individual stores and retailers, but since demand came piece by piece it was only really possible to ship one or two boxes of books at a time (at an average cost of around ~$10 per book via courier, depending on country) rather than leveraging cheap container shipping along with a bunch of different titles into a warehouse or as part of a big push campaign, like a publisher could.

I did a lot of the editing myself, my writing is fine, but my feedback was mostly typos/grammar/phrasing - not a coherent look at the overall structure and content which a more experienced editor may do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com