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Coding Horror: The Book

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95 pointsbussetta34 comments

I think the whole publishing middlemen part was discussed, at length, by Charles Stross on his blog and shined a light on what's essentially a hidden part of the industry. I can't find it but some Google-Fu might get you there.

What I disagree with is where he says: "almost all the profits go directly to the author. I'm not optimistic this will happen any time soon.", which is interesting. Technically there's a few authors who've been self-made, self-published successes through the Kindle store. You lose a percentage to Amazon so can we class them as a publisher? You could chose to sell an ebook directly to your audience as a few people have tried (and have been successful, there's been a few posted on here I've ended up buying very happily).

Publishers at the moment are a necessary evil. Traditionally they publish your work, handle the distribution and all the stuff that's basically not the writer sitting their ass down and writing. Digitally they seem to have filled a similar role of providing a digital shelf space, dealing with payments, hosting and so on. Until it becomes completely trivially to write it, host it, charge it and deliver it they'll be needed.

Publishers at the moment are a necessary evil. Traditionally they publish your work, handle the distribution and all the stuff that's basically not the writer sitting their ass down and writing.

You've missed a few vital parts of the publishers' role here with your handwave about 'all the stuff that's basically not...writing':

Publishers (the good ones at least) provide editorial support, illustrations, research, design (cover and insides), pr and all the other bits that go into producing a published book (ebook or printed, there isn't actually a huge difference in effort). A book without this is often not a very satisfactory affair. Much as music publishers provide an umbrella under which various services like recording, mixing, production, pr etc are provided which are essential for most musicians to produce their work.

A book at manuscript stage is often inchoate and rough at the edges, and the role of the editor can be critical in suggesting changes or cuts and guiding the author. This is esp. true of non-fiction, but also true of fiction. Just like shopkeepers, publishers are a profession which will probably always exist, as there is a gap between the raw materials and what the public likes to consume, they're not a necessary evil, they're just an intermediary, which is sometimes a useful thing to have.

The publishers have of course taken advantage of the dominance they have over these services to try to wring every last bit of profit out of writers and leave them with the minimum of money for their efforts, and a correction is IMHO due, but there may always be publishers who seek to promote, nurture and improve writers, just as there will probably always be musical publishers/patrons who pay for the ancillary services up-front which musicians can't afford/are not skilled in, but which are essential for producing quality music. That doesn't mean musicians or writers should not have more control and be more fairly recompensed, but there is more to writing and music than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

Before publishing we had the system of patronage, which served a similar function for artists/writers/thinkers but introduced other distortions (influencing what could and could not be written for example), I'm not convinced that was better, but the current system will certainly be disrupted by the web as Atwood implies.

Editorial support and guidance is traditionally provided by the literary agent, so there is another professional layer between the writer and the market to consider. Big publishers maintain links with literary agencies based on the agencies' reputation for signing and nurturing talent and delivering ready-to-publish manuscripts that will sell. This arrangement persists at least in the world of commercial and literary fiction.

I think that might depend on the territory/genre/author in question - in my experience many publishers provide the sole editorial input, sometimes going as far as deciding on the content themselves, with the author employed to write to hire, but this varies widely depending on the subject matter, the publisher, the popularity of the author, and probably the country as well, and obviously doesn't apply to fiction.

I've written a book and explored the landscape for writing another, so let me offer my experience with each of your points (out of order). This is anecdote, so all caveats apply:

# illustrations

My co-author and me were 100% responsible for all illustrations. I've heard tales of publishers dedicating in-house talent to helping with illustrations, but I do not know how widespread this is.

# research

My publisher was not involved in research whatsoever. I'm not even sure how they could have helped had they wanted to.

# design (cover and insides)

My publisher was indeed responsible for this, but it was up to my co-author and me to decide what class of element each section should contain. As far as I understand most publishers have a house style that the authors have very little (if any) say in.

# pr

This is a huge question mark. There were time when I felt like knocking my head against a wall trying to figure the PR strategy (to misuse the term). I expect some publishers are better than others, but from what I can tell the PR for for programming books is limited to: some website, occasional discount codes, a table at a conference here and there and hooking up interviews with authors on certain websites. As far as I can tell, the weight of a publisher's name is valuable as marketing also, but that seems a bit complacent to me. Any other PR strategies that I've missed?

# and all the other bits that go into producing a published book

I don't know what this means, but I suspect it has something to do with distribution channels.

# provide editorial support

THIS. If I ever write another book the availability of quality editorial support is the deciding factor in my preference for choosing a publisher. The editorial process was the most positive experience in the otherwise arduous book writing process. I understand you can hire third-parties but in going with a publisher they have an editorial staff that can rotate if you find your chosen editor unsatisfactory.

I notice you've inverted my order :) I too would put editorial support as top of the list of things a writer would miss nowadays in bypassing a publisher (though of course some books also require a lot of design input). There's an interesting gap there perhaps for publishers to simply supply editorial expertise, or writers to team up with editors and produce books independently - though this tends to result in the formation of a small publishing house, with associated costs.

The other points will vary depending on the publisher and the author of course, and some areas (like design and pr) which might seem unimportant, trivial or simply unnecessary to the author might be vital for a successful book. Re PR for example, this encompasses getting reviews in major trade publications/newspapers, getting radio interviews, getting web coverage etc etc, but that'll vary depending on the subject matter - for some books obviously it'd be minimal, so in your experience it might amount to very little added value. Re research, depending on the topic, sometimes editors will do a lot of the work and pull in writers to write specific parts of a non-fiction book - hard to believe if you're a committed, involved author I know. Re design, depending on the book this might be more or less involved - for some books it'll be a simple template where text takes precedence (fiction, programming), for others each page is unique and the illustrations are as important as the text (a children's maths textbook for example).

Other bits was just a catch-all for all the other admin which goes on in publishing a title - buying the ISBN, typesetting, proofreading etc, along with distribution etc, though frankly I think distribution is the least important part of the puzzle, and for many books there simply won't be a dead tree version soon. I suppose my main point was that publishing encompasses far more than the layperson usually considers, and costs are not solely or even mainly associated with printing hard copy books.

So publishers will change with the coming of the internet, perhaps becoming less important, but I suspect they will always be around.

Reading an article in the Guardian on a couple of the breakout successes of self publishing, it's interesting to see that frequently they move over to traditional publishers once they're known.

A friend who is a writer swears blind that his editor make his books massively, massively better as well as doing (along with the rest of the staff at the publishers) a whole bunch of stuff he has no interest in and is no good at.

Yes you can get those services elsewhere but how many authors are going to pay an editor a significant amount up front on the off chance their book sells?

It doesn't always apply - I can see tech books, particularly those written by several people working together, don't rely on editors in the same way - but I think Jeff is generalising from his experience in a very specific field.

I have no evidence of it but it feels to me that publishers get caught up in the whole middlemen are evil, largely derived from record companies and movie studios but publishers, at least not the ones I've spoken to are generally more passionate about what they do, more genuine and authors have far more freedom to move (there are no $100m costs to get a book written) which helps keep them honest.

Maybe, but how do you explain the example he gives? Making 1,8$ pr books seems low. You'll have to sell a lot of books to make a living..

Edit: That might not be the publishers fault though.. Anyone know how the $29.54 breaks down? How much does amazone take for example?

Well partly it's the accounting. Making a book is actually quite expensive compared to making other things, there's the costs of proof reading, the costs of paper stock, binding, artwork, distribution (books are heavy compared to CD's and much bigger). All of these things are real, actual costs. Then there's the RRP, most of the time this is a big chunk higher than the company pays for the book, so lets say the margin is ridiculous and it's 50%, so on a £20.00 book the publisher is getting £10.00 from the sale, then the costs of the book come out of it from there.

And yes, writers have to sell a lot of books to make a living. I can imagine a lot of fairly well known writers probably make comparatively little compared to say, a software developer.

> And yes, writers have to sell a lot of books to make a living. I can imagine a lot of fairly well known writers probably make comparatively little compared to say, a software developer.

It's no co-incidence that you'll often find writers penning newspaper columns or appearing as talking heads on TV shows and the like - it's regular money which supplements the irregular and not massive income they get from writing.

As I say, I think much of the issue here is that he's generalising based on tech books which have higher costs (they're bigger, cost more to print, store and ship), sell in smaller volumes and go out of date faster (leading to far higher numbers of returns).

Full breakdown here but the publisher is basically getting about 50% of the list price so your $30 is already down to $15 by the time it gets there:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_the_costs_of_publishing_...

He's probably right that tech books are broken but I think it's important to distinguish between technical books and other books which don't share the same model.

I imagine that once you were famous, you would be paid a lot more to sign up.

For example I doubt R.R Martin has any problems getting a great deal, if he ever wants another publisher for a new series after he is done with game of thrones.

Possible the Charles Stross piece you're thinking of is his why he doesn't have a tip jar explanation:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminder...

(The TL;DR version - because none of the money would go to his publisher and without his publisher his books wouldn't exist.)

That's the one, thanks!

I can already see people hoping in with but publishers do so much more comments. This is true, but somewhat besides the point.

The point is that publishers, in their traditional form, are highly adapted to an environment that no longer exists. At its centre is a reality that printing books is expensive and is cheaper the larger the volume. Someone needs to speculate and invest money upfront to do the printing. Since larger volume is cheaper one big book is better than lots of little books. Risk investors also usually like to minimize investments so that they can know them better. This creates a push for volume and low risk. For that you need to increase upfront spend on things like shelfspace and publicity which then increases the pressure for bigger (higher volume) books. These upfront costs keep eating into (percentage-wise) what is left for the author. Since it means bigger sales, the individual author might be better off but as a whole, the pie doesn't get much bigger. Mostly the pie gets divided in a way that includes fewer authors and more things like financing, screening, etc. Since "publishers" became this amalgamation of services that make up most of the production and distribution price of books, it makes sense to keep adding services. Going from 68% to 71% is not the same as going from 4% - 7%.

Like software, music, video and anything else that got digitized, two things changed: marketing (promotion, sale, distribution) went online and costs went down. Marginal costs to near zero and capital costs to a flexible level (you still need to write the book, but there is no minimum print run). That removes the need for size, removes the need for risk management, makes room for lots of little books, and lots of other things that make the old publisher model somewhat redundant. The different elements get mixed up. Amazon/Apple are sort of lean publishers + retailers + publicists. Thats using the old terms though and they don't really describe the new things very well. Anyway..

Maybe in the future new leaner publishers take over. Maybe authors self publish but hire the services of publicists, editors and such independently. We don't really know.

At this point though it doesn't seem obvious that traditional publishers are any closer to the ideal version than self publishing authors.

There is also a wildcard in here that the product itself can be radically transformed by sales, distribution and consumption mediums. We know about magazines calling short stories into existence. We know about itunes causing a shift from albums to single songs. Maybe short stories will return. Maybe the future is £0.10 per chapter of a 1000 chapter/30 year page book (please nobody tell George RR Martin about this). Maybe its "subscribe to this author. Maybe copyright will die and free will take over.

Jeff's points ring close to home. Last year I wrote O'Reilly's Redis Cookbook. Even though I love the guys at O'Reilly (I really do, these folks are amazing at what they do), writing a book provides little direct return. It's a great experience, and I wouldn't say I regret it, but it is far less glamorous than what it might seem at a first glance.

There's a comment in this thread that talks about publishers as VCs - which is a correct assessment. Some books do well, some don't. These days, technical books are often part of the latter group, as the amount of information out there renders the vast majority of these books useless.

Would I write another book? Sure. In fact, I'm writing the second edition of Redis Cookbook now. However, my expectations are not high. I don't expect to make a ton of money with it. I just want the people who buy the book to be happy with the content, and to contribute to the documentation on Redis. If I make a bit of cash doing so, perfect.

If you don't mind me asking; how much did it make?

Not sure I can go into too much detail, but I guess I can say the publisher made a sum in the low/mid 5-digits.

I often postpone buying technical books because I know they will too soon be dated. Since you're an author and on the other side of the table, what are your thoughts on offering those who bought the first edition the second book at a good price? Or to sell the book with some sort of subscription, where later editions are available for the subscribers?

I agree with that completely. I'd love to see it happen. It's the only way it makes sense for technical books to remain relevant.

> Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don't expect much.

I think that's good advice.

I'm writing my first book, right now, at 24, on HTML5. (any advice or other articles like this by the way are vastly appreciated) My advance is larger than Resig's (!? what?) but I'm not doing it for the money. Money merely justifies a deadline, not the end product. The end product, to me, is justified by two things:

1. Seeing my name "in the wild", in a bookstore, would make me pleased as punch

2. If just one person, somewhere, at some point, sends me an email saying they enjoyed the book then that's enough. That's the only encouragement I need to help others (for free) on StackOverflow [1], and its the only thing I need here.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png

The #1 justification for authoring any sort of technical tome – and this has been the case for decades – is that it gains you credibility and respect in a field. If you want to consult, or are looking for senior positions, etc, get a book with your name on it out there and you have a foot and a half in the door. At least with many who are suckers and are looking for short-cut filtering, which I say because the vast majority of technical books are terrible.

On the other hand, essays like Philip Greenspun's "The Book Behind the Book" make book publishing seem less prestigious, rather than more (at least in many instances): http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html , but then he also points out that a lot of the problems come from publishing models more than the authors themselves.

The problem with the move to ebooks for technical subjects will be the lack of editorial oversight.

Tutorials, blog posts and a smattering of example code is fine for messing about with some new technology. But where are the authoritative sources. Looking at my bookshelf now, where are the websites that contain all the information I got from (the excellent) "Mastering Regular Expressions" or "CSS: The Definitive Guide" which sits nicely between the CSS spec and actually being readable.

These books still need to be written, in the same format, by the same experts because they contain a lot of value. I agree though that they don't need to be physical books -- all my new O'Reilly books I read in PDF format.

(Realise there's a lot of O'Reilly naming here, it's only because I really like the quality of their books. I'm not affiliated with them.)

I contributed a few chapters to a technical book about 10 years ago and hadn't really thought about whether I regretted having done it until I read this post. It was definitely a serious pain in the butt but how many of those trials shape who you are?

Pros:

  - being abroad in a bookshop and finding 'my' book on the shelf
  - sneaking in a picture of my cat (colour scheme example...)
  - writing a silly bio

Cons:

  - the deadlines
  - near mental breakdown; felt like my brain was melting
  - after the initial writing, the edits arrive
  - shoddy advance
  - no hope of royalties with a book that was quickly dated

A couple of years ago, I was solicited to write for a traditional publisher. I contributed a chapter to one book and got partway through writing another before I realized that everything related to traditional publishers was awful and jumped ship. I spent a good part of the next year struggling to get paid for my work according to the contract we had signed, and it still pops up and irritates me from time to time to this day. (For example, the time when they accidentally overstated my royalty income to the IRS by a factor of 4 was really entertaining.)

Later on, I self-published a collection of my blog posts. The experience was the complete opposite. It was fun, the finished product was much better (technical publishers, oddly, appear to have approximately no idea how to create good technical content), and people seem to appreciate it more. I made as much money, if not more, than I would have selling through a traditional publisher. Although volume is considerably lower, my share of the proceeds is vastly higher.

I plan to begin a second self-published book (another collection of more recent blog posts) soon. I will only consider working with a traditional publisher again if the only alternative is begging on the streets, and even then I'll have to take a long while to think about which to choose.

This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve at Leanpub.

1) We pay 90% royalty, not 10% (with a flat fee of $0.50 per purchase)

2) We think you should start selling your book before it's done, so that you can find out if you have a market for it, and so that you get feedback from your readers as you are writing.

3) Once someone buys your book on Leanpub, they get updates to the book for free. This is great for technical books, as you can keep your book up to date when technology changes.

4) You own your book. You are free to get a publishing deal with a "real" publisher once the book is done (if you can stomach the hit to your royalties). Imagine going to a publisher and being able to say: the book is done. I have sold 2000 copies on Leanpub, and have tons of great feedback. Here is the manuscript. Oh, and right now I make 90% on every sale. I bet that gets you a better royalty rate than approaching a publisher with just an idea. We all know how much those are worth :).

5) We think our workflow is the least painful way to write a book right now, and it's getting better every day. You write in Markdown in a text editor, save to a Dropbox folder, and hit the publish button on Leanpub.

Excellent work on Leanpub guys, and a well written summary .. I think you can replace this succinct 5-point blurb in your "How Leanpub Works" section ;)

I'm a former journalist and have rejected a traditional-publisher book advance in the past (£2k for something that'll take me 6 months to write? No thanks!).

Not wishing to sound like a fanboy, but I'm really loving the Leanpub experience, even though I'm waiting till I'm mostly finished before publishing v 0.9 of my book [1]. (It isn't the same one for which I was offered and advance; this one took a about 6 months of a few evenings a week.)

The ability to push updates, etc, does really make a big psychological difference to me as an engineer-meets-author - I'm creating something which I plan to evolve/do point releases on, based on user feedback. It's a little like Agile meets publishing, I guess.

[1] <shameless> http://leanpub.com/freelancedeveloperbook </shameless>

Publishers are a bit like VCs. They invest in a number of different books hoping that one will become a bestseller. All the other ones are either complete failures or midlisters (books which are not bestsellers but are strong enough to economically justify their publication).

If you have a bestseller under your belt I guess a publisher makes sense because you would presumably have earned enough money to let other do the boring jobs for you. On the other hand, if you don't break out of the midlist, it may make sense to remove the middle man and go for it alone if you want to write for a living. All the services provided by publishers can be contracted out, specially if you go the ebook way.

Finally, I am not a writer but I helped publish several books. Here is a link to someone with a lot of experience and numbers to back it up:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.co.uk/

Surprised no one's mentioned Zed Shaw or his Learn Python the Hard Way series...

http://learncodethehardway.org/

According to his homepage, his books have been downloaded 500,000 times. Don't know if those are all paying charges but he also sells online tutorials.

The first 40 chapters are Jeff raging against PHP.

> Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don't expect much.

This applies to life in general, as well.

Shouldn't books have github/bitbucket/etc repositories? With readme documents, etc? Hook ups to PivotalTracker with commits published to the github page or marketing site, or pushed to Twitter via IFTTT?

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