Publishing Effective Modern C++, Part 2 | Hacker News Reader

Publishing Effective Modern C++, Part 2

scottmeyers.blogspot.com

54 pointsingve6 comments

Link to discussion of Part 1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9540955

> ... technical publishing into four tasks (1. manuscript creation, 2. production, 3. distribution, and 4. marketing)

I wonder how much value publishers provide on points 3. and 4, relative to a self-distribution and self-marketing approach. Also, the only part of 2. that is not replaceable by scripts (think github.com/softcover) is the developmental editing and the copy editing. These are incredibly valuable.

Authors who choose to self-publish can expect royalties around 30--40% of list price. I bet royalties from mainstream publishers are closer to 1/5th or 1/10th of that (4% to 8% of list price). So the breakeven is clear: if your book will sell 10x more copies due to the distribution and marketing of a mainstream publisher, then go with them, else do your own thing.

So why does the author stop short of telling us what he thinks are the fair terms here?

Also, I wonder how his earlier books have fared monetarily over their life times, considering that their life time is now effectively over with the new EC++ books.

I don't think that the life time of his older books is necessarily over (for better or worse... probably for the worse but that is another discussion). Much of the advice in the old books is still 100% valid ('Prevent exceptions from leaving destructors'), and C++98 is still an entirely valid subset of the language. It is going to be a long time before even a fraction of that existing code is phased out or updated.

>So why does the author stop short of telling us what he thinks are the fair terms here?

Even if a publishing contract does not have a provision for non-disclosure and confidentiality, it's standard business etiquette not to publicly discuss the actual financial terms. It's the same type of professional etiquette when a programmer says, "I jumped from Microsoft to Google for more money." The "more" is left to the readers' imagination and it would be rude of us to ask for specifics.

Unfortunately, since his essay dances around any concrete numbers, the point about "fairness" might seem like a build up to punchline that never comes.

Decreasing royalties make a lot of sense for authors, as the publisher may be motivated to keep promoting books to gain increasing royalties. Any decrease should obviously be sensible without encouraging a gross underpayment situation analogous to music composers.

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