I am an author of 1-2 books about programming (Cocoa & Objective-C). The books my co-author any myself wrote are very "thick" (about 700 pages each) and we get about 1 Euro per copy sold. Although the books we wrote are among the best selling programming books in Germany we do not make a fortune. We make most of our money indirectly from the books: consulting, seminars.
When I found the torrent for our books I was pretty happy about it to be honest. :) Of course our publisher does not like it for sure. I have thought about publishing new books on my own so that I get more than 1 Euro per copy. Then again: The German speaking audience is too small in my opinion.
So if I had the balls I would make similar statements.
I wonder why authors are still working with those publishers and not switching to print on demand or even giving digital copies away for free in order to reach a larger audience. I never published a book, but to me it looks like the publishers are selling the books for pretty high prices, while giving the authors only ridiculous shares of that. Is the editing, printing and marketing job they do really worth it?
Publishers do provide editorial service. If an author writes a book in a year, there're more than 2 years of editorial process before the initial writing becomes a consumable.
Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate. Think about your weekend prototype project. And how much effort it takes to make it into a "successful" start up. For books, you put all the effort before printing. And that effort to turn a prototype into a profitable product is what publishers provide you. And many publishers are really good at that.
Of course with ebooks and tablet, you can start thinking of a book as software: an interactive multimedia thingy that can be updated often. You are welcome to innovate this digital medium. But we are not there yet.
> Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate.
That's not true at all. Check out https://leanpub.com/, Manning's MEAPs, The Pragmatic Programmers' Beta books, Apress' Alpha books, Oreilly's Early Release books, etc, etc. Of course these are all digital (mostly PDFs), but they are still very much books.
Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate.
Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java was written in public. Early drafts were available as PDFs. High quality feedback, iterations, rapid releases, community engagement, mindshare, etc.
It was great to observe. Once it hit paper, I bought maybe 10 copies, as gifts, just to support the author and the new strategy.
I'm a bit disappointed it hasn't become the norm. Being on the outside, I rightly don't understand why.
I don't recall if Eckel had a publisher at the outset. Or if he was able to get a publisher by demonstrating the size of his audience. (The market for Java books at the time was flooded with schlock.)
Those aren't exclusive goals. Michael Hartl has had great success with a free HTML version of rails tutorial. I presume zed shaw is also making money with his learn X the hard way series.
I'm not a programmer, but I've released a free HTML version of my books and print sales didn't decline at all. Too soon to be certain, but they may have increased. I sell PDF copies too.
A smart player will consider the volume under the sales curve, setting a price point that will lead to the greatest revenue at the least cost, instead of focusing on maximizing each sale.
I made good money publishing shareware. Maybe 1% of my users registered their copies. Mostly government contractors, who were required to. And free tech supp led to conversions about 1/2 the time.
At my scale, there's no way I could have profitably bought ads, maintained a copy protection scheme, etc. (Having since done it both ways, I know.)
Many, many artists identify exposure as the major hurdle to financial success. The same applies for indie games, phone apps, authors, etc.
Congratulations on publishing such huge books, I can't imagine how much work it is.
I self-published a programming book on C#, it's a bit less than 300 pages and that took a long time to finish.
1 EUR per copy sounds like a really bad deal though? I imagine the book is selling for at least 30 EUR so if you have a normal author royalty of ~16% that would at least give you 5 EUR.
If you self-publish through Amazon(CreateSpace) you get about 50% royalties and you don't have to pay any upfront fees to get it printed since the cost for printing is take out of the other 50%.
When I found the torrent for our books I was pretty happy about it to be honest. :) Of course our publisher does not like it for sure. I have thought about publishing new books on my own so that I get more than 1 Euro per copy. Then again: The German speaking audience is too small in my opinion.
So if I had the balls I would make similar statements.