Your experiences writing books

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#21

I wrote Getting Started with LevelDB for Packt back in Nov 2013 and it was an utter nightmare. I’m still earning back my advance so doubt I’ll ever see more than that for it. They have an incredibly restrictive waterfall process for writing where you estimate page counts and give them an outline in advance on which they won’t budge no matter what happens during the writing process.

They have a production process which uses very detailed Word templates that map into their production software. I could live with that but I failed to write a full chapter with them before estimating. I hadn’t realised that the 5 page chapters they insisted on lost 1/3 page due to the style sheets.

Most of the code examples were Objective-C which is the world’s worst language for wrapping in a book - so many single lines of code ended up as 3 lines of page that I spend a month in editing just to make the book make sense without someone having to sit there with the code in a separate editor. For this amount of work, I could have done the whole thing myself and been a lot happier with the result.

I’d go Leanpub or I notice that quite a few books I’ve bought recently are published via Gumroad.

Lest I seem too down on Packt, I have to say their editing was in general high quality even if we had to go back and forth up to 4 times on some chapters to fit the production constraints. However, their production process let us down - I submitted a revision to a key diagram several weeks before finalising the book. The revised version was in the galley proofs but the original made it through into the book.

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#22

@AndyDent, that is the normal process when you go with legacy publishers. They can take years to publish your book.

In one horror story, the publisher dragged the process for 7 years, and then decided to cancel the project, even though the author had been jumping through all the hoops, constantly updating her book based on the editor-of-the-day. The author was forced to return the advance- 7 years later.

On top of that you get what, 10-20% royalty? (and that’s after middlemen like Amazon/bookstores get their cut) You get 70% if you go direct via Amazon, and something like 90-95% on Leanpub/Gumroad etc.

In the bad old days, you had to go via the publishers, as they controlled distribution. No longer.

There is no financial sense is going via legacy publishers anymore.

#23

I’ve been listening to episodes of http://www.selfpublishingquestions.com/ podcast; it goes in-depth on publishing on Amazon. The month-by-month income breakdown is interesting as well.

#24

I’ve also done both self-publishing and through a publisher. I’ve written for a traditional publisher that used Word templates (this book on podcasting) and the awesome folks at Pragmatic Programmers, who have developer-friendly publishing tools are a joy to use.

Here’s my take: if you find a good publisher (like PragProg) and publish on a topic that is surging and not yet smothered with good tutorials or training, then you can indeed make decent money writing a book. That was my experience writing ExpressionEngine 2: A Quick-Start Guide. It was well-timed, hit a need in the market, and I was already known in the community.

The same formula is true for self-publishing; it’s just that you have more control and keep more of the money (and all of the headaches).

Just like with software, SaaS, or products, if there’s no market for what you’re writing and no one knows you for that topic, then it won’t matter, monetarily speaking, if self-publish or use a publisher.

#25

Ummm, Keeping 90% vs 10% of the profits? Sorry, but how does that not matter monetarily?

#26

Just like with software, SaaS, or products, if there’s no market for what you’re writing and no one knows you for that topic, then it won’t matter, monetarily speaking, if self-publish or use a publisher.

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