Your experiences writing books

Discussions
#7

You would use Createspace nowadays (for print books) and eBooks are published directly. They were bought by Amazon, and so are well integrated with them. I stopped using Lulu after they went into lala-land, and started recommending scammers like Author’s Solutions.

I would still create epub and mobi versions- plenty of people prefer to read on eReaders. If you have a smart phone or iPad, you can download the Kindle app and read on that. Pdf is a terrible format- it only works on PCs. It’s hard to read a book on your PC. My kindle is very light- I can read books while lying down without straining my wrists, and the battery lasts for weeks.

I tried many tools, but nothing beats Scrivener. It’s not free, but at $40, is very reasonably priced. Though my experience is mainly in fiction.

#8

The PragProg guys, and O’Reilly are people I will buy from without going through Amazon, because their books are also on Amazon, do have reviews, and they’re fairly well established companies.

But there’s a higher bar: I tend to be more skeptical of books that don’t have any reviews, and where I don’t have a centralized place that stores them for me over the years. I also don’t have the Amazon wishlist, where I’ll keep a list of things that look interesting, and come back from time to time and buy one. On the whole, I’m more likely to ignore a book that is not on Amazon.

#9

I’ll share my experience so far, hope it helps.

I launched preorders for my book, Building Secure PHP Apps, five days ago. I have two chapters finished, about 40%, so people are taking a decent risk preordering.

I setup a landing page with an email signup about a month ago, using launchrock. I have around 200 emails on the mailing list so far, acquired via twitter.

The first day I released to the mailing list only, with a coupon code. Since then I’ve mostly been marketing through twitter by annoying my followers and offering coupon codes.

I have a fairly popular open source library, Ion Auth, so I added a reference to the book in the docs. Also added a link to my blog homepage (my blog is not popular at all).

As of right now I have 68 sales totaling $1109.58 in royalties.

I’ve spent about 4 hours on writing so far. So that is definitely a net win if I can keep the sales up. This does not count any time for marketing or learning how Leanpub works, etc. Which was definitely a few hours but should be drastically lower here on out and for future projects.

Next is to keep writing. If I can break even with my writing time I’ll consider it a success. $2000 would equal 20 hours freelancing at $100/hr. Having a book on my portfolio and just the experience of finally launching something makes it a net win either way in my mind though.

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#10

This thread inspired me to take look at Nathan Barry’s Authority, then to purchase it, then to start writing a small book. It’s called “How to Beat Your Friends at Poker”, and I completely the draft of a chapter one today.

Advice happily accepted :smile:

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#11

That’s awesome @SteveMcLeod! Good luck!

The main thing I learned, create a landing page and start marketing the mailing list now! I had much higher conversion rates from the mailing list.

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#12

Thanks @benedmunds. I created and published a landing page, and spammed my friends on FaceBook. That’s a start…

#13

I second davidw’s view that every single books having its own website / landing page doesn’t sound sustainable to me. Market places exist to solve the discoverability problem, which is why people love Amazon and other similar market places for books.
I must say, that’s the only way I buy books. Independent reviews are extremely important for me.
Being a bootstrapper and knowing how hard the “discoverability” problem is and how much you have to invest in marketing, I’m just wondering if publishing on your own website is only a solution for authors with an established audience (via blogs, social media, etc.). Once you have the audience, selling might look easy, but building an audience is not easy.

@SteveMcLeod: perhaps you can keep us updated with the progress of your venture, I’d be curious.

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#14

FYI, I just posted an update on my book writing experience so far on the forums here: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/t/hey-im-ben-edmunds-serial-starter-occasional-finisher/1151/7

#15

Hi @benedmunds, I liked your strategy. Just finished Nathan’s book and you follow almost everything he suggest in his book. I will bet that most of your revenue will come from the higher tier $500 option.

Is it too dificult to come up with a middle tier? It is a big range from $30 to $500. There should be an $99 option.

#16

Haha that’s funny since I haven’t read Nathan’s book yet. I’ve actually been trying to decide what to offer as a middle tier and I think I found it, I would love your feedback.

I’m thinking that I’ll make a screencast for each item discussed in the book, mostly focusing on refactoring a legacy app to secure it. So I would start with crappy legacy PHP code and then refactor it on the screencast to be secure. Just follow that format for each topic. Thoughts?

#17

I think that is a great idea!

The only thing I just realized that make it different from Nathan’s approach (and that maybe a huge difference) is that he is totally self-published and he talks a lot of the importance of building your mailing list.

I think LeanPub don’t let you know the emails of your book buyers and that is a terrible thing for next time you have something to sell to them. Actually, the best is to keep talking with your audience frequently.

#18

They do collect email but there is an opt-out so many people don’t allow me to collect their email. Under the LeanPub terms I am free to sell the book myself though so I may setup a site to do it myself. It would also save on fees.

At this point though I’m not sure if the value add is enough to offset the time it would take me to set this up. So I’m still weighing it.

#19

For technical people wanting to write books, I think it is worth cheking Softcover.io.

Their production platform is open sourced and free, you may option for their services for 10% of your royalties. The service permits you to easily build a site for selling your book.

#20

I wrote a book for a publisher, which gave me an understanding of how the industry works:

after that I self-published:

Clearly, this was some time ago and the game has changed somewhat, but what hasn’t changed is that you will earn significantly more, with far fewer sales, by self-publishing.

When I self-published there were no services to use, so I used LaTeX to typeset and dealt with a short-run printer. I’d probably do the same now, because you can control and ensure that the quality is high.

I also struck lucky a little when a magazine approached me to put the book on their cover CD. I earned more from that than all the dead tree sales up to that point, and the book had sold very well for a self-published, specialist title. (I also ended up with a two-year journalism gig as a sideline because of that, but that’s another story.)

This will sound old school now, in the days of kindles, tablets, etc., but a year or so after I published, and the content was becoming out of date, I was staring at the screen one evening after a couple of beers and decided to put the PDF of the book on my web-site for 6 USD – I have no idea why I priced it at 6 USD – then I announced it to my target market.

I made significant multiples of previous earnings from that one action than everything that had gone before. Funny old world.

#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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