Why my book can be downloaded for free (2014)
blog.plover.com
blog.plover.com
> "So if you write a book it should not be because you want to make a lot of money from it but because you have an idea that you want to present to the world. And as an author, you owe it to yourself to get your idea in front of as many people as possible. By putting the book in your web site, you make it available to many people who would not otherwise have access to it: poor people, high school students, people in developing countries, and so on."
... Which is why I give all my books away for free[1][2], and have been doing so for over 10 years.
[1] Obligatory spam link to my website: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/publications
[2] The fact that there's no money in writing poetry is entirely incidental.
I share your ambition but had to put my OU course on hold when I migrated abroad. I hope to one day either finish it or restart. Once the kids are a bit older, perhaps.
Nina Paley (from Rita Sings the Blues) had a great talk five years ago on how restricting information is a form of cultural cancer that is very relevant here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc.
Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java was free to download. IIRC, from early drafts thru many editions.
Crucially, Eckel built a community. He was great about including reader feedback, errata, discussing finer points, vetting example code. (Today, authors would probably just host on git and accept pull reqs.)
As a result, Thinking in Java became significantly better than any other Java book. The easy, safe recommendation.
I probably bought 10+ copies over the years, for self and gifts. And it became the default book for workplace study groups.
I saw a off site PDF was the top result of my book.
So I gave up and gave the book away for free.
Guess I'll be charging money now.
I just wanted to get my message across and learn something on the way. It also sells relatively well, but that is a side-effect of my initial intentions :)
Evidence is mostly anecdotal (not my anecdotes) but the main reasons why people buy a book are:
- they know, know of, or have heard good things about the author (author platform)
- the book was recommended to them by a friend, or authority they trust
- they have to buy it either for themselves (textbooks, reading list, bookclub, etc), or for someone else (gifts)
... Which indicates (to me) that the price point of the book is generally not a high priority on the reader's decision-making tree, especially as the majority of books are cheap (compared to the costs of other forms of entertainment).
Smashwords (my main distribution channel) currently tells me I've given away 3,900 books over the past 360 days. Google books generally reports smaller numbers than Smashwords (60-70%). Amazon results are less than 100, but then they force me to price the books on their platform.
I'm not disputing your point (that my books are so crap I have no choice but to give them away). But it doesn't take away from the quote I lifted from the article, in my first comment: giving books away for free is a good thing if you're not in the business of writing books for profit.
Why use PDFs instead of a format that allows people to bookmark individual pages, and for search engines to index individual chapters?
Also, on average I update my eBooks 2 or 3 times so they are hardly static material.
There is something very satisfying about spending 3 or 4 months putting one's thoughts into an eBook. I have about 1300 articles on my blog, but I am sure that by word count, my books are much more content than my blog. To be fair, blogs are easy to update old articles - as eBooks are easy to update.
To quote Seth Godin, the book is just the souvenir of the idea. And it builds credibility, so you can leverage it for consulting or to do public speaking.
For example, you can go from zero rails experience to being able to build a site with Michael Hartl’s rails book. As a reader you can stay focused on the book and roughly assume you can understand Chapter 2 with the information from Chapter 1.
Conversely, a common complaint about intermediate-level Haskell is a lot of it is scattered across blog posts, and is difficult for beginners to follow.
But neither is a blog or reddit post.
I've written two books and read countless others and I strongly believe that books are a much better shape for doing comprehensive justice to a topic.
I've learned a ton from blogs and random articles, of course, but there is nothing quite like the in-depth knowledge you get when a single author has chosen to organize and write an entire book.
Because it's (mostly) a fun hobby. Writing the novel or poem can be great fun and great annoyance both at the same time. Self-publishing the book is a whole different sort of adventure, but the pleasure of getting a printed copy of my words in book format ... it's a special, very happy feeling.
And afterwards? I don't get many reviews of my work, but it's always fun to read them - even the more negative ones: it demonstrates that my words have reached out to a complete stranger and, somehow, affected them in ways that compelled them to write and post a review.
> Why not write and format as blog posts instead? Or for poetry, a single entry for each poem?
Both are good alternatives. And, yes, I've done (and do) both in a variety of online venues. Collaborative writing can also be fun.
> Why use PDFs instead of a format that allows people to bookmark individual pages, and for search engines to index individual chapters?
The online venue I use for self-publishing[1] converts manuscripts to .epub, .mobi and .pdf versions - all of which can be downloaded from my website. Other self-pub venues offer similar services.
[1] Smashwords - https://www.smashwords.com/
Do they also allow you to upload your own EPUB or PDF documents? Asking, because I am looking for a publisher.
Amazon's KDP allow uploads in .doc, .docx and .pdf formats - https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200735480
Google Play Books take .epub and .pdf files - https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/3424254?hl=e...
Not too much different than where music and albums are today... the money’s in touring, performance, etc.
If my favorite bands had to,live off album sales, those bands wouldn’t exist.
Not any more. Sadly.
And AFAIK EPUB gets into the same mess of MathJax as web pages do when they want to render mathematics. No thanks.
Seriously though... I more and more find these kinds of sentiments to be unintentional classism, not to mention being massively impractical. It's one thing to churn out a book in your spare time, and its quite another to make authorship your main focus. To do that requires a way to make a living off it unless you are already rich.
I'll let you know ... if I ever manage to find and marry a trust funded person
> It's one thing to churn out a book in your spare time, and its quite another to make authorship your main focus
Agreed. I am a hobbyist author. To pay the rent and put food on the table I have to do proper work with wages and stuff.
The first group won't be able to afford the book right now, but if you can still manage to give them the knowledge, they won't forget about it, and might come back to buy the book when they can afford it. I certainly did this for many books that been available for free, but as soon as I could, wanted to support the author. Same goes for Open Source software with donation jars.
The second group just want to be able to review something before they buy it, and the purchase is still not just about getting the content, but supporting the person creating the content.
So by having it available for free online, you can easier reach both these groups, as otherwise you mainly get the second one (and pirate copies with varying degree of quality all over the place)
But no open source software is being sustainably developed on contributions form donation jars. There might be 1-2 exceptions, but most open source projects make pennies from donations.
Not sure there are people who survive on only writing technical books, usually they have another job and do the book on the side of other things. At least as far as I can gather.
The difference with open source projects is that there are a lot of project leaders who in my experience get sucked into an ongoing full-time role for which they receive very little money. Such a role can lead to a good job of course. But my sense is that there are more people doing a full-timeish largely unpaid gig writing software/managing a project than in the case of technical books--which people are more likely to do as a one-off project that they may even do partly on work time.
Development of the Linux kernel is largely funded by companies paying for developers to work on it (and by paying membership fees to the Linux Foundation to cover professional LF salaries like Linus').
Back when physical book stores existed, this is how I would buy books. I would go in and skim books and I would buy the ones I was interested in. It is nearly impossible to do this now as the remaining physical book stores can't carry all the books I'd like to skim and potentially buy.
Cory Doctorow in 2008:
> For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks to Tim O’Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.
* https://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/
Now that he's more established and has a fan base it may be less applicable (just like Stephen King may not want to give away his stuff), but if anyone is starting out, getting readers is a challenge in the first place.
FWIW:
I skimmed to see, but did not find, if you specify the target JavaScript version and coding style.
I can't keep up with the rapid change in JS Universe. And I have absolutely no opinions. I just want someone to declare their preferred idiom and stick to it. House rules for objectness, for error handling, for concurrency, for modules, and so forth.
So a project would declare "ES2015, Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition, eslint w/ Twitter rules 2018-09-01".
Thanks for listening.
https://runestone.academy/runestone/books/published/thinkcsp...
Do you recommend my first book be something like this, or something more "traditional", like O'Reilly's "Living Clojure" or "Clojure"?
I think the lightweight humor and good explanations is what kept me from getting discouraged, as some Clojure books did to me before I came across CFTBT.
Sadly it’s hard to recommend because prejudice against Perl
I mean, that's like saying C is good for embedded devices, true but definitely not the whole story. But it's been enough to get a few people to try it.
Wildbow is great at writing, kind of bad at monetization. If he sold any merch, his many fans would have bought lots of it. I'd love a a hoodie that had "Property of Parahuman Response Team ENE: Brockton Bay" on it. Or even just some black sweatpants with "VILLAIN" printed down one leg. I've given off and on with Patreon, but that is somehow much less compelling.
Edit: as for the rabbit hole, I spent a fair amount of my free time over the course of three months reading this. It definitely sucked me in.
1) beautiful print book - paid and giveaway
2) paid kindle on amazon
3) DRM free epub, pdf, mobi on gumroad - paid and free
there is a reason for all three cases.
my general agenda is that I wrote the book to a) improve the status quo of the topic (SEO) as it's a horrible b#lls#it driven discepline. and b) to reach new clients. these were the driving factors. the money return from the book is not a main motivator, for this it is too niche, as it targets developers who don't want to suffer under SEO anymore.
ad 1)
so I created a print book that gets displayed in the offices, so that people talk about it, easily share and borrow it. it is a paid product so that it percieved to have inherent value. also I don't want to make a loss with print. but I also give it away at workshops so that it spreads wildely. additonal I hope that in the future I can start from a higher knowledge level and that the knowledge stays longer in the organization.
ad 2)
the kindle store is a strong channel in its own. you can not set the price to zero, so it costs something. even if I promore the free DRM version (see 3) people download it via the kindle store, as it is easier.
ad 3)
DRM free on gumroad. free because DRM sucks. has a pricteag as if it's free($) onlye people might not see it as valueable. free with vouchers, as I regularly promote it via all kind of events.
I set it to 0 for some time in general on gumroad, there was no positive uplift in the long term, so I use promotion vouchers.
[1] the book is https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/b/understanding-seo, gumroad is https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news [with 100% voucher for hacker-news], Kindle is https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-SEO-Systematic-Approach... 5 stars, 16 reviews
Only a fluke meeting of the book with someone from the software house who create the book led to some increased popularity and sales, along with incremental improvements in sales from my youtube channel [1].
The book is only available in print form, as I've never trusted any DRM to be worthwhile, and nearly everyone I know who makes music does so with software they haven't paid for. I know this is entirely counter to the article and also everyone's experience on here, but I'm wondering if this is a little different as there aren't consultancies etc in the music tech segment. The most you'll get from someone who has read your book is a few hours' work (at normal rates) either classroom teaching, or one-to-one online.
At the current time (as nearly everything I normally do is face-to-face), the sales from the book are the only income I have; it's not a lot, but last month's sales were about half the baseline I need to pay my bills, so I can't complain. I know I could be completely wrong about this, but I can't imagine that giving it away would do anything other than decimate this income.
Actually he didn't follow the advice.
The new book would not be a “variant”, it would be a completely different book. To gain the expertise needed to to a good job with the new completely different book would require that I spend years studying Raku and thinking about what would work and how to make it work well. Even once I knew what I wanted to write about in HOP, that book took five years to write.
Even if someone were to pay me full-time to do nothing but produce a Raku book, it would still take me at least four years to do it.
It is not too late for you to become one.
use v5
use Stream 'node';
sub iterator_to_stream {
my $it = shift;
my $v = $it->();
return unless defined $v;
node($v, sub { iterator_to_stream($it) });
}
use v6;
sub iterator-to-stream ( Iterator $it ) {
Seq.new($it)
}That doesn't mean the course creators aren't still doing well. Just that there's almost always some kind of '90% off' sale or promotion available. So I find the list prices for courses on there to be mildly dishonest because hardly anybody pays anywhere near that price.
I don't let that stop me from buying courses via Udemy because I've been very happy with the quality of what I've gotten so far.
There's almost certainly a power law effect. I'm sure a (small) subset of people who do training/consulting/writing/instruction who have managed to build mostly fairly small-scale but very respectable businesses. The nice thing about video training course is that they're probably a better way for a solo practitioner to scale than most other things out there. Assuming they have the skillsets/talent for it of course.
[1]: http://from-a-to-remzi.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-case-for-fre...
I think this is a good compromise since I earn a little 'walking around money' and my stuff gets fairly widely read.
The super-power advantage of writing books is getting to meet interesting people and expand networking.
Fun story: some guy in China emailed me about five years ago that he was translating my old Java AI book and placing his name as the author. He said sorry but there was nothing I could do about it. It was strange, but I appreciated him being up front about it. My wife and I had recently returned from a fun trip to China (very friendly people, lots of interesting things to see) and to be honest I didn’t much care.
The author's point that having it online keeps the book relevant is also a great point to consider. An online book is now integrated with the rest of the internet, instead of being firewalled away into obscurity.
-- I can't remember where I've read it.
I have absolutely no issues with paying for most books; especially if they are about my work. I do have an issue with “price-gouging” books, though. I think those are usually textbooks. The markup on them can be eye-watering, and I give them a hard pass.
When I write, I like to make it public and free. I have been approached about having my work behind a paywall, and have declined. Maybe I’ll consider it in the future, but I’m not doing it for the money.
As the author of the post mentioned, writing a book is a fraught process. It would have to be an Oprah’s Book Club special to make it truly worth it, monetarily, and that ain’t happening with geek books.
I do it mainly because I love writing. I’ve been doing it since I was a child. It also helps me to learn, and organize my own thoughts.
But that’s just me. YMMV
One option is honor system: pay if you can, see for ex https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/1254396387703361536 .
Another option is where people can buy the book and pay for other people as well.
However, I’m also kind of glad to see that the typesetting was done by a real person earning a living as a craftsman designer. While I selfishly would love to have access to automated book-quality typesetting I’m also in favour of craftsfolk having a place in the economy!
https://github.com/mjdominus/mod
The main desideratum was that I should be able to use the same sources to generate TeX to send to the compositors, HTML for the web version, and a plain text version output. (In the end I sent the HTML version to the compositors instead.) Also I wanted inline tests, so that when the book said "function `foo` returns 7" I could have an inline test that would check that automatically. I added some features I needed that POD didn't have, like a code to generate an index entry. And I fixed some things I didn't like about POD.
Markdown hadn't been invented yet or I probably would have modified that instead of POD. Pandoc hadn't been invented yet or I probably would have used it.
But Mod didn't take long to make, and it worked well enough that it didn't get in the way while I wrote a book in it.
Here's a review: https://barristerblogger.com/2019/05/16/pozner-dodd-cross-ex...
2) when selecting IP to copy and distribute, that of tenacious litigators must be close to the bottom of the list
For this author, and many others, the book is somewhat of a loss-leader of some sort: a form of marketing for a consultant, freelancer, aspiring politician, scientist, activist, or similar. PhD theses often work like this, too.
In that scenario, the royalty cheque is sometimes nice, but not considered necessary. If given a choice between, say, ten people reading the book for free versus one person buying it and never getting around to reading it, these authors will always chose the former.
But there is, quite obviously, a different kind: the professional author. GoT wouldn't have happened within George RR Martin's lifetime if he had to teach English or run a really strange cult on the side to pay rent. Many non-fiction authors fall into the same category. James Gleick might be one people here enjoy.
This isn't necessarily a binary distinction. Noam Chomsky, Richard Feynman, or Edward Tufte could have all lived quite comfortably on just their salary as professors and the occasional Nobel prize. But their success as authors drastically increased their freedom, possibly allowing them to take risks in their work they would have avoided otherwise, like talking truth to NASA (and/or capitalism).
As an analogy, consider the not-uncommon offer to work for free on someone's (commercial) software project in exchange for "exposure". This is more common among designers and musicians these days, but used to happen quite frequently to programmers as well. It's exactly the same logic, and not always entirely wrong. Nonetheless, it has become somewhat of a running joke/faux pas/universally recognised sign of a person having no clue of the industry and to be avoided.
I would have never read, or later purchased, the testing goat book for Django if it wasn’t freely available because I would have simply selected another source.
People don’t really do that with fiction because there isn’t 9 million different Harry Potters that are all almost equally good.
A further benefit of having a lot of people read your tech book is that you get more feedback which makes it easier to improve it, and a lot of tech books are really rather terrible until they’ve been heavily edited. And unlike fiction there is often a correct way to do things with tech.
1. You can put your book online for free and sacrifice extrinsic reward (money) for greater intrinsic reward (popularity, impact on the world).
2. You can maximize your financial income by only selling the book.
I thought I was making that choice when I decided to put "Game Programming Patterns" online for free, but that's not actually how it turned out. I have made much more money from the book than I would have if I'd gone with a traditional publisher and not put the book online for free. The model I have now is something like the classic marketing funnel. To make the most money from a thing, you need to have as many people go through this series of steps as possible:
1. Know that the product exists.
2. Decide to want it.
3. Be just willing to pay the price to acquire it. (Anything less and you're leaving money on the table.)
4. Keep as much of that money for yourself as possible. (In other words, reduce costs.)
For technical books, most people don't get past step 1. Putting the book online dramatically improves that. Of the people who do, many stop at step 2. There are so many articles out there, it's easy to convince yourself you don't need a acquire a whole book. Again, putting the book online helps: you can try before you buy.
Step 3 is the interesting one. Putting the book online for free obviously leaves, like, all money on the table. But what I have found is that there a self-selected market segmentation seems to come into play. Many people do read the book for free, but some choose to pay anyway.
Step 4 is the dirty secret of the big technical book publishers. They take an embarrassingly large chunk of each sale. That could maybe be justified in the old days of publishing when you needed to run a whole printing press and maintain relationships with independent book publishers and all that. But, frankly, they do not do enough to justify how much they take. Self-publishing fixes that, at the expense of having to do more of the work and management yourself. I had to find a freelance copy editor, and typeset and design the cover. But I effectively "got paid" to do that work at a much better rate than it would have cost me to "pay" a publisher to do that by giving them the lion's share of each sale.
I don't want to generalize too much from my one single data point, but it seemed that for me, the increased widening of the first two steps and the greater share at step 4 more than compensated for the money left on the table for some readers at step 3. It was a clear enough signal that I'm taking the same approach with my second book. And, equally importantly, I really liked the subjective experience of it being my book and being able to put it out into the world exactly the way I wanted to.
Most of the books are not worth it
There's nothing to 'pay back'. Rentier capitalism has us convinced copying is theft, but only because the propertied classes have created artificial scarcity and high exploitative rents. [1] After we move to Commons based peer production, we will have a new reality, and artificial scarcity will be seen for what it is: domination.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
I'm convinced we've just taken the industrial age economic and banking system and copied it into the digital age, but we haven't accounted for the near-zero marginal cost of information creation, storage and transmission. So the actual scarcity vs. the artificial scarcity of things is off.
I think we can get there by valuing knowledge differently: subsidizing the cost of knowledge production and distribution - all costs from the start - so that it doesn't need a business model once produced. I think that's the key. To read more on this phenomenon I enjoy Yochai Benkler, who came up with the term 'Commons based peer production'. Some examples include Linux, Github, Open Source Ecology, Precious Plastic, Wikipedia, Sensorica, Valueflows (Holo-REA) and Holochain.
+
"Money is just information, a way we measure what we trade, nothing of value in itself." [1] [2]
I am closely following the work of Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun of the MetaCurrency Project. They've been working on digital age wealth acknowledgement systems (protocol cooperativism) for over a decade: https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwmM5Nb6hiE
[2] http://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/05/14/id-53, http://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/11/05/id-55 (if down, you can get an archived copy on Archive.org)
"Oh yes, this is true..my experiencing with my book [link]"...
Tech/software dev books make extremely little money. The #1 reason people write such books -- knowing that they're unlikely to see much more than a coffee or two of proceeds -- is for reputation/career development. Getting a book "published", even through actual publishing houses, is the easiest part of the process: Agile printing and the absence of editorial standards makes it a close to riskless process for them.