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Comment by vladmihalcea | Hacker News Reader

I'm the book author, so if you have any questions, let me know.

You mentioned publishers leave you with 10% of the sales. I can't wrap my head around that, how is that possible and acceptable by authors?

Content is easy to get for publishers, and they have to often invest significant time and money to get the book to market. They often take a risk on printing X copies, and they don't sell, the publisher eats the cost. You can say to just print on demand, but that is costlier per book. They often have to provide editors to clean up the book, do marketing through their channels, and promote the book.

Most authors don't do all this guy did. Most simply write the text and leave it there. Publishers do everything else this guy did to move the book.

(I've written parts of several books, and have received small royalty checks for well over a decade)

We both seem to have direct experience of working with a publisher, but I think you are overstating the effort of most publishers these days. Too many books, even from reputable publishers, are of fairly low quality, which as a reader bothers me even more than stuff like this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/markos/49564386913/in/datepost...

Also, I don't see why them taking on a risk of printing upfront should be offloaded on the author through smaller fee.

When either party takes on more risk in a deal they want compensation. This is perfectly understandable.

If an author wants access to the distribution network of a certain publisher, they must pay.

Ever wonder why the biggest authors don’t simply run their own publishing houses? They understand the value provided. And they rarely if ever reach 50% in royalties (I’ve never heard it, in many decades of following professional writing).

What I do find is authors generally have no idea of the value provided. In which case they’re welcome to self publish. But self-publishing rarely results in great sales either.

Both avenues have pros and cons. That said, I’d likely still choose a publisher, since my time is also important, and I’d prefer not having to be average in a dozen skills when I can invest effort at being much better at a few.

I don't understand it myself which is why I chose to self-publish. Very easy nowadays, even if you want to be on Amazon.

Historically, publishers take on the cost of marketing and printing. Printing copies of a book demonstrates their capital investment in the work and that helps unlock distributors, retailers. Often publishers would supply editing and formatting/publication services too.

Now, for ebooks, the marginal cost of "printing" is close to zero. But editing and marketing are still expensive. I think there's a lot of momentum towards preserving the historical royalties even if the business has changed.

The music industry seems to have made this leap to electronic distribution (near exclusively in their case). If royalties have been upset in that industry then we should probably expect something similar for writers.

There are a lot of things publishers do behind the scenes that no one thinks about. Sure there are things like marketing and printing. There are a lot of other little things too. Content editing. Publishers often hire another person who is at least or more knowledgeable on the subject to review what the author says. They make sure that all the code works, does it make sense in certain contexts etc. When code doesn't work, its the reviewer's fault.

There are other things too like a content editor. Does the entire book flow together (2+ authors, that's a big deal). Is the language style the same? Are there spelling and punctuation errors? Is the formatting correct? Someone has to build the index at the back of the book. (Sometimes the author does this). Lots of things. Not to mention, the company puts their name behind the book. I buy a lot of books simply based on the publisher and pass on others. As an author, you're paying them to lend their reputation to your work.

> There are a lot of things publishers do behind the scenes that no one thinks about.

That is definitely part of the publisher's pitch, but from what I gather, that is less than they'd like you to believe.

> Content editing.

Good editing is invaluable, but it's important to distinguish different kinds of editing. "Developmental editing" is high-level "what kind of book does the market want us to write" guidance. If you're writing a technical book, you shouldn't need that. You should already be plugged into the scene for the people who want your book and know what they want. Your domain expertise should also mean audience expertise.

An editor at a publisher doesn't have your domain expertise, and probably doesn't know the audience as well as you do. When I wrote a book on software architecture for games several years ago, an editor at O'Reilly wanted me to use Objective-C as the language (instead of basically pseudo-codish C++). Think about how much I would have regretted that choice today.

Line editing and copyediting are making sure your stuff is grammatically correct and consistent. This is really helpful, but you can also simply hire a freelancer to do it.

> Publishers often hire another person who is at least or more knowledgeable on the subject to review what the author says.

They pay technical editors a pittance. (I know, I've been asked to be a technical editor for several books.) Those that have the deep skill you want are too busy and worth too much to do it. Those that say yes probably won't do as good a job as you'd hope. It's simply not worth their time to go through your book with a fine-toothed comb. They'll find a lot of stuff, but you really can't rely on them. And, again, this is something you could hire yourself if you wanted to.

For my two books, I simply made the repo for them open and let people file bugs. That has been much more thorough than a couple of busy technical editors would be.

> There are other things too like a content editor. Does the entire book flow together (2+ authors, that's a big deal). Is the language style the same? Are there spelling and punctuation errors? Is the formatting correct?

Yeah, this is important. Though it's worth thinking about how much you're willing to pay them to do this. If it's worth it to you, great. But it may not be.

> Someone has to build the index at the back of the book. (Sometimes the author does this).

Yeah, indexing is a chore. You'll do a better job than an indexer would because you know the domain better. You can also, honestly, just kind of half-ass it. Indexes are less important now that you can search in ebooks.

> Not to mention, the company puts their name behind the book. I buy a lot of books simply based on the publisher and pass on others. As an author, you're paying them to lend their reputation to your work.

This is true and is a big one. The big publishers have done a great job of building prestigious brands and they loan you that prestige. That can be very valuable. This matters in particular for fiction where there is a sea of garbage. With technical books, it's so hard for an author to finish a book that I think it's less of an issue. Also, frankly, I think a lot of publishers have been diluting their brands by publishing stuff that isn't that good.

Either way, readers will come to your book largely because of the topic and hopefully because they know who you are already. A pretty woodcut animal and O'Reilly logo on the cover only goes so far. How much is that worth to you?

The way to look at this is: will a traditional publisher increase my sales enough to more than pay for the share they take? If so, do it. If not, they're just leeching off you.

As someone who came down on the other side of this decision, I agree with these points. It's something that I've lightly regretted, but I wouldn't have started the process without Manning. Also being published with Manning has given me career opportunities that I wouldn't have dreamed of without them.

Ultimately, I've decided to go with the traditional route because I don't have the audience.

I don't think it's unreasonable that for many people, a publisher with experience and an existing distribution network & agreements, perceived authority as a "real" publisher, and a marketing budget and plan will result in 10x the sales. I've had a friend self publish in another industry and getting books shipped around the world and in stores is a hassle as a lone operator - and that's if people even know you exist.

If you live in the US (she didn't) then Amazon can be a decent option for a lot of reach though.

Amazon and other similar print on demand services also help with this but it's not suitable for all products (full colour can be a problem).

>perceived authority as a "real" publisher,

With certain professional books publishing with a known publisher definitely gives the book a certain "gravitas" (deserved or not) that it may not have if you independently publish. And if you're mostly writing a book to burnish your professional reputation (as is often the case) rather than to make money, that may be a pretty good tradeoff even if you could have made more in direct sales if you published yourself.

To be honest, I'm not sure publishers do an awful lot for you directly though you will probably have to pay out of your pocket for things like editing services if you go it yourself, but the name does still often matter.

I was approached by two "real" publishers asking me whether I want to publish my book with them.

I had declined both of them as they only offered 10% royalty rates.

I didn't have to pay for editing. I did everything myself: writing, diagrams, proofreading, marketing.

In fact, I decided to self-publish it after reading this article from Antonio Goncalves about his Java EE 7 book:

https://antoniogoncalves.org/2014/09/16/the-uncensored-java-...

Everyone should obviously do things as they individually see fit. But, in my experience, publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general. All I know is that I find it hard to even publish a blog post without typos if someone else doesn't edit it--and sometimes even then.

(The good news is that it's not really expensive to pay someone to do if you don't really need the services of a full-blown editor who is advising on structure, flow, etc.)

I'm using Grammarly to correct my spelling mistakes. It also provides tips about phrasing.

> publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general.

Agreed, but it's easy to hire a freelance copy editor. In fact, that's often what traditional publishers do too.

Yep. The one time I really wanted one, I just paid an intern working for a magazine editor friend of mine a few hundred dollars and that was fine.

IMO, it's not something you can rely on software for although software catches a lot of course. The one time I didn't do it worked out OK. But I had a co-author and we had sufficiently reworked the (somewhat shorter) book enough times over a fairly long period that I decided it had had enough fresh eyes on it to stand on its own.

And of course publishers aren't perfect either. I've found a few typos in my last book which did go through a traditional publisher even though I also proofread it pretty carefully. (One mistake was in front matter which I added fairly late on which makes me suspect there would have been a lot more errors in the book if I didn't check it carefully myself.)

By far the biggest thing we've missed with the book I mentioned was the distribution and marketing reach. It was a niche craft industry so it was possible to get interest from individual stores and retailers, but since demand came piece by piece it was only really possible to ship one or two boxes of books at a time (at an average cost of around ~$10 per book via courier, depending on country) rather than leveraging cheap container shipping along with a bunch of different titles into a warehouse or as part of a big push campaign, like a publisher could.

I did a lot of the editing myself, my writing is fine, but my feedback was mostly typos/grammar/phrasing - not a coherent look at the overall structure and content which a more experienced editor may do.

Same practice here in Germany as well.

Sad practice is, that some local publishers which have a working niche refuse to sell ebooks. They rely solemly on traditional hardcover publishing.

No ebooks, yes. But it is - sadly - working for them.

> how is that possible and acceptable by authors?

I had no problem accepting just 10% of my book sales - without going through a traditional publisher, it would have been impossible for me to get my book carried by physical book stores. Of course, this was 10 years ago, when physical book stores were more common; this may not be such a consideration today.

You get an advance. And in the past it used to be possible to get a royalty stream too. In the 80s and 90s, some authors made fortunes like this.

Today, you'll only get an advance - or maybe small royalties on low-volume sales and no advance.

If you self-pub, you have to consider the market very carefully. If you look at the Leanpub best-sellers they're mostly senior-level niche performance/career dev topics in mainstream corporate languages - like specific performance tweaks in Java.

The bigpubs usually do broad-brush topics like "How to Visual Studio". They're aimed more at beginners and side-movers. They have the marketing links to sell into the big physical bookstores, but for tech that market is smaller than you might expect, so they're unlikely to make anyone rich.

But... it's worth considering all of this is just another example of product/market fit. You get the best results from growing a customer base and giving them what they really want, just as you do for any other business, but with some added complications around product creation and distribution.

You might want to write a fun book about something creative and unusual in tech, but even with a following it's unlikely to sell many copies.

With selfpub you have some control over the big picture. Bigpubs just do what they do. Upfront money and your name on real shelves in a real bookstore may seem sweet, but there are huge costs to authors down the line, and mostly they're not a good deal now.

I've just signed a contract to write a book and I get an advance and then 10% (goes up to 12/15% if more are sold).

One major reason is that I am more likely to finish it and get it done than if I rely on it myself.

Another reason is that I want to be known for one niche, this will help and if that works out then I could likely self-publish and keep more of the profit.

It is slightly more nuanced than I want as much cash as possible for this thing.

Does the 10% go against your advance or does it start immediately?

An advance is, just what it sounds, an advance payment on royalties. Publishing, unlike film/tv or music generally doesn't play games with royalties, so, if the book sells, once you've earned enough royalties to cover the advance you will get additional earnings.

Publisher deadlines are both a blessing and a curse. I did the last book I wrote through a publisher. It was a concept I'd had bouncing around in my head for a while but hadn't made much progress on beyond a rough mental headline. When a publisher wanted to run with it, it forced me to focus on it--fortunately during a period when doing so wasn't too onerous.

On the other hand, I've had other periods when it would have been difficult.

The other thing with publishers is that you're now tied into publishing industry economics. So you can't typically write, say, 100 page book even if that's what you think is the best match for you and the subject. (This is probably the thing that would be most likely to keep me from using a publisher the next time.)

It's worth noting that the 10% vs 80/95% figures are comparing different totals. For a traditional publisher, the 10% is against the price of the book (depending on the contract this might be against cover price or against the price the publisher actually receives from the wholesaler). It's not, like the self-publishing platforms, the percentage of net profit after costs like printing etc.

Yes, good point.

And once upon a time, buying, inking, moving pulp was not cheap.

Probably less than you think. When there was a lot of discussion around ebook pricing back in the day, it turned out that ebooks weren't really all much cheaper to produce than physical mass market books. The costs associated with the physical books were only around $2 per copy.

I thought 15% was the industry standard. But yeah, that's how it acceptable: it's the industry standard.

At one time publishers did all the advertising and actually "publishing" (printing). They also took the risk of course.

They'll tell you about their competition offering you 8%, and they're not even lying.

They told me that it will help me get a better job. At the time I was working for Red Hat on the Hibernate project.

I said that I doubt they could help me find a better job considering that my book is mostly about Java Persistence and Hibernate :D

To make matters worse, the 10% figure can actually be a bit on the high side based on experience.

I've gone the traditional publishing route with three books so far.

Making money wasn't the goal.

A traditional publisher organized a technical review, editorial review, cover design, type setting and project management for me; the result was better than I could have done on my own.

Sure, I could have hired an editor and a cover designer and all that, but would have been exhausting and a financial risk.

So, I went with a publisher, and accepted that I'd likely never recover the advance that the publisher payed.

If you're after exposure or the best result, a traditional publisher can still be the way to go.

The main flipside is that you also have to play by the publisher's rules, so length, deadlines, and (importantly) price. You probably can't set a lower price or give away digital copies like you can if you self-publish which may work against a desire to use the book for exposure/reputation/etc.

At least my publisher (Apress) is pretty open to giving away free copies for review (everything that helps bring reviews on Amazon is a plus), and limited discount vouchers etc.

But yes, you don't have all the freedom that you have with leanpub & co.

I have a book through Apress as well. Among other things, their contract was pretty generous about my repurposing small chunks of book material for other purposes--which I've taken full advantage of. They also offered some sort of discount so that an organization could have me do a book signing though I don't know the financial details. (And said organization might have done this if it weren't through a known publisher.)

On the other hand, the price is set quite a bit higher than I would have set it personally for maximum exposure. And I don't have the right to broadly distribute free electronic copies to just anyone I want.

That's what I'm receiving from Manning for Rust in Action. I didn't sign the book contract with a traditional publisher for the money, I signed up for the credibility.

Also, that 10% is after discounts and payment processing fees. So it works out at about $2/book.

I bought your book very recently! I was reading the online version and it kept losing my place, so I bought the ebook version for the epub. It was recommended on Twitter when I asked for Rust resources.

Thanks!

Under what circumstances would you expect someone to discover your book (they can't buy it if they don't know about it).

If I want to learn a particular software tool (Kafka, Kubernetes, git). I might go to Amazon or Google and search the name of tool, possibly with "book" appended.

If I want to learn how to do functional programming, I'll search for "functional programming book" or something like that.

What's a search term that I'd be likely to use that would lead me to your book? Or is there one?

That's where my blog, https://vladmihalcea.com/blog/ or my StackOverflow answer, https://stackoverflow.com/users/1025118/vlad-mihalcea come into play.

Most of my readers get to know me from these resources prior to knowing about my book.

If everything in the book was also in your blog posts, didn't that dampen sales of the book? This is my fear, if I give it away, no one will buy it.

Packaging, convenience, lack of redundancy and logical structure are worth a lot if your time is valuable. ConversionXL sell video courses for $600 each that have ~the same content as their endless series of blog posts. But the video course has a beginning, middle and end. It’s a polished finished product. The blog posts are raw material. Plenty of academics do similar things when writing books. There’s vanishingly little in any of Bryan Caplan’s that didn’t appear on his blog first but the books are far superior at conveying a theory, rather than more or less disconnected facts.

Exactly.

I would assume that his blog posts are what convinced quite a few people to actually buy the book. That said, I'm not too familiar with the book sales industry.

I am familiar with consulting. Initially I thought that giving all special knowledge away for free would be the worst thing I could possibly do.

Boy was I wrong.

Nowadays I give presentations detailing step by step exactly what people need to do in order to achieve some outcome, with as goal that they could do it 100% by themselves if they want to.

My theory is that this leads to more sales due to me becoming more visible + it builds large amounts of trust + the best possible clients are going to be very busy + the best possible clients are aware that they could implement all my advice by themselves, but if having me on board as well increases odds of success by as little as 10% (or increases the total impact by as little as 10%), it is still going to be a win to have me on board as well.

That's true. My blog is thd front-end to every product or service that I'm selling. It's a very useful marketing tool.

If you are good at something and the customer doesn't really understand the process then you can make it look easy, and no one wants to spend a lot of money to pay someone to do something easy. But if the customer knows what it actually takes to solve the problem, the real value of having someone else do it is much more evident. Even if you feel like what you do is easy, there are people out there who consider it indistinguishable from magic. The uninformed are impressed by the magic, the informed are impressed by the magician.

No, that's not an issue at all. I have hundreds of articles on my blog that are also covered in the book:

https://vladmihalcea.com/tutorials/hibernate/

But reading the book is easier than browsing the articles because the book has a certain structure while the articles focus on a single topic only.

Many in this space have made good revenue by literally just packaging blog posts together with a nice cover and no additional editing. Maybe a small intro for each group of related posts.

If folks really like your content, they'll often pay for the book just to support you.

I have the entire text of my first book available online for free. My sales have been way more than I ever expected, year after year.

It accomplishes a few things:

* While I was writing the book, I published each chapter online as I finished it. The top of each page has a link to my mailing list. This was a great way to build an audience. By the time the book was complete, I had a mailing list with thousands of people I could tell about it.

* It lets readers try before they buy, which builds confidence.

* It makes for a very effective web presence. People searching for the topic are likely to find it.

* People really love it. Even if they never buy it, they become fans because they've been given something for free. That in turn makes them walking advertisers for the book. I've had people who read the entire book online buy a copy afterwards just to say thanks.

* It enables people who can't afford it to still have access to the material. This may not make me more money, but it's important to me.

Thanks for sharing your process. it is very insightful. How did you found out that JAVA is your niche?

edit: This might sound vague, I'm curious because I'm trying to figure out my own niche.

I've been using Java since 2005 so it's the ecosystem I know best. When I started my blog, I tried various topics, but the Java Persistence and Hibernate got the most traffic.

Since I liked the topic, I decided to write a book about high-performance data access with Java.

What program did you use to actually write your book? Word/Pages?

What did you use for the blog?

I wrote the book in MarkDown using IntelliJ IDEA. The book is stored on GitHub and LeanPub fetches the files and renders it.

My blog is running on WordPress.com. I'm using a Business plan so I can better customize the website.

https://vladmihalcea.com/wordpress-business-plan/

Congrats on your book launch!

Thanks. I pre-launched it in November 2015 and launched the final version in October 2016. By 2019, I had managed to sell over 5000 copies and make over 100k. I'm thinking of releasing a second edition in 2021 or 2022.

That’s incredible man!! All the best for your second book!

Thanks

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