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Comment by dd82 | Hacker News Reader

https://martin.kleppmann.com/2020/09/29/is-book-writing-wort...

Martin Kleppmann, the author behind Designing Data Intensive Applications, wrote about his experience as well, and it shows an interesting contrast with Resig's experience with digital publishing. As you can see in Martin's graph, ebook sales starting Sept 2014 were a _major_ part of his royalties due to it being available as "early release", and integration with the O'Reilly platform increased his exposure, and therefore royalties.

Its hard to guage accurately, but it seems O'Reilly + ebook sales contributed to about 2/3rds of his overall royalty returns, which is a pretty darn good result!

Of course, Kleppmann and Resig are writing about very different eras in terms of publishing, but I can't help but wonder if Resig would have a different experience if he was able to publish an equally relevant work in 2015 vs 2008.

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I knew this in loose terms but it's insane to see the revenue sharing percentages going to the creator vs. the publisher.

"My contract with the publisher specifies that I get 25% of publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing, 10% of revenue from print sales, and 5% of revenue from translations."

Imagine a world where the creators actually are the primary financial beneficiaries and the pipes/infrastructure (aka Publishers) are compensated appropriately for their value. Without creators, Publishers cannot exist.

I can think of at least one bearded individual from Germany who would likely agree with you. :)

I haven't made a book with them, but Newline splits 50% on profit.

The publisher is gambling. I don’t know much about non-fiction, but regarding fiction they actually loose on most books and win big on a few. Would you think it’s better if publishers only published if they were really sure it would sell?

The publishers definitely take a risk, but back when I was involved in this, way before ebooks, the biggest part went to the booksellers. IIRC I got about 6% on book sales. If I ever do anything like that again, I'll be self-publishing, because the contractual shenanigans have left me very wary about dealing with publishers.

> The publisher is gambling.

The quantity of risk they take on is generally lower in non-fiction and has been going down dramatically over the past few decades. The publisher/author financial model was built for a world where:

- The publisher had to use expensive presses to print and bind hundreds of books at a time.

- The publisher had to maintain relationships with thousands of independent bookstores and ship boxes of books to them using relatively primitive logistics and shipping channels.

- Data on consumer demand and sales was hard to get and slow to update.

- Typesetting a book required expensive hardware, specialized skills, and tons of labor.

- Consumers had little information when choosing what books to buy, so a publisher's "brand" was an important and valuable signal for quality.

None of this is true any more. Authors are expected to produce near copy-ready manuscripts. Desktop publishing makes typesetting dramatically easier. Books can be printed on demand one at a time near the location where it is sold. Shipping today is highly optimized. Bookstores have consolidated into a small number of mega-chains, and most people are simply buying from Amazon today anyway. Consumers have access to reviews and lots of other data to make informed choices so couldn't care less what publisher logo is on the back of the book.

The fact that royalty rates have not changed to accommodate all of this is simply because authors are mostly unaware of this and let them get away with it.

You could always self-publish if you don't think publishers provide any value.

5% from translations... ha! I remember getting told by a foreign publisher that they were publishing a version in their native language. No royalties, they just thought I'd like to know. They did, however, send me a free copy, which was nice.

The thing is, can a publisher more than quadruple your sales? I think the top ones can.

Tangentially related: there's a guy in Poland running a blog about personal finance (i.e. some advice how to save money on your bills, or how to start investing in stocks, etc.) Some time ago he self-published a book, promoted it through social media, and of course through his blog. Later he made a blog post about how much money he made on that book. Believe it or not, but in 3.5 years, on the limited Polish market (the book was in Polish, so no more than 40 million people speaking the language worldwide) he grossed $2M in revenue, over $1M after-tax profit for about 90k copies sold.

For those of you who speak Polish (or are willing to go with Google Translate) here's the link:

https://jakoszczedzacpieniadze.pl/ile-zarobila-ksiazka-finan...

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=pl&tl=en&u=htt...

Adding another data point.

I wrote a book[0] (published yesterday!) and, so far, sales are about 3:1 digital to print+digital. For me the biggest sales figures so far occurred when early access (MEAP) was launched.

[0] https://www.manning.com/books/knative-in-action

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