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Comment by Samuel_Michon | Hacker News Reader

You're confusing books with manuscripts. Please don't call these things you sell 'books'.

"A manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels.

[...]

While it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only be able to write half as many novels."

As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...

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"A rose by any other name..."

I'm the author of 2 traditionally-published books. ISBNs, dead trees, the works.

The first one (Flexible Rails) was something I self-published on Lulu as I wrote it. It started at about 200 pages and ended up over 500 pages before I did a deal with a traditional publisher.

At what point was it a book? My publisher approached me about publishing my book, not my manuscript (or rose). People all over the world bought my book when it was just a PDF. It made my mortgage payments for a while. In fact about 70% of my profit over my book's lifetime was from PDF sales.

As its author, I considered it a book when I first published it. My readers did too. Publishers like O'Reilly, the Prags and Manning probably consider their beta / early access books to be books.

Finally (since I'm typing on a phone), ebooks are to physical books like web apps are to shrinkwrapped software: you can do way more releases. At what point is a release real? Our answer is it is when you have paying customers. That is a commitment to your readers, and it helps you write and keeps you motivated.

So, to sum up the ramble: in 5 years almost all books will be ebooks, most will have multiple releases (including before being "finished"), and this author's opinion will be quaint.

What you're saying makes perfect sense when applied to technical/non-fiction, but as Stross is writing sci-fi/horror, I'm -- to be honest -- a bit irritated by your use of "quaint." What does multiple releases have to do with a mystery novel? "The killer was Dr. Melville in v1, but I fixed that in v2"? And in anticipation, multiple releases != releasing a chapter at a time. That's a serial, and goes back at least to Dickens. I'm pretty sure that Stephen King tried out a "pay-per-chapter" novel once, but believe it wasn't finished. And even in the case of serials, for most authors, that's just the path to complete mediocrity; unless you know exactly where the story is going and how you're going to get there, an editor is still essential. Are you going to pull the previous three chapter releases because you've decided to put them in the middle of the book? Or refund people for the second chapter because you've decided to drop the character that it introduced?

Will there be a lot of self-published ebooks in 5 years? Yeah, maybe; but the idea that publishing houses is going the way of the dodo, that they deliver no value to the consumer, is best confined to a specific set of genres.

Well, as an aspiring Fantasy writer I fully intend to release my first book in "beta" and refine it over a number of months :)

In my experience of writing occasional short stories online, Sci-Fi/Fantasy readers love updates.

I mean; quite often as a fantasy reader myself I think "hmm, I wonder how that character got there" or "what is her backstory". The ability for the writer to insert those things, fix plot/canon errors (as well as spelling/grammar) and other things pointed out by the reader is really cool

(Don't get me wrong; whilst I enjoy those prospects I'm not suggesting traditional publishing and "hardware" books (:P) will die - I hope not!)

Stross will agree that some of his dead tree books (Jennifer Morgue in UK) are full of typos / errors.

I'm baffled why the Kindle doesn't allow crowd-sourcing to mark these errors for fixing in later versions, and then allow people to download the new version over their old version.

Completely agreed on the crowd-sourcing of typos, that would be very useful. I just got an updated version of Programming Clojure, and the experience was wonderful.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be irritating. What I was intending by the use of "quaint" was to say that the following ideas will be considered quaint in 5 years:

- "ebooks aren't 'real' books"

- "in-progress books aren't 'real' books"

I did not mean to imply the following:

- "any book that's is published on paper is quaint"

- "any book that is finished before being published is quaint"

You brought up Dickens and serials. I totally agree with you! I've been bringing up Dickens when I've been talking about Leanpub to authors (and a room full of publishing industry people) for years.

I am absolutely not claiming that Leanpub invented serials, self-publishing or beta books.

Serials in fiction go back to Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arabian Nights, etc.

What we are calling "Lean Publishing" is the act of self-publishing an in-progress book. Specifically, here's my full definition:

"Lean Publishing is the act of self-publishing a book while you are writing it, evolving the book with feedback from your readers and finishing a first draft before optionally using the traditional publishing workflow."

The notion of self publishing is not new, and the Pragmatic Programmers, O'Reilly and Manning have all published and sold in-progress technical books for years. I think the Pragmatic Programmers were the ones who did it well first.

I wrote a manifesto about Lean Publishing, which is where the above definition is from. It's freely available here: http://leanpub.com/manifesto

I'm also selling an in-progress book of it, of course. My intention is not to promote that book, so I won't link to it, but to bring it up to ask questions about whether you would consider it a book. It's short: it's currently 50 pages, about the length of On Bullshit (a real book). Almost all the content is in the free manifesto, which is an essay on a web page. So is Lean Publishing a real book? People have bought the ebook and read it on computers, Kindles and iPads. If it's not real yet, when will it be real? When it's printed? When it has an editor?

Finally, you focus a lot on mediocrity and the role of publishers. I've thought a lot about this too; my ideas are here: http://leanpub.com/manifesto#what-does-lean-publising-mean-f...

Sorry if my tone came across as being more irritated than I actually was; and I appreciate your clarifications. Also, I didn't notice that you were mentioned in the grandparent; I probably would have interpreted your remarks more charitably if I had known that you were involved in the leanpub project.

Love On Bullshit! But that takes me back to my original point; I love my Kindle, have read all of cstross's articles on the challenge of ebooks, and don't have any problem calling an ebook a "real" book. And from both a technical and philosophical perspective, I understand and sympathize with leanpub (and thanks for the links; this is the first I've heard of your company, and it's great to see you've put so much thought into it).

My original point was simply that I can appreciate the interative nature of writing a manuscript, and getting feedback is essential. But I think there are large swaths of literature which are simply not suitable for the average consumer to provide that kind of feedback, because the very process of reading the draft ruins your ability to enjoy the end result. And since many of my colleagues in the software business don't tend to read those sorts of books (or ebooks), I probably should have made more of an effort making my point, rather than being snarky.

Thanks for replying. I agree that publishing in-progress is an easier sell to a technical book author or a business book author (or any non-fiction author, frankly) than to a novelist. This is especially true since in a non-fiction book where the subject matter is changing so fast, publishing in-progress is the best way to avoid your words being obsolete when read.

However, for a fiction author, publishing in-progress has its merits too. First, given the number of writers in the world, it's a mathematical certainty that there's a really good story that exists only on some author's laptop right now, and all that s/he has to show for it is rejection letters. (Or the author could be so shy that they haven't even submitted it to anyone yet.) Lean publishing on Leanpub could help this author get their work out there and overcome the fear of publishing. (It would be really cool if one day Leanpub enables some great work of literature to be discovered...)

But publishing is special. Even if you've been creating lots of previews and have no interested readers, the first time you click the publish button and make your book available for purchase it is a scary thing to do. (This is a lot more so than tweeting or blogging.) I was even nervous clicking publish on my in-progress manifesto book, and I'm the cofounder of Leanpub! I think this is because most authors (myself included) have a deep respect for books and publishing. Saying that your words are worth reading is one thing, saying that they constitute a book worth reading is a big deal.

That said, we believe that the Lean Startup principles do apply to books, and that releasing more often can create a better work. Publishing in-progress can give authors some of the feedback that really good editors can provide. With my first book, I actually got really good feedback both from readers when I self-published and from my technical editor once I signed with a publisher after the first book version was done. But frankly, the reader feedback was more important: a reader found a security bug in my code, I got to ask my readers how important they thought REST would be to them (this was many years ago), etc, etc. Now, most readers gave me no feedback. This is expected. But the level of feedback I got from the most engaged readers was superior to what I would have gotten from even a good development editor. (The technical depth of these readers was equal to that of the technical reviewers, who are only typically engaged near the end of a technical book's development.)

Finally, publishing in-progress has another advantage: it helps avoid writer's block. This is because once you get in the habit of publishing, it removes the fear from it and just leaves the endorphin rush. This is similar to how continuous deployment in lean startups works, or how regular exercise at the gym works. Lean publishing makes releasing new versions a habit, and habits are powerful things...

There are definite value-adds by publishers, but it varies hugely by author, publisher, and genre. I can certainly see it for novelists, but a lot of technical-book publishers, especially the lower-tier ones, do very minimal editing of manuscripts, and are as likely as not to screw something up when they do (they rarely have subject-matter experts on staff). Academic book publishers also vary hugely, both in how involved they are, and in how good their editing is.

"a lot of technical-book publishers, especially the lower-tier ones, do very minimal editing of manuscripts"

It shows. I notice when a manuscript hasn't been taken care of by a good editor before going to print. I can't think of a single genre in which editing is not necessary.

NB: I'm a publisher of non-fiction books, primarily lifestyle and comp sci. My dad's a publisher, my mom's an author, my brother is a photographer for print. I'm familiar with the amount of work it takes to turn a manuscript into a book.

I've also seen numerous cases where editors have screwed up the original text of a technical publication in semantically critical ways. This holds especially true for editors who remain a few decades behind in technology, and don't quite grasp the concept of providing diffs, as well as the concept of having the author review the changes.

Such a distinction might exist in the traditional publishing world (the one with a sign "deposit manuscripts here" right above the trash can), but no such distinction exists in an all-electronic medium. Authors produce books; editors, illustrators, graphic designers, and others might provide help that improves the quality of the book, but they don't magically imbue it with a "book" status that it didn't already have.

Johannes Gutenberg would beg to differ. A publisher is not a requirement for a book any more than a record company is a requirement for a song.

Perubalsem it's not à requirement per se, but would you call 12 tracks recorded on an iPhone in someone's basement, without any post production, a professionally produced album?

The same is true for books. Anyone can write some texts amounting to 300 pages of characters on pages. That doesn't make it a book, IMHO.

There are lots of professionally produced albums that are utter crap, just like there are lots of professionally produced books that are utter crap.

To think that an intermediary is necessary to create a long-form work is demonstrably false cargo cult thinking. Books were printed for centuries before publishing companies came along.

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