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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

> I kept going because I wanted to understand the BEAM properly. There’s value in following the real logic, not just the surface explanations.

This resonates with me. That's the kind of drive that results in great output. Buying it just for that.

I've been approached by publishers several times throughout my career. Each time the process was similar: they had an idea, I had an idea, we tried to come to common ground, and then the deal fell through because we couldn't find any. E.g. I didn't want to write a Java book aimed at 14 year olds. They didn't want me to write about classloaders (or whatever niche subject I was diving into at the time).

Would love to learn how people find (non-empty) intersections of their passions & what readers want.

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Having written three books, what I found was that you either self publish or you write books that publishers want. Some of that is choosing publishers that specialize in certain types of books. Some publishers want “Learn AI in 21 Minutes with Python,” while others want “Deep Dark Secrets of Java Class Loaders.” O’Reilly is the best for niche technical stuff. Most of the rest of the industry wants beginner stuff because that’s where the volume is. Fortunately, self-publishing is easier than ever and various sites make it easy to sell copies online, so you don’t necessarily have to just give it away for free. But yea, there’s no magic formula here. If you really want to write something niche, don’t expect that a publisher will be interested in. Expect that you’ll have to self publish and promote it yourself.

That’s my experience too. My most recent book (my fifth) was closer to one publisher’s stated mission than 95% of its catalog, but they all but admitted that they had given up on it. After that rejection I didn’t have the energy to approach anyone else and did it myself instead. LeanPub first, then Amazon (print and kindle), Apple, Kobo, and Google.

Yea, good call. My books were all published back in the 1990s, back when paper was still king and you really couldn’t self-publish. Today, I’d probably look much more heavily at the self-publishing route, unless I wanted to write something uber-commercial. What was your experience with the order volume you could drive via self-publishing? Did you do any of your own marketing, or did you just list it in LeanPub and Amazon and let search engines lead people to it organically. If your subject was niche, there isn’t much volume in any case, but you want to get all you can of that small market.

More niche than mainstream I guess, but I do have what could be called a community, a large following on LinkedIn, a mailing list in the low thousands, paid subscribers, and a partner programme. Not enough to generate the kind of sales that anyone could live on, but not nothing either. Much of my blogging since publication has been in support of the book.

Two of my five did have publishers. I’m grateful for that experience. Learned a lot!

Nice! Thanks for the follow up.

> I kept going because I wanted to understand the BEAM properly. There’s value in following the real logic, not just the surface explanations.

Teaching is the best way to learn. I found that out when I started tutoring classmates for math in high school.

Same thing with writing a book. Something about learning a subject and turning around to speak/write out about it that really crystallizes the in-depth understanding beneath the surface.

It is easy to fool oneself into thinking one knows how something works, when in reality one only has a surface level understanding without really knowing about the internals. The serialization process exposes all the dangling pointers.

Your average person "knows" how a toilet works; water is pumped in to fill the cistern, released into the bowl when you pull the plunger, and flushes out the drain. Ask them to explain in detail how that happens, and most realize that they don't actually know how the cistern doesn't just keep filling until it overflows, or how it's not constantly leaking water into the bowl, or how the bowl can be flushed while neither overflowing nor draining completely.

This is also one of the most undersold benefits to hiring interns and entry-level developers.

Shameless self promotion but this is exactly how I ended up writing a book on strength training for climbing, just pursuing every rabbit hole I could.

I was ready to self publish but found a publisher who was interested. I had to make some changes to make it more readable, but you might have luck approaching publishers yourself

To justify your self promotion, can you tell me the name of your book? I've been climbing for over 30 years and seen the entire progression of training practices and would love to read a comprehensive book on the subject.

The Physiology of Climbing. I can mail you a free copy once I get back home this weekend - I’d love any feedback!

To be clear, I aimed to avoid prescribing certain routines through most of the book. I wanted to basically provide a knowledge foundation for readers to evaluate routines or create their own. So instead of saying eg you should campus board, I try to explain that power has to be trained separately from max strength if you care about increasing power

Happy to provide feedback! My email is my user name at Gmail. Thanks!

Can you share your book (by dm or replying here) plz? Thank you!

The Physiology of Climbing. If it looks interesting to you let me know and I can send you a copy!

Do we need to depend on Publishers? Can’t we write books independently? Or is it because of the “Brand” and other perks that come with Publishers?

Self publishing is easier than ever. But even shitty publishers like Packt still have a huge networking/marketing machine. My skillset does not include marketing, or checking whether a target audience exists.

If I want to write for just myself, I can just journal or blog. A book is a significant undertaking, writing one which no one reads would just be depressing.

someone should build a cooperative/self serve after stripe press books

Cooperative/self-serve? What does that mean?

yeah idk but something like curation is done by commitee (to try and maintain a minimum of quality overall) but as an author is super easy to appply/get editors/feedback/publish

(that’d be the self-serve part i guess)

tbh hardest is still marketing. good books are not only text but also covers and the like

So basically a business, where day to day is run by people focused on the day to day and everyone else can pick and choose to use their stuff with low friction, not having to focus on the day to day

The hardest part still being networking into others lives to distribute the message

You just re-invented our economy

> yeah idk but something like curation is done by commitee (to try and maintain a minimum of quality overall) but as an author is super easy to appply/get editors/feedback/publish

This is very much what pragprog.com is meant to be. I'm only on the volunteer curation committee so have less insight into the feedback cycle for authors post-acceptance, but every author who's published on the platform I've talked to has been pretty positive about the experience.

The OP didn't go into nearly as many (indeed, any) details as to why their second publishing attempt with them in particular did not work out, I'd be curious to learn more.

Yeah Pragmatic Programmers seems one of the best publishers on our industry

The problem with marketing just anything is that if you market too many things that people don't actually want, your brand starts to lose its power as people stop trusting that what you're advertising is something they might want.

Indeed curation remains the important function of any publication/brand/company

the gist of the idea: >

yeah idk but something like curation is done by commitee (to try and maintain a minimum of quality overall)

I mean in the blog post the author literally open sourced and then self-published his book after being dropped by multiple publishers for taking too long.

Publishers add the following:

1. marketing and reach

2. financial risk on paper copies

3. Production services (e.g. editing and artwork)

If you don’t need those or can get them some other way (e.g. hire an independent editor), then you are better off self publishing and not giving the publisher a cut.

> 1. marketing and reach

In theory, yes, but they have less expertise than you might imagine. For technical writing, keep in mind that editors at publishing companies aren't actually tech people. They may have been at one point, years ago, but they don't really know what matters to programmers today in that way that an active working engineer does.

> 2. financial risk on paper copies

That was much more of a thing before print-on-demand. You don't have to take the risk of a several thousand copy offset press run anymore.

There is maybe an argument that offset printing is higher quality, but I have textbooks from major academic publishers whose print quality is clearly worse than the POD stuff I get from Amazon for my book.

> 3. Production services (e.g. editing and artwork)

This is absolutely critical, agreed. Though they are often contracting out for this and if you're comfortable finding and vetting freelancers yourself, then they don't add a ton of value.

I don't know if publishers manage to get better deals from Amazon, but Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing has an annoying aspect that the ebook royalty rate falls from 70% to 30% after $9.99, which gets very awkward for a tech book you'd like to sell for, say, $19.99.

Also, piracy is rampant and Amazon doesn't do much about it. Publishers have more resources to stay on top of it, I suspect.

Personally my favorite part of working with real publishers is editors. Having a development editor, technical editor, and a team of copy editors really helps making sure the book comes out polished. Additionally, I don't want to deal with all the layout work and the details of printing.

And, depending on the book, yes the distributor the publisher has can be very helpful for sales. It's nice to be able to grab your book off the shelf at Barnes and Noble (and, does lend a bit more credibility to your work).

All that said, if you're writing for purely economic reasons (which I would caution against regardless), you're probably going to make roughly the same if you self-publish for a small audience vs go with a traditional publisher for a larger audience, and if you can get a larger audience self-publishing then there will be no comparison.

Don Knuth finally sells out

https://nerocam.com/DrFun/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jp...

If you have something interesting to say then people will figure a way to understand it. Early in my career I remember coming across “Essential .Net” by Don Box and I don’t think Don Box had a particular audience in mind. He just unwrapped what’s under the hood in Common Language Runtime (CLR). It took me multiple times to really understand “essential .net”.

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