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?
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.
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.
(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
The hardest part still being networking into others lives to distribute the message
You just re-invented our economy
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.
the gist of the idea: >
yeah idk but something like curation is done by commitee (to try and maintain a minimum of quality overall)
Also, piracy is rampant and Amazon doesn't do much about it. Publishers have more resources to stay on top of it, I suspect.
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.
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.