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Comment by davegardner | Hacker News Reader

Interested to hear about his experience with traditional publishing.

$12,000 was the advance paid on the book that I co-authored and published through Wrox back in 2008 (and again in 2010). I think it took around 12 months to earn out the advance and start receiving additional royalties.

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[Leanpub cofounder here.]

One great thing about this is that with Leanpub, the money you earn while your book is in-progress and selling is not an advance (i.e. a loan), it's earnings. You own your work, and you can sell it with a traditional publisher at any time.

We've had traditional publishers pick up a few Leanpub books, and attempt to get more. If you look at our bestsellers list (https://leanpub.com/bestsellers_lifetime) you can see why.

Leanpub raises the BATNA to doing a deal with a traditional publisher. Since we pay 90% minus 50 cents per copy in royalties, you earn $17.50 from a $20 ebook. The types of books that HN readers would write would do well to be priced at this price point. Authors choose the minimum and suggested price. So, if you sell 1000 copies at that price, that's $17,500; if you sell 5000 copies at that price, that's $87,500.

Because of this, lots of "niche" books that would sell fewer than 5000 copies (and not be worth it for a traditional publisher) are totally worth it to be done on Leanpub, just for the direct revenue. Plus if you consult, a book is a great business card...

Interestingly, $12K is over twice the average advance in the publishing world, which says something about the health of the technical publishing ecosystem.

If you don't mind my asking (customer discovery process here), what tools did you use to write the book?

Could you tell us, roughly, how the royalties work with Wrox publishing? How many copies did the book sell for $12,000 to come your way?

From what I have heard about traditional publishers, the royalties to the author are on the order of 5%, 10% of list price, which is not very interesting.

From personal experience [1] I can tell you that's the range.

I don't think that making lots of money is a very good reason to write a book - or if that is your reason, you're likely to be disappointed.

A better reason is that it's great resume material: it can be a springboard to getting recognition and open doors that you probably wouldn't enjoy otherwise.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Isapi-Chris-Wuestefeld/dp/15620...

I couldn't agree more. The effort involved means the hourly rate is fairly dismal. But right or wrong it immediately establishes you as an expert and certainly stands out on a resume.

This is a great (=true) answer, but doesn't it basically argue that Copyright is a false premise? The evidence seems to be that (1) 90% of the money does not go to the author; and (2) In spite of (1) it still makes sense to do what it takes to publish. Logically, one infers that a copyright monopoly is fairly replaced by something with 10% of the social cost, provided that "springboard to getting recognition and open doors" effect is neutral. Is this lattr assumption only possible through copyright? What if there was something like an Award or &tc stamped your resume?

It says nothing of the validity of copyright, but it says a lot about the importance of distribution and marketing.

On Leanpub, the author gets 90% royalties minus 50 cents per copy. So, on a $10 book, the author gets $8.50 (85%) royalty, and on a $20 book, the author gets $17.50 (87.5%).

Just because publishers have historically paid 10% royalties does not mean it has to be that way in the future.

So, questions of copyright should be a debate about what is fair based on a range of arrangements. Personally, I'm in favour of 14 year copyright, not the "author's death + 70 years" madness that exists now...

Sorry I can't get my hands on the sales volumes easily anymore. For us the royalties ranged from 5% and 15% depending on various conditions. For example:

- 12% from standard sales in the US and Canada,

- 5% from standard sales elsewhere,

- 5% from sales of the work at discounts of 56% or more,

- 10% from sales in electronic form,

- 15% from sales to book clubs, etc.

If you're curious, I shared all the numbers I could on a book I wrote for Apress several years ago (Beginning Ruby): http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/

I got around 6,000 advance on first edition as first time author, which covered first 6k copies sold. It was also split into three parts, each at every third of the book being done.

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