What I've Earned (And Learned) From Writing a Ruby Programming Book

It sounds as if you've burned your bridges with Apress to some degree - do you have any interest in continuing to write books with a better deal (e.g., with Pragmatic Programmers) or are you burnt out of the whole thing entirely?

Trying to find the original interview, but I remember reading an article with Laura Lemay (of 'Teach Yourself HTML' fame) of how they basically abused her name to sell books (even after she said she didn't want to write any more books). She lost control and there ended up being a whole franchise of 'Teach yourself X with Laura Lemay' books.

EDIT: Found the link. Thanks archive.org!

"I wrote a lot of books from 1994 to 2000. Both my HTML and Java books did really well, and I had a series that I didn’t write that nonetheless had my name on it. It felt like I was riding this wave of popularity, I would probably never be this successful again, and I felt that I had to milk it, to push it as far as it would go. My publisher was all too happy to accommodate me in this goal. They reworked my writing over and over again, customizing it, repackaging it, reselling it under different titles and for different purposes. I cheerfully and naively agreed to a lot of this repurposing, but a lot of it happened without my knowing it under the terms of existing contracts. I would go into bookstores and find books there with my name on them that I had never seen or agreed to or had any idea they existed.

With this much writing being produced not all of it had to be great. Towards the end not much of it was. By the end I didn’t feel like I had much control over my own work. even with the writing I was actually doing I was so stretched and overworked that the quality wasn’t there. Eventually I felt I didn’t even have any control over my own identity.

Who is this Laura Lemay person who has her name all over all these books? Me, I think I’m an OK writer, I’m good at explaining stuff to people. Laura Lemay just produces huge numbers of not very good books. I felt really overwhelmed and disassociated from my own work and from my own name."

http://web.archive.org/web/20061027193901/www.dispatchesfrom...

Peter Cooper's unusually successful Ruby book sold ~8000 copies in print and 500 copies as ebooks. He made $19,000.

To gross $19,000 with a $15 PDF, I'd have to sell ~1260 copies. Compare to ~8000/500 paper/print, noting that the PDF will be the only available format for the book, and this doesn't sound impossible. If I raised the prices to a place that still undercut an Apress ebook, I could get that number down to 900 copies.

Of course, whatever number I hit, I own the book free and clear, at all points.

I'm interested in what Cooper thinks about the strategy of foregoing publishers altogether.

This probably works out okay as part of an overall strategy for Mr. Cooper, who is building a publishing empire. :)

However as a money-making strategy, I believe most of the people here at HN could make more doing almost anything else.

In the mid-90s Laura Lemay (graciously) introduced me to her publisher after no more than a simple e-mail query. As a result I got to contribute a chapter to a Web-related title and officially became a published author (yay!).

After that I somehow connected with an agent who started bringing opportunities to my attention. One was for the second or third edition of a semi-successful title; however as part of the deal I'd have to share the (already meager) royalties with the original author. Thanks but no thanks!

The next opportunity seemed golden: the chance to write a brand new title as part of a very well-known series (something like "Selling Online for the Technically-Challenged Among Us").

I started submitting outlines and sample chapters, and assembled a list of e-commerce software ranging from open source to commercial packages (mostly written in Perl). After each submission came the feedback and tiring rewrites, but I still thought it would work out. And that's when it happened. ;)

Apparently the whole department at the publisher had just returned from a Microsoft conference, and had learned about the new software package that was going to set the world of e-commerce on fire: Site Server (maybe Mr. Graham will get a chuckle out of that).

It was expensive, large, and proprietary, and in my opinion not a good match for most of the small-to-medium businesses I thought would most benefit from the book. But guess what (I was told) should be the focus of the new book?

In the end it just wasn't worth the hassle. So that ended my publishing career, but it was sort of fun while it lasted.

P.S.: IIRC some of the big guys, like the first Word and HTML authors, made seven figures.

The good news for US citizens: you pay no FICA (Social Security & Medicare, currently about 16%) on royalties, which are not considered regular income.

The only compromise that was reached was that a couple of chapters could be released per month, separately – which is about as appealing to readers as getting a tenth of a blowjob at a time.

What really flipped my lid, though, was seeing other Apress books like Dive Into Python and Pro Git getting the treatment I wanted. You can read both of these awesome titles online, in full, for free. Offering electronic content for free to promote print book sales isn’t an alien concept to Apress so someone’s playing favorites over there.

More likely, the idea sounds crazy and/or scary to them, but they decided to try it out with a few of their books to see how well it works. You're in the control group. Maybe that's the result of "playing favorites," but a less whiny way to put it would be that other authors had more influence or did a better job of advocacy. Or you were just unlucky.

But you can take comfort in the possibility that your campaign to make the Beginning Ruby PDF free helped convince Apress to make some of their other PDFs free.

There were a few things that I had questions on - since you are answering here at HN, I'll try you here!

You mentioned, "I’d argue that unless you’re writing a very niche book (that’s unlikely to earn back its advance) ..., you should avoid the major publishers and instead find a mid-sized publisher that can offer more attractive royalties..." It has been my experience that, "the bigger the publisher, the bigger the advance" and/or "the smaller the royalty, the bigger the advance". When I think of this conundrum, I always think back to, "Why is this author writing this 'very niche book' - what is their motivation?" If it is money, then I would suggest they perhaps follow your advice and go with whoever gives them the biggest advance (and just forget about negotiating royalties since they are 'unlikely to earn back' in your words). However money is often not the major motivator as you mentioned.

For example, if the motivator was, "I want to increase my profile so that I can speak at big events and raise my consulting rates", they are probably better off going with a bigger company who can flood the market with marketing instead of a small/mid-sized company. Sure they'll give up royalties but they will receive what they want. Small and medium-sized publishers will generally not have the resources and expertise to perform those same functions at the scale a big publishing house can do them.

Also, I would ask the author, "What is success to you for this book?" Some will say, "I want it to sell a bunch of copies because of x, y, and z" then they won't be as likely to do that with most small/mid publishers. Your case of selling 8500 copies through Apress vs. 2000 through Pragmatic Programmer is important since some might perceive that the book was a failure because it "only" sold 2,000 copies. And those "some people" might include potential employers, industry colleagues or the author. It also does not take into account the perceived prestige someone might feel with being accepted to be an Apress author vs. a PP author (again "some people" might have never heard of PP books and so it might not have the same weight).

The final bit I'd say is that negotiating the best possible advance + royalty rate for yourself may not always be the wisest thing to do long term. Example: Let's say that you went with PP and had written "Beginning Ruby" and it was a moderate success selling 2,000 copies over at PP. Apress starts to take notice and they hire someone to write the Beginning Ruby book for them and they market the shit out of it. What do you do now? You l-o-s-e, that's what. PP can't afford to market your book - they don't have any budget left after your 50% royalty and paying their staff - so you are SOL. Your "greed" (and I don't mean "you" as in Peter Cooper; I mean the collective "you") let you miss out on an opportunity: the opportunity to write a beginner-level non-time-specific book (which generally outsell more advanced titles or, as you say, time-specific titles) for a major publisher that will sell for 10-20 years (or as long as (a) the language is popular, and (b) you create new editions). You opted for a small, short-term payday with instead of the potential longer-term success which, yes will have certain confines that aren't ideal, but would be more predictable and more stable. Trust me: although major publishers may not be cutting edge with their titles/technologies, they are paying attention to the small/mid-sized markets. Once something becomes popular, the big guys will emulate it.

Full disclosure: I am the founder of a small publisher (http://www.learnitfirst.com/) albeit in the ebook and video markets exclusively. I know that it sounds like I'm arguing for Apress but I'm not - just a different point of view, I suppose.

Thanks.

All books are written by people who have written (1) book or many books.