Thoughts about self-publishing a book, from my Flexible Rails experience so far
Posted by Peter Armstrong Sat, 20 Jan 2007 06:52:00 GMT
A reader of my Flexible Rails book (which is in Beta now, woo hoo!) recently emailed me asking for my advice regarding self-publishing a PDF-only book. These were my suggestions, edited slightly:
Don't do the multiple edition (Individual / Team / Department / Enterprise) thing like I did if you are doing Alpha / Beta book releases like I have done. The amount of work to maintain multiple editions through Alpha and Beta releases just isn't worth the small amount of extra money. These other editions
Regarding the price to choose, my guess is that somewhere between $9 and $29 is good--depending on how large the book is and how niche the topic is. I chose $20 since even though when I released the first version the book was only 1/3 done, I wanted to declare my intent of making it a full book that would easily be worth $20.
Lulu is pretty good for PDF books. (I don't know how good the print books are yet, since I haven't produced one or purchased one from them yet.) The only real problem I've had so far is that 2 or 3 people who bought my book did not get their email "thank you notes", with the instructions on how to upgrade their book. (My guess is that the emails got spam filtered.)
The Alpha / Beta process I chose has worked out great. It is quite a bit of extra work, but it's worth it. If I write another book I'm going to do the same thing. A few advantages of it have been:
Great technical feedback: When self-publishing a book you don't have an editor. This way, if your book attracts a community, then it will serve as kind of an editor and a focus group for you: suggesting topics they are interested in, pointing out large and small errors, etc. (You still need to be very diligent however, since if you are sloppy you will lose credibility among your early readers!)
Free marketing: If you're self-publishing a book, you don't have a publisher trying to generate buzz for you. This does that job for you, if the book is good enough for people to blog about it positively.
Motivation: Writing a book is very, very, very hard--especially with a full-time job and a toddler in the house. If I hadn't released it as an Alpha version, there is a very good chance I would have given up on the project entirely. As soon as people started buying it though, there was no way I would quit the project: doing so would be unthinkable since I had taken their money with the promise of a finished book! Also, many people have sent extremely supportive and encouraging emails--this has really helped my morale.
A cumulative code example is a good idea in theory, but in practice is hell to maintain since bugfixes need to be propogated through the entire book--not just in the chapter in which the code was created.
Anyway, back to coding and writing. The productivity-killing cold I got over the holidays will just NOT go away (what kind of cold lasts 3 weeks???). Worse yet (for productivity, that is), Europa Universalis III is being released next week... [For those who haven't played it, Europa Universalis II is one of the best games ever.]
