From the New York Times (Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry’s Rules):
Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor and author of the new book ‘The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom’ (Yale University Press), has gone even farther: his entire book is available — free — as a download from his Web site. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book electronically, with some of them adding comments and links to the online version.
The article discusses how new technology, such as e-books, will lead to changes in the publishing industry. The main focus is on fiction.
In our little publishing niche, self-publishing and electronic downloads open up new markets. For instance, our WebWorks Publisher Cookbook (for version 6) is available only as a PDF download. The WebWorks Publisher product is now in version 9, and we don’t sell very many copies of the Cookbook, but in PDF format, there’s no cost for us in making it available.
Osborne-McGraw Hill recently informed us that FrameMaker 7: The Complete Reference would not be reprinted. We have requested that the rights to the content revert to us, and we will republish the information as Publishing Fundamentals: Creating Content in FrameMaker 7. We plan to do short-run digital printing rather than a massive up-front print run.
Of course, Osborne could have chosen to do something similar. But the mass-market publishers are unwilling or unable to change their business practices to support these mid-level titles.
For anyone who’s wondering, here’s what royalties look like in real life:
Mass-market publisher:
List price: $60
Royalty per book: $3 (10% of wholesale)
Actual market price: $42
Profit to author per book: $3
Thus, royalties of approximately $3,000 per 1,000 books sold. It took six months of basically full-time work for Sheila and me to write the contents of the book. That’s equivalent to one year of work by one person. We’d have to sell 10,000 books to get $30,000 in royalties — which isn’t exactly an impressive salary.
Now, what do the numbers look like if we take the content and self-publish it? The per-book profit goes up to approximately $30 per book. Suddenly, we only need to sell 1,000 to make the same amount of profit as we would on a mass-market-published book.
We have the software and experience needed to write, edit, and lay out a book. Beyond that, our logic for self-publishing versus traditional publishing boils down to this:
Can we sell at least one-tenth as many books as the mass-market publisher would?
Traditional publishing houses are supposed to provide marketing and other support for the books on their list. But, in reality, all of that is left to the authors. So, if I’m already doing all of my own marketing and promotion, what exactly am I paying the publisher for?
Distribution and Reputation
Distribution–A major publisher will get books out in the “pipeline” to the book distributors, such as Baker & Taylor and Ingram’s. Effectively, this means getting books into bookstores. But our research indicates that a huge percentage of FrameMaker book readers buy their books online, so bookstore distribution isn’t a huge issue for us.
Reputation–The name of a major publisher on the spine sends a message of quality. Hmmmm. I think this is true for a few publishers, such as O’Reilly & Associates, but not for most.
In short, we don’t get much out of a publishing deal with a traditional publisher.
We plan to publish all content through Scriptorium Press in the future.