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The Business Blog at Intuitive.com
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Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and
is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business
issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related
startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed.
He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and
Linux Journal and frequently appears
in other publications both online and in print.
Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs:
The Business Blog at Intuitive.com,
Ask Dave Taylor,
Dave On Film,
and
GoFatherhood.
Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and
frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of
his community and busy single father to three children.
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Thoughts on royalties, distribution, credibility and other author issues
In one of the many discussion groups I'm involved with, a neophyte author posted the following scenario: "Which publisher would you choose given the folowing scenario? Publisher A (Say the AWLs and Sam's of the world) may sell 5,000 copies of your book at a retail rate of $39.99 and will typically be discounted on Amazon by 30% .. Publisher B (Say the CRCs and Springer's of the world) with the same book may sell 2,000 copies at a retail rate of $59.99 and the book will not be discounted at all on Amazon..."It's a very interesting question because it brings up many of the more subtle facets of publishing, issues that aren't immediately apparent to many authors, whether they're working with magazines or the book publishing industry, and even if you've been contemplating your own ebooks, the same key topics can illuminate your decision-making processes. My response to the question posed is that it's certainly an interesting scenario, but I have to say that the greatest obstacle to evaluating the situation is that I don't agree with the phrase "the same book" because I think that books published by an Addison-Wesley/Macmillan press are going to be inherently different from one published by CRC/Springer-Verlag. Indeed, I view all four of these publishers as quite different and believe that AW is quite a few sigma's removed from a popular press like Sams. :-)
Further, I think that there are some important factors for choosing a publisher that go beyond what was presented in this hypothetical scenario, including "credibility" within a market segment, "reach" of their marketing and distribution, ease of publishing and speed of publishing. I think that Sams can run circles around CRC, for example, in terms of speed of publishing (I've done books with Sams where I turned in my last chapter and had a bound book on the shelf within 4-5 weeks, whereas the more traditional textbook publisher (esp. Springer) might take six months to a year - or more - to print, bind, ship and distribute a new book once the editing is completed).
I also believe that the most important factor for many authors is publisher credibility, though. And that's where O'Reilly Media comes into play, for example, along with Wrox and similar "boutique" presses. If you want to publish a software engineering book for the Unix / Open Source market, for example, I would suggest that O'Reilly is your #1 choice. I know lots of people who own major subsets of the O'Reilly Media output, and I know that my bookshelf has at least a foot or more of ORA titles.
And as my academic colleagues would be quick to point out, credibility is contextual: there are some types of publish (e.g., "publish or perish") where having the book read and evaluated by a group of peers prior to publication is more important than speed to press or even sales and distribution. Many CompSci professors, for example, get little credit within their department for publishing a Dummies book or a Teach Yourself book because of the lack of peer review. Are they inherently better or worse books? No, not in my eyes. It's just a different process of publishing, aimed at a different target market, with different strengths and weaknesses.
So I am afraid that in the great tradition of opinion leaders everywhere, the original poster asked for a straight answer and I'm instead dancing all around the topic, but I think it's considerably more nuanced than it seems.
What do you think? Whether you're a published author or not, I'd be quite interested in what others have to say about this topic!
Two Chinese collegues and I (I'm from the United States) are working on the publishing of results from a linguistic dialect research on a minority language in China. My collegues have to be published for their work to be recognized, but we already know few will actually buy a copy. Basically, the authors pay to have their hard work recognized, and then hand out the books as a filler on academic bookshelves.
The information would be very useful if in digital (preferably online) format for the few people who would use it. Other collegues of mine are scared I could infringe on the copyright of the publisher, but if we are basically paying them to publish, there should not be any copyright problems, I would guess.
Posted by: Cooper on October 6, 2004 1:39 AMi really like your blogs and comments and sugestion
but actually i am an indie musician and singer
sp i would like to know if you got any idea about music publishing and distributing
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The Business Blog
