Here is a neat example of why it no longer, if it ever did, pays to be published conventionally.
Amazon makes it so easy to buy conventional books and music. We can download music for free. How could we connect the dots? How can we have the convenience of book shopping at Amazon with the price of very cheap music? While at the same time how can the costs of publishing be cut to the bone while offering the author a bigger share?
They two key issues are that the creative artist gets screwed and we the consumer pay too much.
I think that the Everest of the new economy is to find out out to sell a lot of creative material without a record company or a book publisher.
Music seems closer. The mechanism of download and play is there. The issue for me is print. I find reading on screen very unsatisfying. How do we have a system that allows me to print at home. My sense is that if HP put as much effort into print for books as they have for Photo's we may get close.
Baen as a publisher are also close - "giving away a lot of books online". They have found that the need for print is such that a customer who gets a free online book will go out and buy a conventional book.
Converging cluster sites of interest and book clubs also give us a clue. Large book clubs with general interest have been doing poorly. But specialty book clubs such as Civil War or Gardening do very well. Some kind of "club" site with reviews and lots of chat about the topic sound like a useful storefront
More later on Baen - but for now the author's plight
Here is the comment on the pitfalls of writing a computer book. There's no money in it
Let's say you pour three months' worth of blood, sweat, and tears into your 500-page computer book. After taking three more months to reformat it, the publisher sends you galley proofs so you can review them and create an index. Of course, you get only a week or two for that. You mark a few minor, last-minute corrections on the proofs. You must then use the hard copy (that's right, hard copy) to create an index manually (that's right, manually). Of course, you can have the publisher do it for an outrageous fee, but most authors choose to index their own books. And most authors do a lousy job of it. By that time the author is too burnt out to do it justice, even though everyone knows the index is the single most important section of any computer book.
Finally, you're finished. The publisher dawdles for another month or so, occasionally sending you messages asking for files you've already sent them twice, and that sort of thing. Finally the book goes to print. If you're lucky, you see a couple of copies on the shelf at Border's.
Now suppose the book's list price is $40. Typically, the writer's cut is a percentage of the "net" which is a fancy way of saying half the list price. Supposedly this is to cover the cost of publishing the book. (Why does it cost that much? I'm not sure, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that three months' labor is required to reformat a book.) What this means is that if your royalty is 15%, you get 15% of $20, or $3. But that's only for domestic retail sales. Chances are, your contract contains lots of loopholes for things like international sales, book clubs, and anything else you can dream up, so on average you might get $2. That's 5% of the revenue from the sale of the book. The publisher gets the remaining 95%. Think about these two facts for a moment:
You researched, wrote, reviewed, revised, and indexed this 500-page book. You developed and tested the examples.
The publisher's cut is 95%.
Are you now suffering from severe cognitive dissonance?
Yup. Right on the money. When I emailed my editor asking about sales of the book -- AFTER he emailed me about it first he never even responded. As near as I can tell, royalties for a computer book might cover sales tax on a decent dinner out but not necessarily the dinner itself. And, finally, when I asked a professional literary agent about writing computer books, his response was "The game is rigged by publishers against the authors. If you can write ANY OTHER type of book than a computer book that's what I recommend".
Writing Computer Books? Not Recommended.
