Our Model-Driven Software Engineering in Practice book was published in September 2012. 18 months later I’d like to share with you some personal reflections on the publication (and marketing) process for the book. I believe that Marco and Manuel share most of these opinions but I’m just talking on my own behalf here.
I´ll skip the obviouss (no, don’t even think about writing a book to make money, and yes, it takes much more time than what you ever thought) but focus on some details regarding the writing, publication and marketing process for the book that I found surprising (and to be honest, disappointing). I´ll try to be syntectic (if somebody wants more info on any specific topic just let me know). In fact, the main conclusion is simple. Going with a established publisher is just not worth it. Not surprised by this, we already clarified that we decided against self-publishing the book mainly because an “official” book would look better in our reserach CV (a longer explanation here). Clearly, now that I have already one, if I write another one ever again, I´ll self-publish it.
So, what I learnt in the process (of course, I talk based on the experience of writing one single book and interacting with one single publisher but I don’t believe things would be very different with others):
- Established publishers won’t take any risk with your book. Unless they know you’re going to be a bets-seller, they will not take the pay for shelf-space for your book. Your book will only be sold online and following a print-on-demand model.
- You can write in LaTeX. I would put this one in the win-win category. This is good for the publisher because they give you the template you should use and they basically forget about editing the book but, hey, we love LaTeX so this was also good for us. I do belive they should have been a little bit more helpful (e.g. we asked them to create an index of terms and they replied saying that if WE created it they would be happy to sell the book with it).
- We don’t have the exact number of copies of the book we have sold (my approximation is around one per day since the day we published it). I’ve been using novelrank to follow at least somehow the sales on Amazon but until the first royalties check the editorial did not provide any sales information. And still now, I´m not sure I have the right number since the editorial not only sell the book separately but also as part of a collection and at that point things get fuzzy.
- You get paid little and very late. One disadvantage of official publishers (not sure if I’ve found any advantage so far) is that they take 85% of the sales and you the remaining 15% (5% in my case since we are three authors). But even worse, in fact they 100% for one year and only after that period they pay you back your 15%. Just last month I got my first royalties check for the sales during 2012! If you’re curious the check was for 300 USD (after paying 30% of takes) which translates in a little more of 200 euros. So to be clear, one year after writing a book I’ve only made so far 200 euros!.
- Understand that you and the publisher may have a different business model. You may think that you and your publisher are perfectly aligned, right? I mean you both want to sell as many copies of the book as possible. Well, this is not exaclty true. You want to sell your book but your publisher wants to sell its collection of books, which is a different story. Selling the full collection access to an institution, they make more money than selling individual books but you’ll make much less. They will put their marketing efforst in selling the collection not to help you sell your book. In fact, we had to put pressure on them to release a kindle version of the book. And they did it but they were not so keen on that for the simple reason that this is not a format on which they make a lot of money (price is fixed by Amazon) even if for the author this can make a significant difference
- Forget about marketing. This was probably the biggest disappointment. I believed that by partnering with them we would have access to an audience that we could not reach directly (i.e. readers of this portal, fellow researchers and their institutions,…) which would be very good for the book since it’s especially targeted to people that are not already MDE believers. I know they did some basic mailing and printed some brochures they brought to some conferences (along with those of many other books) but the reality was that I’m convinced that more than 90% of the sales have come from our own efforst (the book web page, our own contacts, Marco’s participation at OMG meetings,…)
Of course, not everything is bad. We´re extremely excited that more than 50 organizations are using our book to introduce MDE to their students/employees but there is a bittersweet taste in my mouth. I do belive that with a little bit more of help we could have managed to have a greater impact for the book and for MDE.
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. More about me.
Interesting to read. Seems that my decision to self-publish wasn’t all that wrong then 🙂
Markus
There’s nothing I can add to this. I published a book in 2007 with Springer. The value they added was negligible: they did chase a few people distributing copied versions of the book, and arranged for a translation, but in the end, when you’re interested in readers first, going the self-published route like Markus is way better.
It would be interesting to calculate the time people spend reading books and compare it to the number of books available * time it would take to read them. These number should explain why it’s a lost cause to market books, self-published or not.
In the past, time people had was much closer to, possibly even larger than, what was there to read. Today, it is pretty much negligible.
The only marketing success I know of close to us is “Business Model Generations” and yet, it’s content is vastly flawed (coming straight from a PhD’s dissertation -> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nickmalik/archive/2012/08/22/the-ea-metamodel-behind-the-business-model-generation.aspx)
“Business Model Generation practices what it preaches. Co-authored by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book was financed and produced independently of the traditional publishing industry. It features a tightly integrated, highly visual design that enables immediate hands-on use.”
Now if you look at the energy spent by the Alexander in building the community, hiring designers, building tools around the book, you realize that it does not happen by itself. Either you target an existing community (and you are facing the time vs content barrier), or you build your own, but be prepared to make it a full time job and deliver solutions along the way, not just a “here is my book, please read it”. In the case of BMG you can’t even call a book anymore, the book is just an element of the whole.
IMHO, we have to concede that publishers from iTunes to Elsevier can only make money by maximizing the amount of content they offer, not by picking and marketing that content. They long understood that from apps to books.
I would argue that at this point we have to reinvent the model behind creating “content”, in ways that returns the balance between the time people have and the content that’s offered to them. Until then, it’s nearly hopeless to try to market anything.
JJ-
I fully agree with Jean-Jacques in two facts: 1) publishers are aware (and are betting for it) that the new trend is the long tail model (maximize the amount of available content); but 2) customers are appreciating even more their valuable time and selectively choosing content that require less time to invest in (that is short books or other formats).
However, I think that the remarkable point here is not about the creation of content or the delivery of it, but about the obsolete business model that some (big) traditional publishers are still maintaining despite the changing context. Being a publisher generally an intermediary -a platform- among the customer and the provider (i.e. the author), what kind of value does an editorial provide for the author (who is the content provider) in exchange of 75% over the sales? Printing the book? Marketing? A “reputation” image? Not worth it, in the end.
The model needs to be reinvented, as Jean-Jacques says.