J.A. Konrath

Publishers are a bit like VCs. They invest in a number of different books hoping that one will become a bestseller. All the other ones are either complete failures or midlisters (books which are not bestsellers but are strong enough to economically justify their publication). If you have a bestseller under your belt I guess a publisher makes sense because you would presumably have earned enough money to let other do the boring jobs for you. On the other hand, if you don't break out of the midlist, it may make sense to remove the middle man and go for it alone if you want to write for a living. All the services provided by publishers can be contracted out, specially if you go the ebook way. Finally, I am not a writer but I helped publish several books. Here is a link to someone with a lot of experience and numbers to back it up: http://jakonrath.blogspot.co.uk/

I've been following this blog: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ It's by a traditionally published author that used to hold much of the same opinion as you and has now moved to self-publishing and argues that newcomers should do the same. If what publishers provide is good editors it would seem a simple solution would be for good editors to go freelance and take a direct cut of the sales.

I've been following this for some time, if you want more information on it this is one of the best blogs out there detailing numbers between paper/e-publishing: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

This all ties in with a blog that I just started reading yesterday. It's written by a genre fiction writer that has also made the switch to predominantly ebooks. I guess the most relevant post is http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/08/beginning-of-end.html but the whole blog is really interesting and worth reading. http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile, thousands of authors support Amazon, and question not only Hachette but the "Authors Guild" which only protects the 1% of super-rich authors (who, coincidentally, are mostly signers of the Preston letter.) For a different viewpoint on all this, see the posts of Barry Eisler and JA Konrath who've been covering this issue for YEARS. http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

You're going to want to go read every post on http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

#1 blogging mistake: treating it like an info dump and bragging platform. Blogs are a place to share and gain knowledge. For a business, they're a place to demonstrate your competency to the market and to attract new customers. Example: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ 99% of his blog is him yelling at the traditional publishing industry. That it sells a lot of books is a happily encouraged byproduct.

This post makes the same mistakes many critics of the Laffer curve make. The Laffer curve, despite their simplistic criticisms, does not say that lower taxes increases revenue, it says that there is a "sweet spot" where tax rates maximize revenue; if your rates are higher than that, then lowering them will increase revenue, but if the rates are lower then raising them should increase revenue. Similarly with pricing schemes; there is some price point which will maximize revenue, often it is lower than the seller believes, but not always. J A Konrath on his blog has discussed his experiments with pricing and revenue several times over the last few years (http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/).

If she really believes she can get 800 downloads a week with no promotion, most of your objections there kind of disappear. (The typesetters, editors and translators are the only ones that continue to matter, and those can be hired for fairly cheap — take a look at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ for a real ebook author's take on the matter.)

I think it's not a good solution unless you are yet pretty "famous". IMO you should look to Amazon or other service with a well estabilished community you can get advantage of. Relevant read: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

Speaking of monopolies, anyone heard of JA Konrath? http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ He wrote the blog a newbie's guide to publishing. During that time he discovered publishing his refused books on Amazon KDP because the big 6 publishing companies had rejected them. He used to be an advocate for signing with a big publishing company, and suffering their 17.5% royalty + marketing costs. Most large published books never out earn their advances your chops. But his refused books kept growing in sales with Amazon Kindle. The books he did publish with traditional publishes kept insisting on high prices to keep the paper backs competitive. Eventually he switched to just publishing on Amazon KDP as the future and eventually got the rights to his books back. The above book is published by Wiley. The digital version listed on Wiley's site is $14.95, the hardback is $27.95, while the amazon hardback is $18.27. The Kindle version is listed for $11.99.

I've been watching the self-publishing world lately since reading Jon Konrath's blog here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ and I have to say, why can't I get all the programming books I want for approximately $1-$5 per book in electronic format? I'd probably buy at least 1 book/week at that price! So here's an idea for what I'd pay for, as a more technical reader: technical ebook purchasing for $1-$5 per book with the option of accessing the book via a distributed source control system. The purchase then entitles me to push errata, additions, etc. back to the author as well as to pull contributions, fixes, etc. from the readers. With each ebook major version release, I'd pay the purchase amount again to gain access to the new version. That new version may merely be all of the changes I've already had access to via source control, but payment then unlocks access to the next major branch. Patch review could even be offloaded to readers via up/down votes. My main goal here is to counteract the short half life of the majority of most technical books, benefit from the other readers as much as possible and encourage current/potential authors with appropriate payment. Call it an "o'reilly killer", or "gitbooks" or whatever. Cheers Bill

A couple of key bits: “If somebody can actually get their kids through college writing for screens, for e-books, then the thing is working,” said Lanier. “If they can’t, it isn’t.” Well, it's working for Joe Konrath[1], Randall Munroe[2], Felix Salmon[3], and others. They've got very different models, but each has company for theirs. (Not that it's easy to break in, but it's also really hard to break in to traditional publishing.) It's very strange to say that people can't make a living writing on line, while ignoring the folks who are actually doing it. Worse is this: "If the future is one in which writers are not paid, then it also is one in which writers lack clout. And if it’s a future in which writers lack clout, then what we have is a lack, basically, of an intellectual middle class. Instead we have a sort of volunteer intellectual class, which in terms of clout starts to resemble peasants." What gives writers clout, at a social level, is that people are reading their stuff, and taking it seriously, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the size of their paycheck. In the tech corner of the world, The GNU Manifesto and The Cathedral and the Bazaar are both essays that had a huge influence, and not because of how much either author got (belatedly) paid. Or, to be a bit of a homer, for a minute, you can't really judge pg's influence by his royalties on Hackers and Painters. I'm not sure he could live well off the royalty checks --- but I'm pretty sure no…

Because that’s what it boils down to is convenience. People who illegally download books are more interested in their convenience than in supporting the authors they want to read. It’s not hard to go to the library, it just takes time.. Since you're treating your writing as a business (which is fine) why not actually give your customers what they want? If your customers want to be able to buy your e-book in their location, why can't they? Blame your publisher (I do, but I'm also OK with people pirating that book). J A Konrath is an author who's highly realistic about this. His post about piracy nails it: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html - He's selling his books for merely a few dollars each and on a DRM-ed platform (the Kindle) and is still making more. One of the comments on the post struck me, too: I have a professional musician on my friends list and he makes posts like this all the time. He said the amount of time he spends cracking down on his albums being distributed illegally (he's a fairly popular, but completely independent artist) is ridiculous. And that he'll be at a show and someone will come up and just cheerily tell him that, "Hey, I illegally downloaded your songs, man. LOVE THEM!" It's insane how entitled people are. Someone AT his show? You mean, someone pirated his almost zero marginal cost material and then paid up good money to attend his show and that's a bad thing? Thankfully, many sane independent musicians have realized…

- The DRM of Netflix is irrelevant. The people who want to download the movies will do it anyway, but their number got way lower once Netflix (and probably Hulu and others like them) got a large enough catalog. People like convenience and are willing to pay for it. - I couldn't immediately find the article where he announced that HE uploaded his books (as an experiment), but here is one of the many articles where he dismisses the issue: https://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html

Hiring a good editor on your own seems far more valuable than giving up control of pricing your own ebooks, and getting 17cents[1] on the dollar for digital royalties though. [1] http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/09/acquisitions-editor.html

The actual, non-aggregated, article: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-locke.html

But the thing that the traditional publishers won't be able to counter is pointed out in Konrath's recent blog post about time is money: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/02/time-is-money.html. And until I actually investigated it, I wouldn't claim that editing and such takes a four-figure outlay. I would defer to patio11 there.

I don't know, but talking to tech professional writers I have responses similar to this: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/12/bedtime-story.html Long story sort: If you get more money with the digital version than with paper you don't need publishers, or editors at all, you don't need to give away your copyrights in exchange for access to market by the gatekeepers(publishers) and a minority of the profits. You don't even have to ask for permission, just let the market decide, like web startups. On digital you just make an alpha version and send to friends for testing, make a public beta like this book: http://iphone-3d-programming.labs.oreilly.com/ ...And just sell your book digital taking 70% of the money and never losing your copy rights, like you do when you sign with a (paper)publisher.

There's a pretty interesting blog about eBooks and publishing and the link. This entry http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/09/acquisitions-editor.html is a more humorous approach to the question of eBook costs.

Well, the thing is there is rumor of a KindlePad of some kind coming, so think of that. Also, did you see the Amazon Kindle news for today? Massive sales. I've never been an Amazon fan but I had to acknowledge what just happened today: http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/this-settles-it-kindle-ebooks… And, here's a post from a writer publishing directly through Kindle who is very pleased with the money he's making: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/07/with-change-comes-anger.html I'm not advocating for Amazon. Just giving you some stuff to consider. Good luck.

>And where did you get the idea of advertisements from? There was a recent submission that touched on this: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/01/booty-call.html

Author of the featured blog post here, and a long-time HN member. I would like to share a few observations about the nature of the independent author community, based on the Internet discussions that preceded the suspension of LendInk (see https://www.facebook.com/pages/LendInk/124974504234948 and check out the threads and comments from August 2), as well as my own experience as an ebook author: * Even though indie authors are using the Kindle platform to publish their work, many are not aware of the "fine print" governing their participation in the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program or KDP Select. * Technology skills are very focused in this community. Authors are generally very good at using Internet discussion boards and other Web channels to promote their work. But not everyone understands the differences between reading devices (which are significant) or how secondary software features work. * On the production side, many authors are turning to services like Smashwords or freelancers to handle the conversion of Word files to the formats that Amazon/Sony/BN/etc. accept for upload. * There is a lot of sensitivity around price (see the comment thread starting here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/03/barry-joe-scott-turow.html?showC… ) and free giveaways (like KDP Select, http://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/KDPSelect ). This translates to intense worry about whether authors are losing out or getting cheated in some…

I just finished writing a programming book (an R graphs cookbook), in the traditional way, so here are my thoughts. I had a print publisher, who did all the administrative and editorial work on the book. I just had to do the writing. Because of the publishing house's work, my job was easy. But I don't think I will ever do it this way again. Why? Because publishing books, especially programming books, in the traditional way just feels completely out of sync with the times. If I had to write a book now, I'd rather blook it. Blog every day and then compile and edit the blog posts into a book. It's the only way that makes sense to me now, especially for programming books because they need to be live, fresh and up-to-date documents, not works of art frozen in time (unless that's what you are aiming for). So I would give away the whole thing for free in the form of blog posts and also sell it in various convenient ebook formats. That's my opinion based on very limited experience. Here are some more qualified opinions: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/12/you-should-self-publis... http://ejohn.org/blog/programming-book-profits/ http://ejohn.org/blog/online-book-vs-ebook/

> Rule of thumb, never start a sentence with "There are people", it's very vague and almost meaningless. Always refer to specific groups of people. This from the person who claims the supporters of our current copyright system are by necessity "Writers, researchers, artists, architects, musicians, composers, filmmakers, actors, podcasters, even a lot of software developers" Not a terribly specific list there either, but examples of folks fed up with system abound and I'm prepared to offer some to get you started: musicians: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7287785 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lady-gaga-jack-white-norah-jones-musici… https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/05/16/0257212/danger-mouse-releases… see also : every artist that defends the use of samples in their works Writers: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond https://www.brandonsanderson.com/warbreaker-rights-explanation/ filmmakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Paley Luke Thompson (Decay 2012) Michela Ledwidge (sanctuary 2005) Programmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Eldred https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Abelson See also: huge swaths of the FOSS movement Podcasters: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-minds-from-creative-commons… There are few people who would say we should abolish copyright entirely, I wouldn't myself,…