In
part 1, I divided technical publishing into four tasks (manuscript creation, production, distribution, and marketing), and I gave my perspective on publishing economics from a traditional technical publisher's point of view. In that post, my financial analysis was based on the assumption that most technical books sell no more than 5000 copies. For an author who's already been published, that assumption can be replaced with (or at least tempered by) the author's past performance. In my case, I have a history of five C++ books dating back to 1991. Each has sold more than 5000 copies.
If I wanted to impress you, I'd tell you that
Effective C++, Third Edition, has sold over 225,000 copies, which, if my royalty statements are to believed and my spreadsheet summarizing them is accurate, it has. But then I'd worry that you'd think I light fires with 100-dollar bills and own an island in a tropical paradise. So I'd hasten to add that a great many of those sales took place in foreign countries, where my royalties are...well, let's put it this way: my most recent royalty statement has an entry for 10,000 books in Chinese, and my take was about 27 cents per book. That's not the kind of money that buys islands.
Still, if an author has sold well in the past, that suggests that a publisher is unlikely to lose money on a similar book project by the same author. (I say "similar" projects, because an author's success with topic X may say little about that author's success with topic Y. Donald Knuth is a legendary author in Computer Science, but I don't think
his novel burned up the best-seller lists.)
For an established author, what's a reasonable approach to sharing book revenues with a publisher? I can think of three basic designs:
- Flat rate: The author gets a flat percentage of the income produced by the book. Presumably this is a higher rate than an unproven author would receive.
- Increasing tiers: The author gets a flat rate for the first n books, then a higher rate after that. The lower initial rate permits the publisher to quickly recover their up-front costs. There may be multiple tiers: the more you sell, the higher the rate. For example, Apress's default contract has five tiers, ranging from 10% to 20%.
- Decreasing tiers: The author gets a flat rate for the first n books, then a lower rate
after that. The higher initial rate acknowledges that the proven author can sell some books on his or her reputation alone. For such sales, the publisher brings little to the party. As sales rise, the role of the publisher in finding buyers increases, so the publisher deserves a greater share of the revenue.
I don't know anybody who's used a decreasing tiered royalty scheme, but I think it makes sense. The looks on the faces of the few authors and publishers I've mentioned it to suggest that I may be alone in this belief.
So here's where we stand, or, more accurately, where I stood in early 2014 when I started thinking about signing a publishing contract for
Effective Modern C++:
- Of the four tasks involved in publishing the book, I wanted to be responsible only for manuscript creation. However, I wanted a voice in some aspects of production (e.g., page layout, use of color, usability on mobile devices) and marketing (e.g., how the book is pitched to prospective buyers).
- I believed that the publisher's distribution and marketing efforts would be an important factor in determining the success of the book, measured both in terms of revenue generated and programmers reached.
- I understood that the publisher had to make a nontrivial investment to bring the book to market, but I felt that my track record as a C++ author (and my lack of a request for an advance) essentially guaranteed that the investment would be recouped.
Addison-Wesley and I undertook negotiations, and they offered generous terms. Compared to the deals most technical authors receive, I was offered more of everything: higher royalties, a bigger voice in production and marketing decisions, greater autonomy as an author--you name it. Had I signed, it would have been the most generous contract I'd had with AW in my nearly quarter century of working with them.
Unfortunately, I felt that what AW offered didn't embody a principle I had begun to realize was very important to me:
fairness. I believed that the terms of the publishing agreement should fairly reflect our respective contributions to the success of the book. But how do you evaluate that? How do you disentangle the author's contribution to the book's success from that of the publisher?
Being an author, I felt that the
component I was tackling--the
writing--was the most important of
the publishing tasks. Without a manuscript, the world's best production, distribution, and
marketing teams have nothing to do. Given a good
manuscript, however, anybody can produce PDF and sell it online. That is, they can produce, distribute, and market a book. They may not do it well, but they can do it. It's no longer that difficult to publish something on your own.
At the same time, professionals versed in production, distribution, and marketing could take my
manuscript, make it available in multiple formats on multiple platforms,
and sell a lot more copies than I could myself. Since 2010, for example, I've sold my
annotated training materials through an arrangement with
Artima that has me handle manuscript creation and production, while Artima is responsible for online sales and PDF downloads. Compared to "full service" publishing, production and distribution in this arrangement are quite limited (the materials are available only in PDF and at only one web site), and marketing barely exists. Feedback from readers indicates that the content of these publications is good, but sales have been underwhelming.
I conclude that it's not necessary to have skilled people working on production, distribution, and marketing to bring a book to
market, but that doesn't mean those aspects of publishing aren't important. They are.
So what's fair? If a book bombs, the revenue involved isn't enough to make much difference to either party. The publisher loses money, and the author loses a chunk of his or her life. But if a book is successful--if it earns a zillion dollars over its lifetime--how much of that zillion should go to the author and how much should go to the publisher? What's a fair revenue split?
I ultimately decided that AW's offer, though generous, didn't reflect what I thought was fair. We tried to bridge the gap in various ways, but we weren't able to come to an accord. That's when I approached O'Reilly. I explained what I was looking for in a publishing agreement, i.e., what I considered a fair apportionment between author and publisher of the work to be done and the revenues ultimately received. We quickly agreed on terms, and that, in a nutshell, is why EMC++ is an O'Reilly book.
In my
Advice to Prospective Book Authors, I say:
Given the uncertain financial return on your authoring effort, I suggest
you figure out what's most important to you. When your book comes out,
what will make you say, "I'm happy with the way things went, even if the
book sells poorly"? Do you want to have designed your own cover? To have
had complete editorial control? To have specified how the book would be
marketed? To have made the text of the book available at your web site?
If these things are important to you, you may want to trade them off
against financial aspects of the contract. After all, even if the book
sells zero copies, you'll still have designed your own cover, have
exercised complete editorial control, have specified how the book would be
marketed, etc. If those things have value to you, I encourage you to find
agreement with your editor on them.
For EMC++, I ultimately decided that having contract terms I considered fair--not just generous--was
important enough to warrant changing to a different publisher. I knew
that such a shift was accompanied by a Pandora's box of unknowns, but I'm sincere in my advice above, so I decided to
follow it myself.
I still work with AW, and I still enjoy
doing it. It's still home for my three earlier C++ books, and I still
act as consulting editor for the increasingly active
Effective Software Development Series. (In the past nine months, we've published both
Effective Python and
Effective Ruby.)
My decision to publish EMC++ with O'Reilly wasn't an expression of
displeasure with AW. It was a reflection of the the fact that,
taking everything into account, O'Reilly was a better match for the kind of arrangement I wanted to have with my publisher for
Effective Modern C++.
Scott
