Book Royalties

[William Park]

Dr. David Mertz <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:
> But for my gap time, I thought really seriously about self-publishing.
> The electronic vs. paper issue is surprisingly unimportant, actually.
> You can get a printer to produce a very nice physical book for just a
> few dollars a copy.  I looked at some paper stocks and print process
> stuff, and for a run of 1000 you can get something just as good looking
> as what New Riders of O'Reilly publish for less than $4/book.  The
> author needs to find an editor; and either find a typesetter and indexer
> or do it herself -- but then, I am doing my AW typesetting in exchange
> for a bit of extra money from them anyway (I wouldn't dream of trying to
> be my own editor or indexer; authors are blind to certain things in
> their own books).
>
> The real problem with self-publishing is publicity and distribution.
> It's easy to get an ISBN; and not hard to get your book listed on Amazon
> and Barnes-and-Noble websites.  But to put books on bookstore shelves, a
> self-published author has a big challenge.  The thumb-through-the-shelf
> shoppers are just simply not going to see your self-published book; and
> I don't really believe that websites are going to attract all that many
> potential buyers.  Of course, if you can get three or four times the
> per-book profit, you can sell a third or fourth as many books and get
> the same income.  I don't know how these things balance each other...
> maybe someone like Bruce Eckel--with more books out there--has a better
> knowledge of the pros and cons.

Hi David,

I'm also an aspiring author, looking at 5% (retail) royalty.  I would
like to ask few questions...

1. Of the printers that you looked at, how were their binding?  Were the
binding comparable to those books that you see on bookstores?  I can do
my own typesetting and all, but can't do binding.

2. In your dealing with publishers, have you comes across any who will
do the marketing and distribution only, and leave the printing to the
author?  I figure most publisher already outsource the printing to
offset shops.

	Yours truly,
-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>.
8 CPU cluster, NAS, (Slackware) Linux, Python, LaTeX, Vim, Mutt, Tin