The Best and Worst Tech-Book Publishers? 271
An anonymous reader writes "I am an author working on a technical book about an open-source software package. I am looking for a publisher, and I would like to hear experiences from any Slashdot authors. Who are the best publishers to work with and why are they great? Who are the worst publishers in the tech book business, and what nightmare/horror stories can you tell us about them? Any publishing company in particular you recommend avoiding? Any gems of advice (rights reversion, etc.) you can provide for first-time tech book authors?"
Re:Isn't this the age of e-books? (Score:5, Informative)
A related option is to have an outfit like Lulu [lulu.com] publish the book and sell it for you. You upload a PDF. They take orders and process them, print the book on demand, and send it out. They take a fixed cost (based on number of pages, binding, etc.) and you set the margin added to that, which goes to you. You get an ISBN, which gets the book into Books in Print, and they have arrangements for listing the book with Amazon.com and some other distributors. It looks attractive if you don't need the editing or marketing that a regular publisher provides.
Apress and Pragmatic Programmers (Score:5, Informative)
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.. I'm published with Apress. They have good people who mostly seem to work independently from home as well as more "admin" type folk who reside at Springer, the parent publisher. Apress's workflow is honed for a high number of books with little room for creativity. For example, you probably won't get much of a say in the cover of your book. You will also have little say in the workflow which is almost entirely Word based (though they can be semi-flexible in some cases, such as with Scott Chacon's new Pro Git book).
With Apress, for a book on reasonably popular topics from a new author, the advance is in the $5-8k range. The biggest downside of going with them is the inflexibility of the workflow and the opaqueness of the management - getting responses via e-mail can be tough on things like royalty issues, etc. Trying to get them to agree to stuff like open sourcing the e-book or a cover that's not in the style of the rest of a series is like pulling teeth. Royalties start at about 10% and work their way up to 20% once you've sold 20,000(?) copies (unlikely). I believe it's 15% for over 10,000 copies. They take a significant "reserve" each quarter and you do not get any of this back until at least 18 months later (6 quarters, basically). On a book with an RRP of about $40, Apress get about $18 net so your royalties are based on that, not the RRP. So let's say you sell 5,000 copies (not a bad number unless you're on a very mainstream topic).. you're looking at $9000 royalties - don't expect to see all of this for a couple of years though due to the reserves.
Separate to that, I hear very good things about the Pragmatic Programmers / Pragmatic Bookshelf although I haven't worked with them myself. Supposedly they have a very good, hacker-friendly workflow and offer 50% royalties.
You may wish to consider avoiding Elsevier... (Score:5, Informative)
...depending on your moral stance; the company (which unfortunately owns a host of major computer book publishers, most notably Academic Press, Digital Press and Morgan Kaufmann) has had a small host of scandals, mostly concerning exorbitant journal fees and 'sponsored' pharmaceutical journals (they were the publisher behind the Merck Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine scandal, if you recall that). MK and AP publish some of the finest books in the industry, which makes this that much harder a moral stand to take, but it's worth evaluating how you feel about the publisher before you consider going down that route.
Re:Isn't this the age of e-books? (Score:5, Informative)
I've used lulu for some nonfiction books, and I've been fairly happy with them, apart from some painful issues early on until I learned how to work around some of their issues. However, I wrote those books to scratch my own itch, whereas I'm guessing the OP wants to write his to, like, you know, pay the rent and stuff. Self-publishing is not a good way to make any significant amount of money. The big problem is lack of promotion. It's also virtually impossible to get a self-published book into a books-and-mortar store. (Possible exceptions would be, e.g., getting a bookstore in Pacific Grove, CA, to carry a self-published book on the history of Pacific Grove.)
Another thing to realize about lulu is that they have different levels of service, some of which cost the author and others that don't. The general rule in thr world of publishing is that money is supposed to flow toward the author, not the other way around; anything else is most likely a scam, and even if it's not a scam, it's almost certainly not a good idea. I use lulu's free level of service, and it works for me -- but that means I don't get an ISBN from them, or any of theire other services (which I suspect are basically snake oil).
If all you want is to get an ISBN for a book and get it in Books in Print, you can just do that directly by dealing with Bowker. You don't need lulu for that. One thing to consider about getting an ISBN for a self-published book is that you're supposed to have a different ISBN for every edition of the book. I don't know whether lulu will do that for you or not.
O'Reilly (Score:1, Informative)
As an author I have only worked with O'Reilly, so I have no basis for comparison from that perspective. They were great to work with and I highly recommend them.
As a reader who owns hundreds of technical books, most of them are from O'Reilly and very nearly all of the ones I really love are from O'Reilly. That's why I wanted to work with them in the first place, I think they are the best.
my $0.02,
JP Vossen -- co-author, O'Reilly's bash Cookbook
PS--Ironically the captcha for this post is "authors"
O'Reilly, of course (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Isn't this the age of e-books? (Score:5, Informative)
Get the ISBN yourself. Don't use someone else's -- it can reduce portability. For example, a ISBN from Createspace cannot be move to anywhere else, so you're stuck on Amazon only, forever. If you have your own ISBN, you can move to Lulu (for example) or to a more conventional publisher.
Re:AC time (Score:4, Informative)
Note for people about to post -- check your contract. Both of mine explicitly stated you must not say anything nasty about the publisher. You want to go AC on this thread.
Double Ditto here folks. If you're published, DO NOT post unless it's as an AC. Same for me, but more publishers than two.
Re:Apress and Pragmatic Programmers (Score:5, Informative)
Google for "programming book profits" - a number of authors did blog posts a few years ago around that theme. Also try more advanced searches like "1000..10000 copies" in connection with publisher names and words like "advance" or "reserve."
My personal "I've worked with a few publishers in various capacities" yardstick would vary depending on the topic.. for example, a Beginning C# Book should sell > 10k copies no problems, whereas a Beginning Haskell book might do well to sell 5k. But for a not-too-popular, not-too-obscure topic, I'd say 3000 probably means you won't be working with that publisher again, 5000 == everyone's vaguely happy but not over the moon, 8000+ == it was a pretty solid run, 10000+ == you did well, prepare to get hounded to write more.
Re:Apress and Pragmatic Programmers (Score:2, Informative)
I'm surprised more people aren't recommending Pragmatic Bookshelf.
They seem to have great terms [pragprog.com] for their authors. I guess the only drawback could be that your particular open source book isn't something that fits with their established bookshelf, but it never hurts to ask.
Good and Bad Game Programming Books (Score:5, Informative)
"Thomson Course Technology" are extremely good. They have the highst editorial standard I've seen. Books like "Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists" by Sebastien St-Laurent are extremely well done and IMHO the best in the field.
O'Reilly is good ole' reliable but he does tend to fatten his books out to ridiculous sizes. Why say in one paragraph what you can say in ten pages? It makes them slow going for learners, but that aside we should congratulate him for raising the bar for all publishers.
Bad:
Wordware and Charles River have put out some shockers over the years. These seem to have included many books written by the "give a kid some money to go away and write a book for us." These are rambling monologs to nowhere in particular. I remember one they did on character animation where the author where he didn't discuss the most commonly used formats because they were "too hard" (why else would I buy his book!?) and another which told the reader to buy some particular company's SDK (sure, but what if you don't want to?) Some of their other books have just been copied straight from a technical specs with minimal explanation. Occasionally they do a good one though: Frank Luna's books on shaders and 3d programming are good.
We should also flame Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Wiley and publishers of textbooks. We see far too many textbooks with typos, errors, problems without solutions ("sold separately"), overpriced US editions and the way they rip off students by bring out new editions with superficial changes. The same with their academic books which seem to have very poor editorial control. For all the money these publishers make they should do a better job, to say nothing of their overpriced academic journals.
Elsevier = worst by far, and sometimes best. (Score:5, Informative)
Elsevier has no morality whatsoever. They publish fake magazines, with fake studies in them, especially targeted to make doctors think they are real and therefore describe pills that kill their patients, or at least make them suffer while going broke, just so the pharma industry can make money.
But the also published "The Art Of Game Design" which is a really great book (except for the very "old world" chapters about money making).
So it as usual is no black/white thing, as this is close to Hitler, who also did the exceptional good thing (*gasp*). ;)
As usual this is all a question of trust. So here is my little addition to your graph of trust. :)
Advice from a computer book veteran (Score:5, Informative)
I've written computer books for 20 years, and you'll be shafted on your first book deal no matter what you do. So, if you want a career out of this, choose a publisher that can push titles out the door: O'Reilly or Dummies. For a first time author, establishing a reliable reputation is more important than your royalty rate. You need to show you can produce a marketable product on time, and be able to work professionally with editors, copyeditors, proofreaders and everybody else who will try to muck up your copy.
Also, pick an agent in the tech field, like Fresh Books, Waterside, or StudioB. Sure, they'll scoop 15% off your take, but by weeding the crap out of your contract, they'll get you a better deal in the long run. They also know which publishers are best suited for your book, saving you a lot of time. And time is key in computer books: You must deliver on deadline, or you're toast. The tech field changes too rapidly for tech books to have much shelf life.
Once you have a decent first book under your belt, then try to pump up your royalty rate.
Sir, this is your OOP copyright revertion reminder (Score:2, Informative)
Make sure your contract clearly defines what it means for your book to be out-of-print (remember, this is the digital era, you might need special verbiage in there to cover that) at which time all copyrights revert to you.
Depends on intent (Score:1, Informative)
Addison Wesley is a the best publisher if one if looking for rigor. It is sometimes hard to read, but relatively error free, both implicate and explicate. I tend to favor these books when i am learning new concepts. They published the practice of programing, a game changing book from my point of view.
One should not rule out MS press on some of the basic techniques of programing, expecially those books coming from the macintosh side. I have not seen any books of late, but they have some classics on software development.
A challenger to o'reilly, and a higher quality mass production outlet, IMHO, is the pragmatic programmer. Where O'reilly is HTMl, pragmatic programer is best practices and Ruby.The former is a critical issue. One complaint I have about O'reilly is that they are limited in their scope. They don't really lay the ground work for a person to become a good programmer, only a passable one. Of course, when O'reilly began, it was not the fashion in the popular computer press to talk about best practices on the macro scale. That has changed. The Prgamatic programmer considers the whole process. For someone looking for accessible, complete, and overall correct coverage this is not a bad place to start.
The publishers I avoid. Anyhing for dummies or any variation. I know it is toungue in cheek, but if one thinks one is a dummy, success is not forthcoming. Any other silly variations. Sams Publishing. I have never bout a book from them that is helpfu. No Starch press has been of limited value to me, but then I don;t do all that much of what they write about. If I did I might have a different opinion, but my QT book is not no-starch, but prentice hall.
What I will say is this. I tend to know what I want for the stuff I already do. When I interested in learning something, new, I take a look at all the books. Just because a publisher does on thing well, doesn't mean they do everything well.
Re:Why not open source your book? (Score:5, Informative)
No.
Giving away advice, articles, etc., is one thing, and I do it all the time. (Some of this is covered by my salary. But nowhere near all of it.)
But when I spend 10 months full-time, writing a 500-page book that developers are going to use to learn or improve skills that will help them make more money, I see absolutely nothing wrong with me getting a share.
As for the original question, my advice is, "Apress and O'Reilly will treat you fairly and professionally. Wrox and Addison-Wesley will do their best to steal you blind."
(NB: I've never actually written for O'Reilly, but I've written several for each of the other three. My colleagues who've written for O'Reilly, however, seem pretty happy about having done so, and their contracts look very reasonable.)
Apress (Score:5, Informative)
My story of when I was involved with an Apress book here [merjis.com].
Rich.
You don't get to choose your publisher (Score:3, Informative)
Unless you have an established reputation in your field - one that is worth real cash (hint: most exist only in the mind of the author and/or are not worth a cent), or you are an already published author you won't be in a position to pick or choose which publisher gets to risk thousands in the shrinkingly small possibility that your work might just, possibly break even, or (even more unlikely) make a few bucks.
As it is, there's this recession thing going on at the moment. What that means for you is that publishers are less willing to risk their money on unknowns - and since you have to ask which publishers are good / bad, it doesn't sound as if you've done this before. It also means they have a backlog of new authors waiting for their stuff to get into print. It also means fewer people are spending money on books. Put all this together and even if you can find someone willing to put your work into print, it won't happen this year - maybe not even next. You might just see you name on the cover in 2011 and you might just see an earnings cheque somethime the next year. However, the money you eventually make won't cover the cost of your time - even at minimum wage rates.
Better to use your book as a loss-leader and give it away (thereby helping to ensure that future authors have an even tougher time trying to get their works into bookshops - no-one said it was fair, just or right :-), and try to make your money on consultancy based around your book and the knowledge you have in that field.
The workflow the publisher uses is key (Score:3, Informative)
I published a book with Sams. Never again. There were two main problems. The first was that they published my material in two books and to start with only paid me for the first (until I pointed out that they had 'forgotten' to pay me). The second problem is that they have a publication process totally based on MS Word. That's very common in publishing. However, in my case the result was that quite a bit of the content got screwed up. The shell commands for example had back-ticks turned into single quotes. Gah. So I won't use Sams or any of the other impressions of Macmillan Computer Publishing again (this is not the same publisher as Macmillian, confusingly). Another thing that would give me pause is the number of completed pages per day they expect. I don't believe an individual author could come within a factor of 3 of that and maintain any level of quality.
Now for the good news. Next time around I would engage with any publisher who has a workflow that either produces camera-ready copy (e.g. with LaTeX for example) or uses something like DocBook -- essentially, any workflow that limits the opportunity for people who don't understand those funny symbols to accidentally mess them up (in my case I don't know if the people or Word messed up my shell code). I'd talk to O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley first, though there are other publishers who are equally accomodating.
OTOH I suggest you take your existing computer science bookshelf, give each book a score out of say 5, and sort them by score. That should give you a shortlist of publishers to talk to.
Re:Good and Bad Game Programming Books (Score:2, Informative)
Bizarrely you've actually got the same publisher in both the good and bad columns. Charles River got aquired by Thomson (now Cengage), owner of Course Technology. The title that you mentioned, "Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists" by Sebastien St-Laurent, is probably from another publisher they acquire a few years ago, Premier.
I'm not saying you're wrong though. In the end, it all depends on the author and editor, and one publisher could easily could have good and bad books. Especially when they're produced by different imprints/divisions. Now that a lot of smaller publishers have been eaten by big ones, I guess that I'd keep an eye out for what division I'd be working with.
Re:You may wish to consider avoiding Elsevier... (Score:3, Informative)
As one who has and is having experiences with Elsevier, I totally approve and support the above post. I won't go into all the disgusting details, but basically, fuck Elsevier.
Re:The workflow the publisher uses is key (Score:1, Informative)
How long has it been since you've worked with Sams? Just wondering because Sams is now owned by Pearson and is essentially an imprint of Addison-Wesley (in fact many of Sams' old professional level books are now Addison-Wesley books).
I know it's hard to keep track of these things, but you really should be carful when you diss a company and then essentially say that same company would be one of your first choices.
Get an agent (Score:2, Informative)
I've written two books and a fair bit of paid articles. Get an agent. Go to http://studiob.com./ [studiob.com.]
They're going to negotiate a better contract, they're going to interface with the publisher, they're going to take care of everything but the writing. I don't worry if I get paid because they've got a person there that hounds publishers. They'll work on your proposal to make sure it works with the publisher. Got a problem with the publisher? Tell your agent, they take care of it. Yea, they take a percentage off the top, it's money well spent.
Sean
Re:You don't get to choose your publisher (Score:2, Informative)
Most No Starch Press authors are actually first-time authors. At the same time, most are also experts in their fields.
Because we only publish around 20 books each year (we keep trying to increase that number but we always seem to fall back), our goal is to publish the best books we can find by the people best qualified to write them. Our watchwords are always quality over quantity, which is why you don't see 50 books on obscure aspects of programming. I'd be happy with one great book on learning Python that we could sell the hell out of.
Bill Pollock, Founder
No Starch Press
Re:the good and the meh (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, we offer from 10-15% royalties, on a sort of cafeteria plan. Our authors have the choice of three royalty options -- 10%, 12%, or 15% -- with advances ranging from $0 to $8,000.
Our royalties are flat which means that we don't cut them for different types of sales. The only royalty that varies is the royalty on electronic sales; currently 1 1/2 times the chosen royalty rate.
And unlike most publishing companies today, we edit everything. Sometimes we rewrite everything. I've personally rewritten many books over the years at no additional cost to the author. There's a lot of overhead in this business when your publishing actually acts as a publishing company, as opposed to a printer.
Also, we're distributed in the U.S. by O'Reilly -- a business relationship that has really been great for us. We remain independent, we control the business 100%, but we have great reach into the marketplace.
Bill Pollock, Founder
No Starch Press
Re:the good and the meh (Score:2, Informative)
As far as I know, most every publisher in the U.S. pays based on net cash received -- or net selling price. For the few publishers who pay a share of profits one has to ask how those profits are calculated and what happens when there is no profit? These are all varying degrees of risk.
For those who are down on book publishers, have you looked at the statistics on how many book publishers (and bookstores) are going out of business? Do you think that would be happening if these companies were sitting on piles of money? We're not software publishers. Books are expensive to print and you can't just print a few hundred to sell into bookstores while still making a decent profit. You have to print a few thousand. And printers expect to be paid before you sell even one copy.
Never mind the overhead involved in editorial, marketing, design, production, and sales. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. If you were looking to make money, it would be much better to go into banking and take some TARP funds.
This is a very low margin business and it can be very high risk when companies publish too many books. Sure, there's money to be made if you can pump up your sales into the millions and sell to a larger company who has the cash. But those companies aren't buying because your margins are so great -- they're buying because they want the list and they typically axe the company's staff. And there aren't that many companies left who can buy.
Bill Pollock, Founder
No Starch Press
Re:Isn't this the age of e-books? (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't quite accurate. First off, you're supposed to have a new ISBN for every edition. A book is not supposed to have a single ISBN associated with it forever, so portability is not such a big issue. Just get a new ISBN. I could be wrong, but I also don't think your example of bringing in your own ISBN to lulu works. Lulu wants to sell you an ISBN as part of one of their packages. And if you move to a conventional publisher, they're going to certainly do enough changes to the book (even if it's just the cover and binding) to require generating a new ISBN for a new edition.
There are really three options for a self-published book, each of which has its own pros and cons:
Great Experience With O'Reilly (Score:4, Informative)
My experience publishing a book [oreilly.com] with O'Reilly was just about perfect. The editors were smart, well-informed and deep enough to catch even binary encoding typos in protocol descriptions, and even though my coauthor and I had looked for critique by just everyone we could talk into it, the mandatory peer review process gave us a great chance to hear what people who had no vested interest in protecting our feelings had to say about the book in its nearly finished form. We made significant changes for the better from the editors' edits and suggestions and peer review questions and criticism. I would recommend O'Reilly to anyone with a technical book.
One thing to be aware of, O'Reilly prefers to start from scratch rather than getting a completed manuscript. They have very strict submission guidelines (down to specific styles in the document) that feed into their automated typesetting process. It's worth the effort to do it their way, because it eliminates plenty of opportunities for error and confusion.
Re:the good and the meh (Score:3, Informative)
You speak of "marketing" as if it were something you can buy at 7-11. Real marketing is complicated and expensive, and takes organization and contacts. Without it, you haven't much hope of reaching an audience of any size. Getting 10% of the revenue from a book that sells well is a lot more money than 100% of a book that nobody knows about.
Yes, I know, some people have made a success of online books, using viral marketing. But I think you'll find that in every case, the goal is to demonstrate to a "real" publisher that there's a market for the book. And once that happens, they soon make a lot more money from royalties than they ever made from distributing the book themselves, even with the 90% "rip off".
Re:Isn't this the age of e-books? (Score:1, Informative)
However, I wrote those books to scratch my own itch, whereas I'm guessing the OP wants to write his to, like, you know, pay the rent and stuff. Self-publishing is not a good way to make any significant amount of money.
Writing technical books on open source software packages is not a good way to make any significant amount of money, unless your software package is something that has a huge amount of buzz like Linux itself. Most technical books sell between 10,000 and 20,000 copies total. The author's cust of a book is probably going to be something around 5-10% of the retail price. So, assume your book sells for $40, you can expect to make $2-4 per copy sold. If you sell 10,000 books, you might make somewhere between $20,000-$40,000 over a two or three year lifespan of the book.
Here's a couple of sites from authors you might want to look at:
http://ejohn.org/blog/programming-book-profits/
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/technical-writing.shtml
http://tinyurl.com/orjfxe
Que (Score:1, Informative)
My favorite publisher of all-time is Que. They come in a variety of flavors... including the "Complete Idiot's Guide to (insert topic here)", "Special Edition using (topic)", and "Platinum Edition using (topic)". I've at least found that the "Complete Idiot's Guides" go much further in-depth than one might think (at least more-so than IDG's "For Dummies" series which seem to often be good for nothing-more-than writing "Hello World" applications). I've always been impressed with the level of quality, depthness, and even humor contained in all the Que-published titles. O'Reilly actually earns second-place behind Que in my book, while being utterly invaluable for the fact that they (O'Reilly) publish on topics that nobody else does.