More (self-)publishing thoughts. @ Irrational Exuberance

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This is the weekly digest for my blog, Irrational Exuberance. Reach out with thoughts on Twitter at @lethain, or reply to this email.

Posts from this week:

- More (self-)publishing thoughts.

More (self-)publishing thoughts.

I recently got an email asking about self-publishing books, and wanted to summarize my thinking there. Recapping my relevant experience, I’ve written three books:

1. An Elegant Puzzle was published in 2019 as a manuscript by Stripe Press (e.g. I wrote it and then it was released as is), which has sold about 100,000 copies (96k through the end of 2023, and selling about 4k copies a quarter over past two years),
2. Staff Engineer which I self-published in 2021, which has sold about 70,000 copies (also selling roughly 4k copies a quarter over the past two years)
3. The Engineering Executive’s Primer which was published by O’Reilly earlier this month. It’s too early to have sales numbers at this point

Putting those in context, my sense is that these are “very good” numbers, but not “breakout” numbers. For example, my best guess is that a breakout technology book like Accelerate or The Manager’s Path has sold something closer to 300-500k copies.

I’ve also written about publishing a few times:

• Self-publishing Staff Engineer (2021) – this remains a comprehensive summary of my self-publishing process
• Thoughts on writing and publishing Primer (2023) – my process writing with O’Reilly and how it contrasted with self-publishing
• What I learned writing [An Elegant Puzzle] (2019) – I wrote this shortly after finishing writing Puzzle, and rereading this five years later, I’m most surprised at how little I knew about writing books at this point. It’s also a poorly formatted post, but whatever, who knows what I was doing back then

Building on that, the general elements I’d encourage someone to think through if they’re deciding whether to self-publishing:

• There’s a learning curve to publishing book, and I’ve learned a lot from every book I’ve written. Both working with publishers and self-publishing accelerate your learning curve. To maximize learning, I’d recommend doing a mix of both. If your goal is to only write a single book, I’d recommend working with a publisher already has gone through the learning curve and can guide you on navigate it as well

• Publishers might not take your book, which means sometimes you can’t publish a given book with a publisher. I’d generally argue that means you should work on your own distribution before trying to publish the book. Having your own distribution is critical to getting a publisher to take your book, and also critical to being able to self-publish successfully. If you can’t find a publisher willing to take your book, I think there’s a lot of risk in self-publishing it (not because self-publishing is inherently risky, but because publishers filter for the sorts of criteria that derisk self-publishing), and you should reflect on that

• Pricing control is lost when you work with a publisher. Stripe Press prices to maximize distribution, selling a hard cover at roughly $20. O’Reilly prices to maximize profit, selling a paperback at roughly $40. Neither of these is right or wrong, but your goals may or may not align with your publisher’s pricing strategy. When self-publishing, there’s no potential for misaligning with the publisher’s pricing strategy. Of course, pricing strategy also impacts your compensation a great deal, e.g. I probably make twice as much from each copy of Staff Engineer sold as I do from a copy of The Engineering Executive’s Primer, despite the fact that Staff Engineer costs half as much.

• Pring quality is highly variable across publishing solutions. In particular, Kindle Direct Publishing–which is the dominant on-demand printing solution for self-published books–has highly variable print quality. In general, on-demand print quality is variable because there are 10,000s of small batch print runs. Even when print quality is high 99% of the time, it still means shipping some badly printed books. Anecdotally, my sense is that quality is highly dependent on the specific region where your book is printed, so you might never get a badly printed copy, but many of your readers in another region might frequently receive low quality print. This has been the largest “hidden tax” of self-publishing for me.

  If you work with a publisher, they handle this, and their large volume print runs are generally error free because they are infrequent and represent a major investment for both the publisher and printer

• Creative control may be significantly lower working with a publisher on many dimensions. This ranges from creating your book’s cover to decisions about how content and topics are treated. Similar to pricing strategy, you can largely derisk this issue upfront by understanding what a given publisher wants in these regards, but you can get into a lot of trouble if you don’t align early

• Editorial support is highly variable across publishers and editors within publishers I’ve adored every publisher and editor I’ve worked with, but I think that’s largely due to good luck (asking around about a given editor goes a long way here)

• Other sorts of support is highly variable, but working with a publisher you don’t have to find the folks, and generally you’re going to run into fewer operational issues because you’re working with folks who publish books frequently

• Release timing and control is very low when you work with a publisher. When you self-publish, particularly with a print on-demand solution, you have immense control here

• Payment nuances are someone else’s problem if you work with a publisher. If you’re an individual author who is taking full revenue (and costs), this is trivial. However, if you want to split revenue from a book, this is going to be fairly annoying as a self-publisher

• International rights management is pretty painstaking as a self-published author, although if you’re lucky you can find an agency to work with like Nordlyset who take on most of the burden for this. You can do this yourself (and I did for one language, just to understand the process), but you won’t have a good sense of the quality of those international publishers, how to do the negotiations, and so on. Not all publishers will handle this for you either, for example I work with Nordlyset for both my Stripe Press and self-published books, but O’Reilly handles this for me

In sum, I don’t think there’s any right decision on whether or not to self-publish, it’s all very context dependent. The only thing I’d push back on is the sense that there’s only one obviously right decision, that statement is resoundingly untrue from my experience.

That's all for now! Hope to hear your thoughts on Twitter at @lethain!

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