Richard Monson-Haefel's Blog

My adventure in Self-Publishing

It turns out that publishing was both easier and harder than I had expected. I found that with some research and work I was able to publish a couple of excellent books of professional quality. Both of the books I published are workbooks or companion guides to my EJB book. They were very well received and very successful in some ways and not so successful in others. For example, the free download versions of these books did great! People loved them. The sale of paper editions by me directly and through Amazon.com were less successful for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, was the workload of daily operations and marketing.

I discovered after about six months that I was spending way too much time marketing and managing the production and sale of the workbooks. At first I sold them directly to customers on-line from my own Web site. I used Yahoo!Store and was very satisfied with how it worked, but I was spending a lot of time (at least 20 hours a week) fulfilling orders and managing day-to-day operations. For me it was a very unprofitable venture. I also found out that people were shy of buying books from my web site because they didn't trust my publishing company as a vendor. I don't blame them. I rarely give out my credit card info to companies I don't know. In an attempt to reduce my work in fulfillment (not to mention directly customer support) I started to exclusively sell through Amazon.com's Advantage program. This required that I sell the books to Amazon.com at wholesale (actually 45% of cover price) which sapped my profits enormously, but it turned out to be a lot easier for me personally. Once a week or so I would ship out a bunch of books all at once per Amazon.com's request. One destination, one client, one package -- it all became much easier. But again, the revenue was diminished by 55%! Which hurt my profits and the royalties I paid to the authors.

In the end I gave up on the whole dream of publishing for one reason: For me, it was too much work for too little profit. I think a person could still make this whole thing work if they were smarter than I was about fulfillment and marketing. Not a big stretch since I'm only human and tend to have limitations. I ended up selling the rights to the workbooks to O'Reilly, which allowed me to cover some but not all of my expenditures. Like I said, it came out as a loss in the end but only monetarily. The adventure was worth it.

What I learned is that publishers earn their money. I don't think they are raking in a lot of money like I used to. It's very difficult to manage the production process, marketing, sales to retailers, etc. With only 1 out of 10 books breaking even, its clearly a numbers game and not that great of one. Grocery stores make about 3% profit (something I learned consulting in the Consumer Package Goods industry) and I'll bet publishers are somewhere in that ball park (Just a guess). Personally, I'll stick with the middlemen and traditional publishers. They fulfill a purpose and, in my opinion, are necessary to get books from my typing fingers to the eyes of my readers.

Comments

• Hindsight
  Knowing what you know now, what would you have done for your workbooks?:

  Sell the rights to O'reilly (or another publisher) from the beginning
  Still self publish, but try to avoid the pitfalls you experience this go-around.
  Only offer downloads, but for a fee.
  Only offer downloads, for free.
  Something else?
  

  Posted by: jimothy on June 02, 2004 at 11:09 AM

• Hindsight
  Knowing what I know now, I'd skip using the "ul" tag in my comments. :)

  Posted by: jimothy on June 02, 2004 at 11:10 AM

• selfish reaction
  My selfish reaction is for you to do more writing and less publishing, mostly because I have enjoyed your books and look forward to what you write. I guess this is one of those lessons about doing what you do well and leveraging specialization.

  Posted by: duanegran on June 02, 2004 at 11:51 AM

• Hindsight
  Hmm ... well, I wouldn't do it again is probably the best answer but ...

  1. I would offer only a partial download and than offer the entire PDF download for a fee. The download would be priced (for a 200 page book) at between $20 and $30.

  2. I would offer a print editiion, but a premium with some type of added value (e.g. examples or other material).

  However, if I was all that great in the publishing industry I wouldn't be writing this blog entry and comment. I would be cashing checks and living on a beach somewhere - the point is why take my advice on what to do, when clearly I did it wrong?

  Posted by: monsonhaefel on June 02, 2004 at 01:10 PM

• selfish reaction
  That is very kind, thank you.

  Posted by: monsonhaefel on June 02, 2004 at 01:11 PM

• Hindsight
  My motto is, we learn from our mistakes, but it's a lot cheaper to learn from others' mistakes!

  Posted by: jimothy on June 03, 2004 at 05:54 AM

• Thanks Richard
  Just wanted to thank Richard publicly for giving Sacha Labourey and I a chance to become authors. Richard approached JBoss about 2.5 years ago about writing a JBoss workbook for his little publishing company to compliment EJB 3rd edition.

  Now it seems EJB 4th edition will include our workbook.

  Thanks Richard for your support.

  Bill Burke
  Chief Architect
  JBoss Inc.

  Posted by: patriot1burke on June 03, 2004 at 06:29 AM

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