[vladtaltos]

Assuming writing a technical book will at least take 3 months of your time (probably 4-6 months more realistically for a good book), making ~$10K is outrageous. And this is in case the book sells well. Who'd accept any other job if someone comes to you and tells you 'look I'll give you a single shiny dollar for every twenty dollars you make for me'.

This is slavery. Publishing houses need to be more realistic.

long live the internet... authors everywhere - self publish!

[bphogan]

I've written for PragProg numerous times and will continue to do so. Full disclosure: I also edit books for them.

The royalty rate is 50% of the profit. The other 50% goes to pay the editor for his or her time, and other production fees. It's incredibly fair, the help authors get is great, and I earn a lot more than $1 per book sold.

I think self publishing is great but it's not for me. I am happy to give up 50% if I can focus on writing and delivering quality content while someone else spends the time making it look good, indexing it, helping me develop the content (development editor) and helping me fix mistakes (copy editing.)

Just my .02.

[jeremymcanally]

The Prags' deal and commitment to actually, you know, helping their authors is unfortunately a beautiful unique snowflake amongst publishers. I've been involved with projects with all the major tech publishers in some form or another, and they're all horrible terms (usually 12-15% of proceeds [i.e., post-costs] or less).

Even worse, they do almost no work for you these days. The editors they find are 99% completely non-technical and on contract, so they're just trying to squeeze hours out of reviewing something they know zilch about. The publisher will stick your book on a website and put it in bookstores, but outside of that, don't count on any marketing or sales help. PROTIP: They don't want big reputation authors because they're better writers. They want them so they can do minimal work and ride off the authors' social media and conference speaking coattails to sell copies with next to no investment. Then they'll sell your work to places like Safari for a pittance (on the order of the cost of about 100 print copies if I recall correctly) and give you as small of a piece of the pie as humanly possible. I understand they're a business trying to survive these days, but seriously, the whole thing needs to be re-evaluated.

As GP or someone said, self-publishing is way more profitable if you can find a niche that's not being served. I've made about 10x more money off my self-published works as I have my "published" works, and that's a very sad statistic given how big the book industry really is. Not saying all publishers will end up with figures like that, but the industry as a whole is wrapped up in an author-hostile business model and a crappy, slow process.