Self Publishing a Technical Book in 2020
In the past decade, self publishing books has became more common due to improved tools and platforms for authoring and selling books. Some of the best-selling novels in the 2010’s were originally self published, including The Martian and Fifty Shades of Gray.
In 2019, I decided that I wanted to write a technical book on Python for data science. While I initially explored the option of working with a traditional publisher for publishing the book, I ultimately decided to go the self-publishing route. I saw successes such as the 100-page ML book, and realized that working with a traditional publisher was no longer a requirement for technical books to be successful. This post talks through the process of self-publishing a book given the current tools. It is based on my experience publishing “Data Science in Production”, which is available for free on the Kindle store this weekend.
The Pitch
One of the first steps to go through when authoring a technical book is outlining a table of contents that provides detail on the topics that will be covered in the book. Even when self publishing, it’s useful to put together a proposal on the book that resembles the templates that technical publishers typically require for authors. By going through this process, you’ll have a better understanding of whether or not your book is going to be able to be competitive in the market. Additionally, if you do want to work with a traditional publisher down the road, you’ll already have gone through much of the due diligence required to get to the contract stage. Here’s some of the sections typically included in a proposal.
- Marketing Description: What is the selling point of this book?
- Target Audience: Who is the target audience for your book and what is size of this potential audience? This this an audience that is growing?
- Takeaways: What will readers learn from consuming this material?
- Competing Titles: What books cover similar books to your proposal, and how is your book different?
- Credentials: Why are you a good candidate for authoring this book?
- Outline: What are the expected contents of the book? What are the chapters, sections, and subsections?
To size up your audience, you can use Google trends for terms related to your topic, and you can see if the audience size is growing over time. You can also look at how similar books have compared, by looking at their placement on Amazon and their number of reviews. Traditional publishers will typically have more insight into how competitor titles are performing, but for self publishing these proxy metrics work well enough.
The Trade-offs
Once you feel like you have a strong pitch, you need to make the call about whether or not you want to self publish or work with a traditional publisher. One thing to keep in mind is that publishers won’t expect you to have a polished proposal to start, and you’ll typically work with an acquisitions editor that will help you finalize the proposal before it’s formally pitched to the publisher for a contract. While it is possible to wait until you’ve authored a few chapters before pitching the book, publishers may want to make changes to content you’ve already authored, and therefore it’s usually a good approach to find a publisher before getting far into the process of writing a book.
One of the biggest benefits of working with a big publisher is that it helps build out your resume, which is why it’s important to work with a publisher that you feel has a strong reputation in your industry. In addition to this benefit, here are some of the positives of working with a large publisher:
- Technical Reviewing: Publishers will work with experts in the area to provide technical feedback on the topics that you cover.
- Copy Editing: The publisher is responsible for making sure that the text is free of spelling and grammar errors.
- Cover Design: Publishers work with illustrators to provide high-quality cover designs for texts.
- Typesetting: The publisher is responsible for formatting the book and avoiding text issues such as widows and orphans.
- Conferences: Publishers may sponsor conferences, or provide speaker opportunities for authors, where there are highly-targeted audiences for your technical book.
- Network: Perhaps the biggest perk. Publishers are well connected with past authors and experts in the field that can provide a foreword or endorsement for your book.
- Authors: This network of authors is also useful if you are looking for a coauthor, or need help with a chapter where you lack expertise.
- Audience: An established publisher already has a large addressable audience from past books and may provide online tools where your book can be marketed.
It’s a long process to work with a technical publisher, and the time frame from pitch to publishing can take one to two years. It can take several iterations of chapters to get to the finished product, but the end result is typically a highly-polished book. It’s an approach I may try in the future, because the network it opens up is a nice benefit.
Large publishers provide several benefits, but there are some aspects that are typically lacking when working with this type of contract:
- Performance Marketing: While contracts typically state that marketing will be performed for your book, you lose the ability to manage advertising campaigns using tools such as Amazon sponsorship and Facebook ads. I work in mobile gaming where performance-based marketing is the lifeblood of many companies, and wanted more control in this process.
- Transparency: Publishers may provide contracts where the royalties are paid based on net margins, and it’s often until unclear what the difference will be between net and gross revenues.
- Content Ownership: A large publisher will typically own the content that you author, which is fine when everything goes to plan. But if your title is cancelled during authoring, you may lose months of work depending on the contract details.
Self publishing provides authors with more freedom to write on the topics they want to cover, and time frames to author and publish books. However, authors that self publish are responsible for much more production work than authors that work with a large publisher. My recommendation for writers deciding between traditional and self publishing is to talk with technical authors that have previously worked with a large publisher to get as much context as you can to inform your choice.
The Royalties
One of the biggest benefits of self publishing a book is that you can get a larger slice of royalties for every book that you sell. This is especially important given the growing focus on digital copies of books, where royalties can be significantly higher than working with a large publisher. Here’s the range of royalties that a first time authoring may be presented with:
- Physical Sales: 10% net revenue
- Digital Sales: 10% to 25% net revenue
Since royalties are typically paid on net rather than gross revenues, you can expect to get $4 or $5 for each physical copy sold at $60. There’s a growing focus on digital sales, because both publishers and authors typically make more money per copy sold than a physical sale. However, in 2020 it doesn’t make sense to give authors similar margins for physical and digital copies, because the incremental cost of producing an additional digital copy of a technical book is nearly zero. Digital sales are where self publishing a book can have the best margins. Rather than getting 10% to 25% of digital sales, the following platforms provide much improved margins:
- Kindle: 35% for any price point, 70% for titles priced below $10
- Leanpub: Authors set a preferred and minimum price, and get 80%
Both Leanpub and Kindle provide great rates for authors, and these platforms both support self-publishing authors.
For physical sales, the royalties may not be better when self publishing, especially if you are planning on producing a color paperback book. With color printing, the cost of printing each book is significantly higher than when sticking to black and white. When using Kindle Direct for publishing, I make $3.72 in royalties for every physical copy purchased at $34.99. This is a bit better than the rate offered by large publishers, but it’s not a compelling reason for going the self-publishing route. One of my main motivations for going the self publishing route is that sales of digital copies provide a healthy margin where you can spend money on performance-based marketing in order to scale the sales of your book.
The Tooling
When authoring a book, it’s useful to identify a set of tools from the start that will help you translate your content into print-ready formatting. This typesetting process can be quite involved, so it’s useful to apply tools to transform text and code into PDF, html, and epub formats. There’s two ends of the spectrum here: using what you see if what you get (WYSIWYG) tools such as Microsoft Work and Google Docs, and at the other end is using Latex to specify every specific detail of your text.
When working with a large publisher, you may provide drafts as Word documents and the publisher is responsible for typesetting these documents into a nice output text. With self publishing, you don’t want to send so much time on manual processes. To automate this process, I used the Bookdown package to translate chapters written in markdown into an output PDF. The library extends RMarkdown to translate markdown into a Latex format which is then passed to Pandoc to generate PDF, epub, and html versions of the text. It may take a few minutes to “compile” your book, but this workflow saved a significant amount of time, especially when finalizing the doc and fixing references in the text. To get the exact output that you’re looking for, you may need to occasionally revert to raw Latex code, but it’s also possible to avoid this if you find a suitable style template.
AsciiDoc is another format that is useful for typesetting books, and it’s one of the formats than many large publishers allow authors to use. There’s a few different ways of translating your AsciiDoc text into output formats, and some platforms such as Leanpub provide this workflow for authors. AsciiDoc provides more control over styling the output of your text, but the workflow can be more complicated.
To spell and grammar check, I copy and pasted the content from the html output into Google Docs. Tools such as Grammarly can also be useful for this process. For additional feedback, I published each chapter as it was completed to Leanpub and asked for feedback from readers that purchase early-access copies of the book. The book will continue to be updated as readers report errors, which is an additional benefit of self publishing with these platforms, it’s straightforward to make small updates to a book.
To create the cover, I used the cover creator provided by Kindle Direct. This tool is rather limited, but it does provide enough customization to make a nice looking text if you already have a cover image in mind. To create the Kindle version, I used the Kindle Create tool to produce a “Print Replica” output.
The Authoring Process
I wrote the book in a linear fashion, starting and completing each chapter before moving on to the next. This approach is possible when you are confident in your outline before getting started. When working on the pitch, I decided to merge the first two chapters into one. And once I was nearing the end of authoring the text, I decided to merge two of the later chapters into one and also drop the last two chapters. So while I did write the book from start to finish, I did make some large changes along the way.
Here’s the typical workflow I used to author each chapter:
- Extend Outline: I started with an outline at the section level-of-detail, and added a new level-of-detail with subsections when starting the chapter.
- Code Examples: I worked on Jupyter notebooks and Python scripts for all code examples that the chapter would cover.
- Text: I then authored the text for the chapter, which was typically front-loaded with concepts in earlier sections and then code specific later on.
- Review & Typesetting: I performed a spelling and grammar check and made sure that the output was print ready. This typically involved changing text and code to avoid widow text.
- Publish: I would then publish the updated book to Leanpub and an excerpt of the chapter to Medium.
While the best approach to use for authoring chapters will depend on the writer, I found that this workflow helped me keep focused on finishing each chapter without getting sidetracked on other content.
Authoring the book took around 160 hours over 20 weeks or so. Once you have a solid pitch and outline, you can really hit the ground running. One of the benefits of self publishing is that you can make the schedule longer or shorter as needed, or even take a hiatus if needed when writing.
The Marketing
Once you’ve published your book, you need to get the word out! In fact, you need to start doing this before hand. Here are some of the ways that you can announce the launch of your book to an audience:
- Organic Channels: Online communities are great for targeting an audience, but it’s useful to focus on the most relevant communities. I was able to get a good reception on both /r/datascience and hacker news. This provided an initial spike, but not sustained traffic.
- Paid Channels: I’m exploring Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Amazon Sponsorship as a way of growing my audience. The thing to keep in mind is that I don’t want to spend more then $7 on acquiring a sale, because I only get 70% of the $10 purchase price for digital copies. I’m focused on the Kindle edition, because this is where I have the best margins.
- Reviews: It’s useful to have Amazon reviews queued up before the launch of your title, because this helps show that the book is of high quality. There’s some ways of gaming this, but it’s still generally a useful signal.
- Endorsements: To counteract the issues with reviews, it’s also useful to have endorsements from high-profile individuals relevant to the field, providing recommendations for your book.
- Promotions: Amazon provides promotion opportunities for books enrolled in the Kindle Select program, which has an exclusivity clause. This enables authors to sell digital copies for a temporary discount or for free for a short duration. That’s right now, the book is free until Jan 12!
In general, it’s best to have some reviews and endorsements in place before launching your book, so that you can gain tracking when the book becomes available on the platform. I didn’t time this right, and am now in the process of getting reviews and endorsements after my book has already launched, which means that my organic marketing efforts were not as impactful as they could have been.
The Takeaway
Self publishing is a solid option for authoring a technical book, if you feel that you can take the text from start to finish without too much additional help. You miss out on some of the technical and editorial support that a large publisher provides, but there’s now great tools for filling in these gaps. Like any technical book, it’s unlikely that you’ll make much money off of your book, but with self publishing you have more control over the marketing of your book, which is great if you are able to reach a large audience of readers. It can be a substantial amount of work, but it can also be quite rewarding to self publish a technical book in 2020.
