I got a request last week for a post about self publishing technical books, so I thought I'd give the disc jockey career a spin. I got my start in publishing by writing technical documentation to help bring money into a start-up I was working for around twenty years ago. The writing wasn't too challenging, manuals for a software product, but the production using Ventura Publisher 1.0 destroyed my self confidence for, well, forever. My first venture in technical self publishing was a short manual I wrote for technicians I was training back in 1991/92, an expanded version of which I published on the web as a free ebook in 1995. Around the same time, I co-authored a technical report on new electronic media which retailed for $125, and a little later, I signed my first contract with McGraw-Hill to write The Hand-Me-Down PC.
That's the quick background, but none of the above really describes the type of technical book that my correspondent was asking about, which would fall more into the category of a literary reference book. If anybody thinks that historical engineering type books or encyclopedic references can't be literary, I'd suggest reading some civil engineering histories for starters. At the purely technical end of the spectrum, we have all the C.R.C. books published by the Chemical Rubber Publishing Company (all the techies think it stands for Cyclic Redundancy Check), while at the purely literary end we have books like The Great Bridge by David McCullough, published by Simon & Schuster, which may never go out of print:-)
The potential market for a technical book pretty much depends on which end of the spectrum it falls on. Books on the purely technical end of the spectrum sell to engineers, university libraries and large corporate libraries (those with labs). The size of the market for those books depends almost entirely the subject. Somewhere I own a copy of a book on the radio frequency properties of certain materials that I think was published by the M.I.T. Press. The author was also the experimenter, so many of the constants measured appeared in other references. The audience for the book was limited to engineers who were interested in what happens to radio waves hitting those particular materials, so I suspect they got by with one print run. Another purely technical reference, The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is currently in its 87th edition, which may be some sort of record.
In the middle of the spectrum are the cross-over books, and I hope for my correspondent, a cross-over hit. These are books that contain enough detailed data and appendices to be of use as a reference text for an engineer or a manager making decisions about an engineering project, while maintaining an interesting enough storyline to be readable by engineers or technically oriented people who aren't planning on building or fixing one of the things. A sort of The Way Things Work (by David Macaulay and Neil Ardley) for just one thing, or the Soul Of A New Machine (Tracy Kidder, a local whom I've never met), but with a happy ending.
The main things authors or publishers of such technical books have going for them is a built-in audience and a (usually) noncompetitive environment. Judging the size of the built-in audience is tricky, and reaching a good portion of them in the year the book is released, as opposed to sustaining a trickle of sales forever, still requires some marketing. I think the best and most obvious place to do this marketing is on the web, with a website built around the book, but if there are any journals, magazines or IEEE type groupings around the specific subject, it would probably pay to try a little print advertising as well. The remaining decision for a publisher facing a non-competitive environment is whether to price for maximum sales or maximum profits. If the book is likely to be widely ordered by libraries, gouging is probably the order of the day. If the focus is on the retail customer, keeping the price in the literary, rather than technical range, is critical.
Time Traveling Vampires Suck The Life Out Of Sci Fi
I got so much feedback about my pre-holiday post on publishing science fiction anthologies that I decided to address one of the issues multiple people pointed out to me. It came phrased different ways, like "People would rather see it than read it" and "Horror is where it's all at now." When it comes to visuals (TV, movies), I suppose even I would rather see a vampire fashion model in the changing room than a bunch of space suit wearing astronauts drinking reprocessed bodily fluids through straws. But I ill-spent so much of my youth reading science fiction that I've been assuming it hasn't gone away without checking. So, being a big Google Trends fan, I decided to have a look at what people are searching for.
This first trend is science fiction vs. vampire, sci fi drawn in a friendly light blue and vampire in blood red.
Vampire, unfortunately, is kicking science fiction's behind, though of course, a lot of those vampire related searches are non-fiction:-) Strangely, the much maligned mainstream media had fewer stories about vampires than about science fiction. The next trend shows science fiction vs time travel.
Recently, time travel has gotten more internet search activity than science fiction, which implies that much of the interest in sci fi is disguised in other search terms. Which is a good time to point out that I didn't include trends with either "sci fi" or "SciFi" because both are closely associated with the SciFi cable channel, which is a different beast altogether. Now that I think about it, I watched quite a few episodes of Babylon 5 when it was on in the mid-90's and I had a television. Good show, whoever created it.
But what none of my correspondents mentioned, probably because they are all in their middle age on up, is the impact of video games on what was once a core demographic group for science fiction. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the apparent lack of interest in reading spaceship and alien encounters type sci fi is due to the availability of games and gaming counsels that soak up the same free time. With the rise of multi-player games, playing at science fiction is arguably a more social activity than reading it, even if that social time is largely taken up with killing and destroying stuff.
I'm not trying to say that I'm an old man, but I know kids who play video games and I don't get what makes them tick, so trying to publish science fiction for them wouldn't be too smart. That leaves the thinking man's science fiction or literary sci fi, for the sci fi retro crowd. At the moment, I have no idea how big or tiny that crowd is, but I've started grinding the wheels of research so hopefully I'll have a better take on it by the end of June.
This first trend is science fiction vs. vampire, sci fi drawn in a friendly light blue and vampire in blood red.
Vampire, unfortunately, is kicking science fiction's behind, though of course, a lot of those vampire related searches are non-fiction:-) Strangely, the much maligned mainstream media had fewer stories about vampires than about science fiction. The next trend shows science fiction vs time travel.
Recently, time travel has gotten more internet search activity than science fiction, which implies that much of the interest in sci fi is disguised in other search terms. Which is a good time to point out that I didn't include trends with either "sci fi" or "SciFi" because both are closely associated with the SciFi cable channel, which is a different beast altogether. Now that I think about it, I watched quite a few episodes of Babylon 5 when it was on in the mid-90's and I had a television. Good show, whoever created it.
But what none of my correspondents mentioned, probably because they are all in their middle age on up, is the impact of video games on what was once a core demographic group for science fiction. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the apparent lack of interest in reading spaceship and alien encounters type sci fi is due to the availability of games and gaming counsels that soak up the same free time. With the rise of multi-player games, playing at science fiction is arguably a more social activity than reading it, even if that social time is largely taken up with killing and destroying stuff.
I'm not trying to say that I'm an old man, but I know kids who play video games and I don't get what makes them tick, so trying to publish science fiction for them wouldn't be too smart. That leaves the thinking man's science fiction or literary sci fi, for the sci fi retro crowd. At the moment, I have no idea how big or tiny that crowd is, but I've started grinding the wheels of research so hopefully I'll have a better take on it by the end of June.
Science Fiction Anthology As Magazine Alternative?
Now that I'm back to thinking about publishing other authors for the twenty seventh or seventy second time this year, I thought of a new twist that would sidestep some of the business model issues. Namely, how to justify paying small advances to writers in return for a much larger than traditional royalty share, while retaining a chance of not losing my shirt (and getting abused as an "exploiter" in the bargain). A book publisher can't afford to invest in titles without having the exclusive rights to publish the works, but a magazine or newspaper publisher can and does with first serial rights.
I was a huge science fiction fan as a kid, mainly novels and older anthologies, I never found the "Award winners" anthologies from the 1970's and on to my taste. Science fiction is a great genre for short stories because it's often message driven or preachy, and building a whole novel around a single message rarely makes for a good read. From the 1930's through the recent past, magazines filled some of the gap for getting short science fiction published, though a lot of it seemed to be vam-p-orn or derivative swords and dragons tales.
While I only thought this up while installing windows up at my friend's timber frame today, I suspect the POD anthology as a magazine alternative would have a non-zero chance of success. First, the anthology could remain in print as long as there was an interest. Second, by purchasing first serial and perhaps first web rights only, the initial payment to authors could be quite low. Heck, I was thrilled to get a sci-fi story of mine published for no payment in a little 'zine ten years ago. Since each issue or book would contain tales from a large number of writers, it's unlikely that some other publisher could convince them all to sign up to do the exact same book for them if by some stroke of lightning it proved to be popular.
That would keep the cost low enough that I could fall back on the 50/50 net model, simply dividing up the half going to the writers by the number of stories used, or even proportional to word count. If the book did well, the writers would end up doing better than they would have through any trade or magazine. Whether it did well or not, they'd still be free to peddle their stories elsewhere, anytime, to anyone. I could keep the publishing costs way down by using some public domain photos (think NASA) for cover art, and probably get a few books out the door for around $1,000 each - plus a big chunk of my time.
I think it has potential. I'll see what happens in the next couple weeks with some of the recycled publishing domains I'm bidding on and give it some more thought. I suppose I should really join the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, post something on their boards, and get abused:-)
I was a huge science fiction fan as a kid, mainly novels and older anthologies, I never found the "Award winners" anthologies from the 1970's and on to my taste. Science fiction is a great genre for short stories because it's often message driven or preachy, and building a whole novel around a single message rarely makes for a good read. From the 1930's through the recent past, magazines filled some of the gap for getting short science fiction published, though a lot of it seemed to be vam-p-orn or derivative swords and dragons tales.
While I only thought this up while installing windows up at my friend's timber frame today, I suspect the POD anthology as a magazine alternative would have a non-zero chance of success. First, the anthology could remain in print as long as there was an interest. Second, by purchasing first serial and perhaps first web rights only, the initial payment to authors could be quite low. Heck, I was thrilled to get a sci-fi story of mine published for no payment in a little 'zine ten years ago. Since each issue or book would contain tales from a large number of writers, it's unlikely that some other publisher could convince them all to sign up to do the exact same book for them if by some stroke of lightning it proved to be popular.
That would keep the cost low enough that I could fall back on the 50/50 net model, simply dividing up the half going to the writers by the number of stories used, or even proportional to word count. If the book did well, the writers would end up doing better than they would have through any trade or magazine. Whether it did well or not, they'd still be free to peddle their stories elsewhere, anytime, to anyone. I could keep the publishing costs way down by using some public domain photos (think NASA) for cover art, and probably get a few books out the door for around $1,000 each - plus a big chunk of my time.
I think it has potential. I'll see what happens in the next couple weeks with some of the recycled publishing domains I'm bidding on and give it some more thought. I suppose I should really join the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, post something on their boards, and get abused:-)