Items of Interest: 2006.04.11

An interesting discussion is bubbling all over the place based on the success of 37signals’ Getting Real e-book. Jason Fried shares some numbers here. In 30 days they’ve sold 5800+ licenses, nearly 10% of which are 10 copy site licenses, and they’ve grossed like $120,000, with functionally zero expenses (completely discounting the labor of writing the book). Does this represent a tectonic shift in the tech publishing industry?

David Hansson wants us to think so, but I think Tim O’Reilly’s masterful dissection of the inexorable powerlaws in publishing buried down in the comments of that post undo David’s attempts at Shaking Up Tech Publishing, including this gem:

[from comment on Shaking up tech publishing by Tim O’Reilly]

Normal royalty levels are not some plot by publishers to screw authors: they are a reflection of the real economics of the business.

Tim points out that the 37signals guys are superstars, and that the experience that are having with Getting Real is an anomaly: other authors, even good ones, should not expect the results they are having.

Still… there still seems to be a opportunity to cut out various intermediaries: if not the editorial side of publishing — which Tim suggests is adding a vital function, since many knowledgeable geeks cannot string together grammatical English — then perhaps the retail stores, since in the tech space the readership is very much online.

But self-publishing a la Getting Real may represent a great path for the top 5,000 bloggers out there — those who have a well-defined community, who has honed their writing in the light of the blogoshere, and who have direct connections to a marketplace of readers — but for the rest, I’d guess not.

As Tim puts it:

For many authors, a royalty advance of $8-10,000, plus royalty upside of another $10,000 is more than they’ll see from a self-published book that sells 500 or 1000 copies at $20 or $30, after they deduct their manufacturing cost. And if a book really hits, the access to channels can lead to huge upside. I have quite a few authors to whom I’ve paid hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in royalties over the lifetimes of their books.

[Grig Gheorghiu has a good summary of these are other voices on the subject.