medium size publisher - the accidental publisher - both programmers that read books, but no nothing of the industry - riding out the current storm - would not have gotten into publishing if they knew what it meant - did all their own work when using a publisher (even had to do own indexing), so figured why not self publish
categories to satisfy: readers, authors, business, production. collectively called four axis of incompetence
in tech books too often the author tries to show off knowledge to the lowly reader. "guide by your side, not a sage on the stage" is the goal. The Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition and Bloom's Hierarchy are things to look to when figuring this out. Your reader follows the Hero's Journey where the start with a big goal of understanding the subject matter, so you start small, gain difficulty, and finally send the hero home a changed person.
Publish without DRM because they want the reader to enjoy and not have anything get in the way and so far no issues.
Readers
Focused on community via website as destination, talks, screencasts, beta programs to encourage participation. Instead of only releasing the book as a finished product some books are selected to be released when about 75% complete. People buy the book and are eligible to receive all versions until the book reaches completion. This has been a major win for readers and authors. Readers get access to the information early and the authors get instant feedback and make the books better.
Authors
No MS Word. Standard contract for everyone to keep it simple - no special deals. No advances and 50% royalties (except one title). Some titles (4%) get more than 400K in royalties. The bulk (29%) get $25-50k. They have no idea if this is great because they're the only one to publish this data [murmurs in crowd that it was "freaking awesome"]. Authors get real time sales data, real time foreign rights data. Authors get money from beta immediately, so in one way you could say they get an advance.
Cheap, lazy, close to customer.
Cheap. Always cash flow positive. No marketing really, just word of mouth. One (almost) employee full time in production area. Business mostly runs itself (once a month download some data, once a quarter cut royalty check).
Close to customer. Don't use amazon store. build direct relationships. combo packs and betas mean people come to them first. avoid 3rd party distribution (no Apple app store or amazon). Authors can upload changes to books and customers can download. Quirky - weird sense of humor: emails come from gerbils up in the cloud, an in joke. Responsive - handle own support and try to be very responsive. Customer is amazingly forgiving with problems since they get real person and no form letters. They are much happier with the personal touch.[]
Units sold have recently switched to direct sales instead of channel sales which means higher profit margin. eBooks are now roughly 50% of the business. They can't deal with channel demands such as 7 month notice on new titles, which is difficult because they create books faster than that. eBooks mean no more channels for them.
production
agile: automated, repeatable, testable, distributed, build any time, iterative
book side is almost completely automated. They can create ebook in 37 seconds while others are doing things like going from mobi to indesign in 5 days.
they use one markup language. PML (pragmatic markup language). Only one author pushed back and they canceled the book (out of 250 authors). PML is simple, logical, target-independent, used by authors editors indexers copy editors and layout folk. PML is an XML that is made to look like HTML and be easy to read. The same format is used end to end. For instance their's
Combine PML with assets (images, codes (code kept separate to allow easy updates and is runable & testable) ) combined in build process to go to PDF, device or paper. The build process has no hands on contact. They run one single command to build the book out.
have a centralized repository that has all books, presentations, content, publicity, accounting and is located in the cloud and backed up. When an author joins, they get a login to the repository and can check out all the tools and a skeleton book that they can work with. Editors also can connect to the cloud to work with the book and use special markup to communicate back and forth with the authors. The indexing happens their automatically. The copy editor starts editing the title directly while the author is in read only mode. In the next stage it goes to layout which is still using PML. There is continuous build so the author can always get the latest build via their author portal. There is versioning at every step. Reporting is amazingly detailed. (there's one tag called layout which allows for all print specific things such as window/orphan)
downsample images to work on smaller devices. all code has a link to download the code from their site.
pragprog.com
use malloy for paper book fulfillment. there's social DRM, they put the customer's name at the bottom of every page.
we control the relationship through the central site to better server the readers
if you give someone a spreadsheet then it means your boss thinks you are less valuable than a programmer. automation keeps mistakes from happening. do not allow special cases from author (they are special, but its because of the content they create not the special font they want). Create trust through transparency and share to everyone you can. Have direct relationships and do not give them away to amazon or apple. Use gerbils. Everyone needs gerbils.
They use amazon S3 for the cloud.
For management and career books they experimented with allowing authors to write without the tags. That worked when the content did not require the tags. They still created PML, but let the authors use an easier interface.
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