For everyone calling publishing a "racket": I'm about to publish a textbook for grad students in the social sciences with a major publisher. It will teach them the business side of social impact: planning, raising money, running a board, etc. It is all very badly needed, and I've spent 20 years of extreme hard work learning the details and another 5 years writing... this one book. My publisher, a top academic house, is giving me extensive editorial and layout help at no charge to me. We are going to charge $50, which even if I sell thousands of copies, will be pennies on the hour for everyone.... This is a rip-off?
You are the extreme exception to the rule. If you are as deep into academia as your experience might indicate then you should know that, and should be asking why other publishers and authors don’t play the game like you.
Many, many basic textbooks for required courses sell for hundreds, and use one time use codes for access to required content online. Meaning that the book is useless for future students without paying an additional exorbitant fee.
In other words, you aren’t the problem, and no one is pretending that you are.
Alternatively, how much would your book cost if it wasn’t sold to a captive audience buying on debt… pretty rare to see a $50 business book off campus. I normally see them at the airport for $19.99. Maybe just be happy that you are selling to a market where the person making the purchasing decision (the profesor) isn’t the one that has to pay for the goods.
What is the social impact of your business decisions?
Buddy -- it's your job. If you're TT this is just part of the hustle of an academic career. You get paid by your employer already, and your scope of work includes publications (which includes books). The publisher should be able to recoup their costs but it shouldn't be a profit center.
I think this is what professors/teachers tend to forget; get up in arms about your salary, don’t whine about your side hustle income. If you would be working for a corporate, it could well be that all that belongs to the company; it is about the subject of your job, it gets used at your job; it is your job, why do you believe you should be compensated extra for it?
I am from a time and country where syllabi were written by the professors and were free with the course (you paid a few cents for the printing/paper). Those were thick stacks of paper and they were free. Sure it could’ve been better; they could’ve been free as in speech, but at least they were free as in beer. That is your job and you already get paid for it.
I gonna say the exact same thing. Most of the time researchs are funded by either cooperate or government. Especially when you are receiving supports from the government, keeping the results behind a pay wall should be considered illegal.
This is very much college/program specific. My tenure track wife has tried with two different different universities to get tenure credit by writing an open access text book. In both cases (R1 programs) neither would recognize anything except 1st/2nd author publications in peer reviewed journals. They would not recognize textbooks.
Good for you. But I think you are over valuing your work and the impact it has. Is this going to revolutionize things for your students that so far have managed fine without this work? What about those students that go to different universities and may never see or learn of this? I doubt this work will have the impact you think it will have. There are a lot of academics publishing books. That kind of is what they do. It matters. But mostly only to a small audience.
Your publisher is involved because they don't have to do a lot of work or take a lot of risk. Editorial and layout work is a something they'll recover on the first few hundred copies and they are very good at that because that's their core business. It's a fixed cost. And since you bring the students, they'll have a strong guarantee those copies will get sold. Everything after that is profit. Most publishing deals leave paying the author as an after thought. They pay themselves first. And unless you are a best selling author, that means they pocket most of that 50$.
If you sell 1000 copies, that's 50000 dollars. That's basically the editing and layout cost more than covered. You may have spent years of your life writing and learning. But editing and typesetting that is a lot less billable hours than that. Weeks or months at best. Possibly just days.
So, from the publisher's point of view this is an amazing deal. You do most of the work, including bringing an customer base (i.e. your students for years to come), and they get most of the profit. That's why academic publishing is such a hot business.
And let's be fair. You are compensated by the institution you work for (presumably); probably pretty well even. Having a book with your name on it helps enhance your value and status. Especially if it sells modestly well. That's why you get the big money. Publishing and being good at that is part of the job as an academic. You are already being payed for that. This isn't you going above and beyond what you are supposed to be doing but you doing your job.
What you're doing is a public service and society would benefit from it being freely accessibile to everyone. Sounds like you should be compensate by the state.
So even in your extreme case, you don't expect to make even close to a reasonable amount of profit for your efforts.
How would it be so much worse for you to make no profit at all? $50 from the position of a student is a significant amount of money. In all likelihood, that is going to leave each student with a more significant financial impact than the profit you would be missing out on for not charging them: and it is multiplied to each student who buys the book.
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The ultimate dilemma here is not whether or not you should be compensated. It's how. Whether you choose to charge for this book or not, this strategy is untenable.
Most people who are underpaid don’t want their income to fall further. Budgeting becomes challenging when fixed expenses take up too large a percentage. People often have a sense of how much they can personally sacrifice to accomplish something unremunerative.
> We are going to charge $50, which even if I sell thousands of copies, will be pennies on the hour for everyone.... This is a rip-off?
The part that is missing in the equation: How much value will this give to your readers? The answer is probably different for each individual reader of your book. For some those $50 might be a great investment and I certainly wish you and your audience that there are many such cases. But there is probably also a long tail of people who will not benefit enough to warrant the 50$ price tag - potentially because there's only parts of the book that are actually relevant to them or because they thought that the book answers some important questions that they had but it actually doesn't.
And then there's also the individual financial situation of the readers. Especially grad students are not exactly known for being rich. 50$ might be a lot of money to them. While it is possible that they will derive a value greater than 50$ from buying the book, it is far from guaranteed and can be a risky investment, especially when there are also other expensive books that they need to buy.
I get this feeling there's a better business model for you. After all it sounds like the market is saying this isn't really worth the effort.
My suggestion, and it's only as half baked as one can in 5 minutes of HN reading: give your book away for free to as many students as possible. Make it clear that you are running a community of social impact students, where networking opportunities will be provided. An online forum as well. You will be sure to have a number of industry people coming to you looking for the best students, which is something recruiters spend a lot of money on.
Someone did something similar in the quant finance space a few years ago, they built an online forum for QF students, got a lot of talking going, and then recruitment became a thing, IIRC one of the early users was a recruitment guy.
Another guy I know teaches a bunch of trading related classes, and he also gets to recommend people for things at fancy firms.
This guy is writing a more detailed than average technical book on specialized business planning for a fairly reasonable price of $50 per unit after half a decade spent writing it and some of you here are just piling the shit on, including claiming he's worse than bail bondsmen? What absurd hypocrisy.
Especially coming from commentators on a site where the bubble of privilege living is often as thick as a Star Trek shield, and many make hundreds of thousands per year working for some of the world's most money-grubbing, user-abusing, parasitic, pervasively spying, chronically mendacious tech companies in the world. I suggest you climb down from your sanctimonious pedestals for a little while.
You're a teacher, and your griping that you aren't getting bonus money for something that is part of the normal duties of teaching? Like, you're not even an adjunct here are you, you're tenure track... and the $200k/yr (average) isn't enough, you want to lock up this book of yours behind paywalls and DRM?
I think I have more sympathy for bail bondsmen than I do you.
You appear to be making a number of assumptions about the poster, and then holding them accountable for things that you have assumed. Unless they are all true, maybe you should hold back on judgement until you get confirmation of them?
If there was a way to sell your textbook that would yield more profits for you than thousands of copies at $50 per copy, and would also make it very affordable for students, would you do it?
