Linked below is a very sobering article about how the publishing industry works. The author read all the transcripts from the antitrust case stemming from Penguin Random House trying to buy Simon & Shuster (it was blocked). From the testimony, the author draws out some statistics: 📖 The industry is "hit driven," meaning almost all books fail, and business is kept alive by the tiny percentage that succeed 📖 96% of books sell less than 1,000 copies; 50% of books sell less than a dozen copies 📖 The big hits are consistently celebrity books and "franchise authors"; these are the people who get advances you can live on (Something else I learned from a friend: lots of "traditional" publishing houses will only publish your book if you guarantee a minimum purchase. Consequently, this friend had pallets of her book in her garage. Also, if you want your book on the front table at an airport bookstore, that'll be $7,500 per week, thanks.) I've published four books about CMS(-ish). O'Reilly published the first, I self-published the next two through Amazon, and the fourth was published through some other means (I just co-wrote it; I didn't do much with production). Technical book have nose-dived. I can tell you from my experience with O'Reilly that they're way, way more interested in online access and video tutorials these days. The publisher A Book Apart just recently went under. And the other day, I realized that the computer book section at Barnes and Noble was only about three-feet of shelf space, way in the corner. I'm left wondering if books are the right medium for transmitting larger bodies of information in this age. Don't get me wrong, I love books --- I have a home library of some 1,300 titles. But if you really want to get information across to an audience, is a serial, chapter-by-chapter book the right way to do it anymore? (Note that I differentiate this from reading for pleasure. There's still value in a serialized narrative, but that's very different from learning or reading for information.) There have been amazing advances in the ePub standard. I read an entire book (ha!) on ePub3, and the format is less of a book, and more of a container for an interactive experience. You could create something in the ePub format that only vaguely resembled a "book" in the traditional sense. I have another friend who wrote something amazing in Notion (or Roam?), the note-taking app. It became a source to generate a website that had inter-connected chapters that we're only loosely organized into a series. I have a couple more books in me, I think. Mark Demeny and I are playing around with a second edition of "Web Content Management: Systems, Features, and Best Practices" (the O'Reilly book) and there are a couple other topics bouncing around in my head. But, increasingly, I think a "book" might just become just one more transmission format for a domain of information that needs to be absorbed, and probably not even the most effective one.
Julian Mills
2mo
Deane, thank you for sharing this interesting post with your helpful thoughts. A novelist friend who has published many books over the years likes to say: "The dirty secret of publishing is that there are more people who'd like to write a book than read one."
Joe Pairman
2mo
I think you — and the article you linked — are right about the diminishing relevance of traditional books for many subjects. But non-fiction is still better as a book if: 1. There’s a real connecting thesis 2. There’s enough justifiable material around the thesis that it *needs* to be book-length, and: 3. There is some sense of flow. Lots of historical books are like this (though you can argue that’s more like narrative). Some great semi-academic books are too: First You Write a Sentence (Moran), Vernacular Eloquence (Elbow). For technical books, it is indeed harder. Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist is still great, but arguably would also be great as a course or some networked articles. Some of the knowledge management books work well, such as Making KM Clickable. Perhaps something more computer-sciency also has all three of the criteria I listed — I never read Knuth but perhaps that counts?
Ian Truscott
2mo
Nice share and comments - thanks Deane - You probably know this more than most - but I think today the value of writing a book is the deep work of writing a book, how it shapes your thinking that you can apply to your practice. I’ve been on the same journey - If you want to publish a good book, you either need to pay to do editing and promotion or be marketable enough that a publisher will offer to pay as they’ll make a profit.
I’m really interested in that Notion-enabled interactive “book” experience. Is there more info on this you can share? An interesting strategy Ted Gioia is taking is serializing his latest book, Music to Raise the Dead, on Substack: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/music-to-raise-the-dead-the-secret
Karl Johan Grahn
2mo
Books have a place - it is just that everyone thinks information is more correct and up to date because it exists on a website or blog, which is not true
Interesting post! Thanks for sharing!
Division Director @ ACTUM Digital | CMS & DXP | Headless | Kentico | editor of beyondcms.substack.com
2moI finished reading the first edition of Web Content Management: Systems, Features and Best Practices" just last week. I have been in the CMS world for a few years now, but I wanted to review and structure my perspective and experience. And of all the possible formats, I decided on a paper book. The deciding factor for me is how much time I have to read it. If it's minutes, screen (and a higher level of interactivity/distraction) is fine. If it's hours, I prefer a book. I did some promotion about the book in my team, so there is a waiting list now :-) So take this as a +1 for the second edition and a similar form.