Given the rapid advancement in digital publishing opportunities over the past few years, I'm not sure exactly how much more difficult this is for a "lesser known" scientist. The conversion of LaTeX to ebook problem remains, but if you are in a field that does not need carefully-formatted specialized characters, or if you are starting from scratch in the current landscape, the whole things seems straightforward... in my painfully naive worldview:
You are an lesser-known, but active, member of a field, involved in both research and teaching organizations. Over the past 20 years, teaching organizations now exist in every academic discipline I am aware of, and I assume that membership in at least one teaching organization is a reasonable norm for contemporary people considering writing a textbook. Because you are thus active, you have many friends who teach classes. If you get only 5 of these friends to agree to try the book, you are probably in good shape. For intro science classes, you are likely looking at classrooms with between 100 and 800 students, but lets say only 100 to get a minimum. Including your class, that means you sell at least 600 copies on day 1. The sales then drop, as electronic versions get shared, but some students each semester still do what they are supposed to and pay for the book, lets say 200 a semester after the first. If the book is any good, your can give some conference talks to promote it, and your friends will encourage their friends to adopt it. Frankly, after your friends, your target market is graduate students teaching a course for the first time, so you need to be nice to the grad students you meet at conferences. If the books were selling for $20-$40 each, this seems like a good way to get return on investment in an electronic model that will give you 50-70% return. Note, if you and one of your friends teach particularly large sections (say 800 students a semester), the model seems viable to me on that basis alone. I am at a pretty small school, and I still teach 300 Intro Psych students in a typical year. Obviously, the return on a graduate level text would be much lower, but only because the sales are much lower. Maybe you would need twenty friends to give it a test-run... but sales of advanced texts are always much smaller, and so profits lower. That is part of the game either way, print or electronic. None of this was possible 20 years ago, only some of it was possible 5 years ago, but (I think) it is all possible now, even for a 'lesser-known' member of a field. Is there something I am missing? Also note - this is completely different from the issue of what it would take for other members of your discipline to consider you a "successful textbook author." That is a completely social problem, and has nothing to do with the business models. On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 02:46 PM, Douglas Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: >>Well, maybe. >> > >>But I'd be willing to bet that if a big-name physicist were to publish a physics text, with the intent that it become the standard for teaching his/her physics specialty, Wiley would find themselves sucking vacuum. >> > >>Say, for example, that George Smoot wanted to self-publish a grad-level textbook on cosmic anisotropies... >> > >> >I agree, though, that for the foreseeable future lesser-known/lesser-quality scientists will need to rely on a big-name publisher to attract the cache necessary to become an accepted textbook author. Fortunately, in the relatively short period of time that ebooks have come into their own, the same is no longer true for fiction authors. >> > >>--Doug >> > >>On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 12:14 PM, Bruce Sherwood <<#>> wrote: >The situation for complex textbooks is quite different from the > >situation for other kinds of books. > > >For nearly 20 years Ruth and I did ALL of the work on our physics > >textbook, which was possible only because we have very strong computer > >skills. We also did most of the marketing. It was only with the 3rd > >edition that the publisher put in sizable resources in the form of > >much improved layout design, colorizing our thousands of two-color > >diagrams, highly skilled detailed copy editing, reviews, and > >marketing. We provided LaTeX that was relatively simple in terms of > >layout but contained all of the many thousands of equations, but they > >paid for the design to be implemented in the LaTeX imports of our > >text. They also paid for the conversion to an ebook format, something > >that currently is highly non-trivial starting from LaTeX. > > >Most authors of physics texts do not have the skills to have gotten as > >far as we did before the 3rd edition, and we couldn't have gone the > >last mile that led to the much improved 3rd edition. > > >Certainly we could have done something not too shabby completely on > >our own, self-publishing, but as I reported in earlier notes, it was > >absolutely crucial that the known Wiley imprimatur be on the book; > >otherwise no one would have paid any attention to it. Also, the Wiley > >name means to potential adopters that the book will be available a > >couple of years from now, and maintained and corrected -- that the web > >site won't just disappear. > > >I have no doubt that even complex projects of our kind will eventually > >lend themselves to self-publishing, and I have little doubt that > >eventually the imprimatur/certification role of major publishers will > >fade too, as alternative reviewing mechanisms take firmer hold. But I > >just wanted to emphasize that in the real world of publishing intro > >physics textbooks we ain't there yet. > > >Bruce >>> > > > > > > > ============================================================ >FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601
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