Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

Back in 2001, Julian Bucknall published The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures with Wordware Publishing, and it became something of a legend. The book's been out of print for awhile, and used copies are selling on Amazon Marketplace for $200 and up. Whoa.

There's definitely a message in that market. With rights now reverted and in-hand, Julian has republished the book on his own through Lulu.com. You can now order that $200 book for $25. Wordware sent me a review copy when it first came out in 2001 (alas, too late to review in Visual Developer Magazine) though it disappeared somewhere along the way. I just ordered a new copy, but my memory of the book is still solid: If you do anything in Delphi beyond stringing components together with one-line event handlers, this book needs to be on your shelf.

That would be good enough news right there, but Julian's gone further: He's written a three-part article on how he went about re-creating and re-publishing the book, which stands as the best single description of the print-on-demand publishing process that I've yet seen. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. (The sections are not linked to one another yet.)

If you have any least interest in print-on-demand publishing, read them closely and in order. A number of lessons emerge from his experience:

• Publishing at book length is now possible for almost anyone. It's still a lot of work, but there are no real gatekeepers, as there are in conventional publishing. You don't have to persuade anyone to list or carry your book. You follow the process, and it's published.
• There is very little real money in print-on-demand (POD) publishing. This has been true since the dawn of POD time. What is said less often is that there is very little real money in conventional publishing anymore, either.
• The real strength in POD publishing is re-publishing out-of-print books to capture "long tail" demand. Julian's book is exceptional in that regard, in that the book had an unusually good reputation in its first life, rather like Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book, a 1,340-page behemoth that we published at Coriolis in 1997. Used copies were selling in the $80 range until relatively recently.
• But that said, POD publishing is extremely length-sensitive. Unit manufacturing cost is 2c per page plus $4.55. Julian's book is 524 pages long, so its UMC is $15.03. That's over twice (and approaching three times) what it would cost to print each copy in 4,000 copy quantities using a conventional offset press. Michael's book would have a UMC of $26. Ouch.

Julian tells us that he has sold 110 copies in one week. That's little short of astonishing, though some of that is probably an initial blip of pent-up demand. Books like this are less version-sensitive than most computer books, so there's a good chance that the book will sell steadily for years to come. And one overwhelming advantage of Lulu-style self-publishing is that the author does not have to warehouse books, process orders and payments, dun deadbeat retailers, or handle the inevitable bookstore returns.

Julian speculates (and I agree) that POD books should go for depth, not breadth. It might be better for all parties if POD books were shorter (100-200 pages) and priced at about $20-$25. (I think that Julian underpriced his book by $5-$8 and consider it a honking bargain.) Based on his experience, I am considering taking my book Degunking Your Email, Spam, and Viruses and breaking it up into three separate books along the obvious topic lines, updating them, and publishing them on Lulu. I don't expect his kind of success with it, but the book reviewed well enough for me to think that it still has some value.