On Ruby

JavaOne [h]as a *very* different feel than that of a Ruby show, obviously :P — Leah Silber

Really starting to believe that small, short, regional conferences are the way to go. — Andrew O'Brien

I think events of many sizes can be worthwhile -- they just have different profiles and risks/rewards. — David Black

Some of the discussion recently on Twitter has made me think about how we organized MountainWest RubyConf. We've been very focused on keeping it intimate and engaging. From the comments I hear, it seems like we did a good job. It certainly feels like we've for the community behind us, and that can only help us get better each yer.

It also reminded me of some of my earlier writing about publishing. I think there's a lot of overlap in building community for a conference and for a book/publisher.

To me, I guess it boils down to conferences and books with strong ties to the community feel better. What do you think?

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

As a writer (blogs, magazines, and a book), I've got an unhealthy interest in publishing. A number of my blog posts spring from that attraction. Here's a list to get you started:

• Books, Publishing, & the Community
• Technical Publishing Market — A Whole 'Nother Look at Things
• WalMart and the Publisher
• Wresponding to Wrox
• The Big Box Publisher
• Mom & Pop Publishers
• A Tale of Two Books
• Publishing: the Four Kinds Revisited
• An Authors Story: a cautionary tale
• Editor Interview: Talking about Open Content with O'Reilly's Mike Loukides
• Books, Bits, or Both
• Communities, Publishers, and Conferences

"Heh, I've been working thru the PDF for a while. Now that the book is here, I'm digging a little deeper."

—Jim Weirich

This is a pattern I've seen in myself too. I love ebooks because I can carry a bunch of them around on my laptop, search them easily, and grab the occasional snippet from them.

On the other hand, I find myself not reading them as seriously as 'real' books. There's something about turning pages that keeps me involved. I'm just glad that most publishers are selling paper and ebook combos.

What do you think? Paper, bits, or both?

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

With a recent string of interviews with authors working on (open) books for O'Reilly, I wanted to see what the folks inside O'Reilly had to say about this trend. Mike Loukides (@mikeloukides) was good enough to answer my questions in a short interview. There's some great stuff in here whether you're an aspiring author, interested in open content, or how thinking conversations (in the web 2.0 sense) impact book marketing. Read on to see what Mike had to say.

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Mike, it looks like you guys are riding a string of Creative Commons books either out or in the pipeline (Real World Haskell, Relax with CouchDB, and Ruby Best Practices). Historically, you've done a number of other open/free books as well. I'd like to pick your brains a bit about your willingness to head down this road.

Noah Slater told me "Our editor told us a surprising rule of thumb, that releasing a good book under a free license makes it sell more copies, and releasing a bad book under a free license makes it sell less copies." Why do you think this is?

Mike First: I'm not trying to back down from what I told Noah, because that is what I tell authors. But there's no hard data, and very little soft data: it's just our sense of what happens. It would be next to impossible to do a controlled experiment.

And I do want to correct one thing. I don't think in terms of good books and bad books; I think in terms of successful and unsuccessful. Plenty of good books are unsuccessful. What really drives success is the community that forms around the technology and the book.

That said, the mechanism is fairly simple. If there's a strong, thriving community around the technology—let's say CouchDB, since you're talking to Noah—the free online edition of the book will increase buzz, and make more people aware of the print book. A lot of people will download the online book, and decide they want the print book.

On the other hand, if the community around the technology is small, isn't thriving for one reason or another, etc., the existence of a free version will soak up what limited demand exists.

So I think free licenses for books is an intensifier: if a book is going to succeed, a free license will make it more successful. If it's going to fail, a free license will make it fail worse.

In the same vein, what can prospective authors do to make sure the open book they want to write is a good book? What makes the proposal stand out and say "I'd be a winner under a free license!"?

Mike Although I have a fair amount of ego tied up in making sure the book itself is as good as possible, I think in the long run it's only partially about the book. It's really about the technology and the community. If a community is growing, and people are excited, a good book will be successful (free license or not).

That said, there is an awful lot that authors can do to make their book more successful. None of this is magic: blogs, trade show talks, tutorials, all of that. A free online version of the book gives you a few more tools to play with. The authors of our Haskell book have done an excellent job of motivating the Haskell community.

As far as the book itself: readers want practical books. Readers want books that help them to solve the problem. If Noah and the other CouchDB authors had wanted to write a couple hundred pages explaining the principles behind CouchDB, non-relational databases, REST, and so on, without a single line of working code, it would be a disaster. I do get lots of proposals like this. They're generally disguised as "books targeted at management".

That's not to say that I'd turn down more abstract books on topics like software engineering. But I also think the case for writing that kind of a book with a free license isn't as strong. Would Martin Fowler's Refactoring or Kent Beck's Test Driven Development have been more successful if there was a version with an open source license? Possibly, but I don't think it's as clear a case.

O'Reilly seems to embrace open, flowing communication. You've got active bloggers, you work closely with User Groups, and you seem to have jumped on Twitter in a big way. How does this willingness to have conversations with your customers change the way you bring books to market?

Mike That's probably a better question for someone in Marketing.

But yes, all of these things give us more tools to work with. It certainly helps to get people talking about a book early on, it certainly helps to get people motivated and excited so that they want to read the book. And with some books, like the Haskell book, we got huge amounts of technical feedback from the public. That was a real help in making it a great book.

Other than technology titles, what other genres do you think would benefit from more openess (license, development, and conversational)?

Mike That's a really interesting question. One thing I like to point out is that we almost lost Shakespeare's entire works because there was no such thing as copyright protection in the 17th century. Plays were trade secrets, and the few plays that were published were generally published in unauthorized editions: several years after the fact, a few actors sat around a table and tried to remember the lines.

At the same time, I think the DMCA was a ridiculous intellectual property land grab. Music has always thrived on artists ripping off bits and pieces from each other: that's really central to how musical creativity works. But in the current climate it's entirely too easy to write a song and end up being sued because it's similar to some song that was published 5 years ago and happened to be buried in your subconscious. (Part of the problem in music, I think, is that you're dealing with relatively short sequences taken from a relatively limited repetoire—24 notes in a typical singer's range, 88 notes on a piano keyboard.)

It's worth noting that Noel Paul Stookey, from Peter, Paul, and Mary, started something equivalent to the FSF back in the late 70s. So free licensing didn't start with RMS and the GPL. (I'm trying to look up info on what Paul did back then, but I can't find it now. If you dig into this and find anything, I'd appreciate a link. I don't think he got very far with it. But in 78, I don't think it was needed the way it is now.)

Sticking with books: I think anywhere you can build a book out of a conversation, you'll do well. We've got some interesting experiments coming out: 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know (Feb.) was built on a wiki, with contributions from roughly 40 software architects. We had the book about halfway done, with contributions from a couple dozen architects, and then opened it to the public. The response was great.

So, if you start from a conversation, almost anything is possible. There's a sense in which all the design patterns books are really about conversations. So can I see freely licensed books in fields like software engineering? Definitely. Can I see it in science? It runs against the way scientific institutions currently work, but open, collaborative science—doing science in public, on a wiki, as it were—was discussed a lot at our last SciFOO camp, and you should have seen how excited people were. Science changes a lot when it becomes more open and less tied to traditional publishing institutions.

A few days ago, I was IMing with a friend who's working on a technical book. Things started out like this:

So, how's the book coming?

Yeah, I have some editing to do still..I can't speak for when it'll be published. I've pretty much lost all willpower to work on it :( so it's hard to finish up the deathmarch.

Why the lack of willpower? Have things been too long in the pipeline, or is it something else?

Then, a sort of cautionary tail rolled out over IM. I've reduced it to the following points. I wanted to post it so that others could benefit from the mistakes my friend and his publisher made.

It looks like there were several things that went wrong:

• The publisher really wants things turned around faster than my friend is able to work on them, and they want them in (削除) discreet (削除ここまで) discrete (thanks anon) chunks that don't match well with the agile mindset a lot of programmers work from. If you're thinking about writing a book (or contracting a programmer to write one) watch out for mismatched expectations
• After writing several chapters, the the publisher made some very major decisions about changing the style of the book without asking my friend about it. He wanted to write a narrative using idioms to guide the reader along, they wanted a more granular approach. Make sure both sides know what they're looking for up front, then stick to it.
• At this point, my friend felt like he was losing steam and ownership. Ennui had set in, both the book and the schedule suffered. If the author isn't happy, I don't see how the publisher will be happy in the long run. The opposite certainly applies as well.

My friend has already written other books, but this was a new publisher and a new situation. Had he and the publisher partnered more, maybe this would have turned out better, I don't know. I do know that they both would have been happier, and a better book would probably be on the shelves already.

Update! You might also want to read A Tale of Two Books.

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

[フレーム]

Matt Wade is an editor in the open source line at Apress. As an editor, he's had the priviledge to work on titles such as Beginning GIMP and Pro PHP XML and Web Services. He's also a freelance web developer, database analyst, and all around technology junkie. Matt lives in Jacksonville, FL with his wife and three children. You can find some of his musing at opensource.apress.com.

I recently interviewed Joshua Smith, the author of Practical OCaml. During the course of our discussion, he brought up his editor and experience with Apress. So, I decided to take a couple of minutes to talk to Matt as well. Here's what we talked about:

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What made you decide the time was right for a functional programming book? And an OCaml book specificly?

Deciding what to publish on and what not to publish on is a bit of a tricky process. Sure, there are places where you know you'll be publishing: PHP, .NET, MySQL, Oracle, etc. The key to success in publishing though is to find that gem in the rough that is on the verge of making waves. Functional programming has seen a rise in popularity over the past year or so. OCaml is one of the forerunners in that popularity. The rise of F# popularity is another item that tells up that functional programming is on the rise. Given those factors and a bit of a 'gut' feeling, we thought it would be a good time to publish on OCaml.

What will it take to see another OCaml book from Apress?

Buy this one and ask all your friends to buy it as well :). Seriously, publishers are here to make money. Sure, we love to publish books on great technology and enjoy knowing that people can learn and further their careers from the books we publish, but when it comes to push and shove we need to make a profit from a book. If we find that publishing in the OCaml space does that for us, we will certainly continue doing so.

What about a book on another functional language (like Haskell)?

We are actively looking at other functional languages and considering them for publication. James Huddleston, another editor at Apress, has brought on Robert Pickering to write 'Foundations of F#' for us. You can find more information about that book at its page on the Apress website. It's expected to publish early next year. James and I would love to look over any proposals for function programming books. If you'd like to pitch an idea to us, send an email to editorial@apress.com.

To you, what's the best thing about OCaml?

I think one of the best things about OCaml, when compared to other functional languages, is the libraries available. I hate reinventing the wheel! OCaml has a huge number of libraries available to cover just about anything you'd want to do and they are all easily found.

Why the average non-OCaml programmer pick up a copy of this book?

Pick up this book if you want to learn how to program a functional language. You'll find a variety of practical projects that you can apply immediately to help you create your own applications. Personally, I find programming books that have nothing but academic examples boring and tedious. I want practical, real world examples that I can put to use. This book offers that.

(Look for my interview with Joshua on Friday.)

I've had the opportunity over the last couple of weeks to trade emails with the CEO of a boutique publisher. This discussion has helped me sharpen my view of the technical publishing market in general, and of boutique publishers specifically. (As always, you can go back and see my original post on classifications here.)

During the course of our conversation, he challenged me about my definition of his company as a boutique publisher. After reading his comments I had to refine my thinking a bit. I came up with a more structured approach to my division of publishers. If you were to draw a graph measuring where a publisher fell along two axes (Community and Production), the resulting four quadrants would each hold one of my classes ('Big-Box', 'Mom & Pop', 'Boutique', and 'Farmers Market').

A discussion with another friend raised some questions about what these axes mean, and how they fit together. Here are my explanations (complete with over-simplifications and over-generalizations — it's a two-fer-one sale):

• The Community axis:
  • Provider: These publishers don't see themselves as members of the community, but as a vendor that caters to the community's needs. At it's best this creates a strong drive for customer satisfaction — at its worst, it breeds a "father knows best" attitude that turns off the community. Providers can do some wonderful things like sponsoring conferences and user groups, providing infrastructure, and the like. The benefits only come when the community is seen as a viable market though.
  • Partner: As members of the community, these publishers see themselves as participants in the ongoing conversation that shapes the community. Being a partner limits the size of the publisher as they can only be engaged in a small set of communities before they're spread too thin to be effective. Partners give back to the community not based on the marketing bottom line, but based on their relationship.
• The Production Focus axis:
  • Commodity: Publishers with a Commodity Production focus look will look at books, authors, editors, and buyers as part of an established process. They push for their process to create the 'best' books. When it works, you end up with books of consistent quality being produced in a timely and predictable fashion. Then the process doesn't work, it's like Procruste's bed.
  • Craftsman: Following the Craftsman Production focus means that the publisher is focusing on getting each book right according to the needs of the book itself. Books tend to be produced more slowly, and to be more unique. At it's best, you get masterpieces like Tufte's work. At it's worst, you get the published equivalent of a Jr Highschool Shop project.

How does it work then? Let's look at a "Mom & Pop" publisher. They're in the Commodity Production and Community Partner quadrant. I'd expect that this kind of publisher would be talking to community members to find out what books to work on and to look for writers, not working with graphic designers to figure out the best or most cutting edge look for their books. I'd expect them to be looking at the bottom line, and publishing books that enough of the community wants to be profitable. With the concern about community comes contribution to that community, but it is measured against its impact on sales and profit.

How does this model affect my thoughts on publishing? It lets me see how a publisher might slide from one classification to another. I can use it to see where I think a publisher sits, and how they might want to interact with there community (or communities) if they want to stay there. If a publisher want to change the way they do business, this model can help identify what changes to make to get them moving in the right direction.

What do you think, am I full of hot air? Can you use this model to place your favorite publisher? How well do they fit?

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

I'm finally getting around to pulling my thoughts on publishing back toward Ruby. I've got a pair of short case studies about publishers dealing with Ruby books that I'd like to share with you. I think it helps clarify some of the differences that I see between the kinds of publishers I've been describing.

The following is a true story, names have been changed or withheld to protect the participants.

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My friend, Tom, and I have been approached by two different publishers to look at or work on books. In both cases, the publishers knew that the books were flawed, but thought that they were recoverable (given enough work).

The first publisher is a Mom & Pop Publisher. They came to us and were pretty up front about their concerns, they asked us to read the existing draft and get back to them. Both Tom and I encouraged them to either drop or rewrite the book, there were too many problems to overcome (it was unfocused, repetitive, and got any number of facts wrong). I don't know that publisher number one has followed our advice, but it seems like they might have.

The second publisher was a Big-Box Publisher, they approached me to become the technical editor on the book. I knew I wouldn't have time to do a good job at it, so I recommended they talk to Tom. He took on the job, and began to see problems very quickly. The author was getting basic stuff wrong. The further Tom got, the more concerned he was but on raising his concerns to the editors at publisher number two, he found them more interested in finishing the book quickly than addressing the deep flaws (or killing the book).

Now, I'm not trying to say that Tom and I have all the right answers, but I think these two scenarios illustrate the difference between the Big-Box and Mom & Pop publishers. The big guys think of themselves as providers to the community, they know better. The Mom & Pops recognize that they need to listen to the community, especially when the community is complaining.

I hope both these publishers succeed in getting into the Ruby community, but I hope that it's not on the backs of these two books. I think these books would hurt them much more than being in the community will help them.

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

Make no mistake, the Mom & Pop operation is the publishing/community sweet spot as far as I'm concerned. It's the place where the needs of the community get the most play in the decisions and direction of the company — and, if ignored (or misread), will spell the doom of the publisher. This level of dependence ensures that the Mom & Pop publisher will stay close to the community.

When I was twelve years old, my friend and I raised money the traditional way, mowing lawns and running a paper route. Then we spent it the traditional way (for twelve year olds), at the corner candy and comic shops. The workers at these shops knew us by name, they knew what we liked, and they took the time to talk to us. That meant that they could upsell and cross-sell pretty effectively. It also meant that they knew what kinds of things to stock. There was no corporate headquarters telling them not to stock chocolate-covered raisins, they knew Marty and I would be there to buy them every Wednesday. even if there had been a near-by big-box store back then, our stores had won our loyalty by treating us like friends, not nameless customers.

The Mom & Pop publisher is going to be the same way. They're involved enough in the community to know what books are needed/wanted, and who the best people are to write them. Even better, they have the trust of the community to produce the right thing. Because they tend to be smaller shops, with less history behind them, they can be more flexible about what they do and how they do it, they can respond to their community — to borrow a phrase, they can be agile. Finally, because they're in the community, they have a very short feedback loop. If they're doing something wrong, they hear about it while they still have time to recover.

This isn't to say that the life of a Mom & Pop publisher is all roses. They have plenty of problems of their own. It can be hard for them to manage there supply chain (witness Manning's underestimation of Ruby for Rails sales. They sold through their initial printing before they even got their first run back from the printer). In some cases, it can be difficult to get books placed in traditional book stores — and once you're in, it can be hard to get the premium locations. Being small can work against you in the cost department too, you don't get the printing, binding, shipping, and other discounts that someone doing ten or one-hundred times your business will.

What can the Mom & Pop do? I've got four ideas to share:

• Stay close to your roots — don't lose sight of the community and don't run off to join a bunch more communities, make sure there's a good reason to join another one (and some real synergy between it and the one(s) you're already in).
• Contribute, contribute, contribute — use some of your resources (time, talents, and/or money) to help improve the communities you belong to; work on or sponsor projects, send books to user groups or conferences, give talks, and write some free documentation. It all adds up to a stronger community and a more important role in it.
• Explore the broader market in your community — don't be afraid to publish in the niches, especially with the advent of smaller, electronic materials. It only takes a modest investment to help create a new marketing niche.
• Shop at the farmers market &mdash there are a lot of interesting writers and topics that could make the jump into your portfolio, seeing what's hot (and who's hot) should provide lots of material for your next strategy meeting. (If you don't remember my analogy of the farmers market, take a look at my initial post on this topic.)

Hopefully, these posts are worthwhile. I know they've helped me work through my thinking about publishing and writing. They've also helped me discover some new publishers. I'd like to hear your thoughts about this. Please post a comment below to let me know what you think about Mom & Pop publishing, or tech publishing in general.

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

The "big three" publishers, share a variety of traits once you abstract differences based on communities and approach. I'd like to look at some common benefits and drawbacks, then offer some advice for anyone in (or wanting to be in) this space.

Benefits of Being a Big-Box Publisher

I see three primary benefits to being the big box stores of the technical publishing world: economy of scale, a bigger set of resources to work with, and access to book stores.

Because these publishers are bigger, they can push for and get better pricing from their vendors (materials, printing, binding, and distributing, thus increasing their margin, allowing them to lower prices, or both.

Selling more books with a higher margin means more money is available to strengthen their position in the marketplace. This money might be used to provide books to Users Groups or to regional Conferences. It might be used to support less popular, but still important books. It might be used to fund other activities, like a conference.

Finally, because a publisher is well established, it is easier for them to place their books in a bookstore. Store owners are more likely to buy a new book from an established publisher than a new book from an unknown (there are certainly some exceptions, but I think they're rare enough to ignore).

Drawbacks to Being a Big-Box Publisher

I see three significant drawbacks: loss of connection to community, loss of agility and cost of reputation management.

Once a publisher reaches a certain size, I believe that they begin to lose there connection with the community — they become a provider to the community and not a part of it. Once this starts to happen, it's easy to become arrogant and lose sight of what the community really wants.

Being larger also means that it's harder to make changes in process or positioning. When things are going well this isn't such a big deal, but when there's an opportunity you need to act on now it can be a really big deal.

Finally, there's the cost of keeping your reputation up. Once you've made it big, it takes a lot of money and resources to stay there. You have to keep producing great books or suddenly you're "slipping". It's a treadmill that just keeps getting faster with each new success.

My Advice To Big-Box Publishers

If you're one of the big guys, and you want my advice, you're in luck because that's just what I'm going to give you. This may not be the game I'd like to be playing, but that doesn't mean that no one should. If you're happy here (or want to get onto the field), here are three things you should do.

First, be selective in which communities you join. Don't try to be all things to all people. I don't mean stick to one or two (or five or six) communities. Watch for new communities to form and when they match your goals, get involved.

Second, look to your chosen communities for guidance. Just because you're big doesn't mean you know what the community wants or needs. You might have been a driving force behind Perl, Java, or C#, but that doesn't mean the same things will work with Lua, Haskell, or IO. Get on the mailing lists, irc channels, wikis, and whatever else the community uses to communicate — and once you're there, listen and act on what you hear.

Third, foster growth in your chosen communities. As the community grows, so will your opportunities. Because you're involved in just a couple of communities, and because you're paying attention to them, you'll be able to make things happen. Will it be sponsoring user groups? (If it is, don't ship Perl books to the Ruby guys.) How about running a booth, a bofh, or an after hours bash at a conference? What about sponsoring a programmer working on some important tool or library in the community? (If you play your cards right, you'll also have the inside track on the best book about the new development.)

Wrapping Up

Okay, so you've read this far. Hopefully you've found some ideas worth your time. Do you agree with what I wrote? Have I missed something? Let me know.

Join me next time, when I talk about the Mom & Pop publishers.

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

Over on my post about the technical publishing market on Apress' Ablog, Jim Minatel was kind enough to chime in with his thoughts. I'm responding to them here because I think Jim makes some good points, and they fit in well with my ongoing series of posts about Wal-Mart and the Publisher.

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Jim: Great comments. If I can chime in with what I think Wrox has already been doing in some of these areas:

Thanks for responding, and especially for being so open with your thoughts. I'm still a bit surprised at the openness you, Gary, and Tim have shown. I think it's a great sign of your honest interest in improving your chosen communities.

Jim:1. It's not just books:
our p2p.wrox.com discussion forums are a massive and popular developer destination, not just to ask book questions but to have great "how do I do this" or "why won't this work" or "what's the best way to" coding questions and actually get answers from other very good coders.

Discussion groups can be suboptimal if not well executed, though they are a great way to get involved in the community. They can fragment the user community, resulting in multiple isolated groups that are harder to search and confusing for newcomers ("Which one(s) should I join?"). They can be very low traffic, frustrating the users that frequent them. They can dilute your brand, hurting you worse than not having them.

It sounds like you're happy with the results you're getting from p2p.wrox.com, but I see some places you could improve.

• Some of your forums look very healthy (e.g., the XML pages), others are pretty anemic (e.g., the Ruby pages). Choose your communities carefully, and nurture them.
• URLs like p2p.wrox.com/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=195 aren't meaningful. Provide meaningful urls, they're more useful and more memorable.
• The individual forums aren't well branded to the communities they serve, while they all look like Wrox, you can't tell the Ruby from the Java at a glance. Establishing Wrox Foo branding for the communities you want to be a part of helps make Wrox a part of the community instead of a provider to the community.

Jim: We're in the infancy, taking baby steps, of posting more article length content online, both short nugget size book excerpts and original articles. The links to these are currently featured at the bottom of our home page. As this grows in success, look for more prominent placement and more sophisticated organization of the archives.

That's great news. I'd be interested to learn how your sales are affected as you become more sophisticated in placement. I believe you'll see improvements in sales and in community presence as you have greater cross linking between book pages, online content, and your forums.

Jim: conferences and magazines: I'll happily admit I've got a predisposition against investing in Wrox-run conferences or a Wrox magazine. I know from a couple of year stint working at a company that was a magazine and conference leader how hard it is to do those well and profitably and how easy it would be for a new comer to lose money. However, we are doing small things along these lines like sponsoring more user groups and small conferences like code camp. which brings me to:

I'd meant to throw online content, conferences and magazines up as examples, not as a standard to comply to. I think that each publisher should look for ways to become a part of their communities. For example, the Pragmatic Programmers are very active in the Ruby community mailing lists, irc channels, and even development.

You're right though that magazines and big conferences are an easy way to fail both spectacularly and expensively. It's good to hear that you're involved with user groups and regional conferences. I think these will provide a lot of value to both local groups and the larger community — and to you.

Jim: 2. Community.
I think the areas where we're having the most success, mostly MSFT dev topics, reflect where we've been able to be the most involved in the community too. "Get the best and the brightest to write for you." we've been real lucky in ASP.NET and the rest of the MSFT dev topics to really be building the community relationships and networks to make this possible.

Bravo! I don't have any visibility into this space (I'm a Ruby and Open Source guy), but it sounds like you're spot on to really succeed.

Anyway, I love that this discussion is happening. I'll have to go back and read some of the other posts. I'm a bit slow blog reading the last few days and must have missed the barbs.

I love it too. Thanks again for responding, and good luck with making Wrox a thriving publisher and community member.

You might want to read An Author's Story: a Cautionary Tale

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

After talking with a publisher about my last post about the technical publishing market, I have some additional thoughts

Brick and mortar retailers come in four varieties — big box stores, mom & pops, boutique stores, and farmers markets.

• Big box stores (like Wal-Mart) leverage their size to reduce costs and provide wide range of products of a consistent (and presumed lower level of) quality with a consistent level of service to their customers at a (presumed) low price.
• Mom & pop stores are a part of the community and rely on that relationship to provide the variety and quality of products and services that the community wants at a price the community will bear.
• Boutique shops provide high end or hard-to-find products to a community, often at a (perceived) premium price.
• Farmers markets provide a meeting place where community members buy and sell the goods that they've produced to one another.

Publishers can be broadly lumped into four similar classes:

• There are larger publishers who cater to a broad range of technical areas, specializing on getting a broad selection of titles to market quickly and keeping their prices down. This group is similar to the big box stores. The "big three" from my last post (Apress, O'Reilly, and Wrox) fit into this group — and no, I'm not calling anyone the Wal-Mart of the tech publishing world.
• There are smaller publishers who work hard to be a part of the communities they cater to, and are similar to the mom & pop stores above. The Pragmatic Programmers are the best example of this category.
• There are specialty presses that trade on their reputation to sell their product, often with some additional cachet because of the name. This class corresponds to boutique stores. 37 Signals seems fit into this group.
• The last group are the self-publishing authors and companies who sell (or sometimes give away) their materials to other members of the communities they belong to, these are like the people behind the tables at your local farmers market. This blog (among others, cafe press stores, etc.) is an example of this model.

What does all of this mean? I think that the class a publisher belongs to has a lot to do with the way it perceives a community (and is perceived by that community). That perception colors the decisions the publisher makes about what to publish, how to market, and how to approach the community. Over the next week or so I'm going to write about each of the four kinds of publishers.

In the meantime, this leaves me with some questions that I don't have answers to:

• How does the class of publisher affect its sales?
• Can a publisher straddle classes?
• If you're a publisher and can only pick one class, which one do you shoot for?
• If you're a consumer, what kind of publisher do you want to support?

Let me know what you think. I'm pretty sure there is another post or two hiding in there.

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

Gary Cornell, Jim Minatel and Tim O'Reilly have been trading statistics, insights and barbs over the technical publishing market recently. I've been reading them with a great deal of interest because what they have to say strongly affects me as both a producer and a consumer of technical materials. I think each of them is looking at the whole somewhat myopically though (bold words for someone without nearly as much time or effort invested as any of them). Here's my take.

The technical publishing market is about more than just books. In fact it's more than just a market — it's a community, and the publishers who misunderstand that do so at their peril. It's about more than the "big three" (Apress, O'Reilly, and Wrox) — there are a lot of "little guys" too (the Pragmatic Programmers, Manning, No Starch Press, etc.), some of these have distribution or other agreements with the "big three" but they're still out there. Let me touch on each of these ideas briefly.

It's about more than just books. O'Reilly seems to grok this. They produce on-line content, a magazine, and conferences — this helps make them a destination (and, I'm sure, bolsters book sales). Apress seems to be making steps in this direction (with this blog, for example), but could make some changes and really make up some ground here. I don't follow Wrox as closely, but it seems like they would benefit from moving beyond books too.

It's a comunity, not a market. In some ways, this ties to the last point. It's important to be involved in the general tech community and the specific communities around the fields you want to publish around. If you want to hit a home run in the Ruby space, get on the mailing lists, contribute code, and get the best and brightest to write for you. This is where doing more than books will help. Apress has a lot of Java and ASP titles but this blog doesn't even feature a specific Java or ASP page. There is no reason there couldn't be an ablog.apress.com/java/ page with its own Apress Java branding, some featured content and cross links to and from Apress Java titles. This would draw eyes and make Apress a bigger part of the Java community — ablog.apress.com/?cat=6 just doesn't cut it.

It's more than just the "big three". Smaller publishers like the Pragmatic Programmers are revolutionizing the technical publishing market. The Pragmatic 'Beta Book' program showed everyone what beta books done right can be. Smaller publishers can also maintain a higher quality image, making new books by some publishers a must have sight unseen. Recognizing the value these publishers bring to the community and gleaning the best they have to offer can only help the market as a whole.

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

Tim O'Reilly has been posting about the book market over the last couple of days, and it's been quite informative. He calls out Apress, Wrox, and O'Reilly as outperforming the current market

Jim Minatel (of Wrox) has posted a response. He said something that really struck a chord with me:

So, I'm happy to see that Apress's rep is improving and O'Reilly's rep is strong, as always. But Wrox? We're on the right track too. Competition is good for the customer, so we'll just keep getting better.

As an occasional blogger for two of these three publishers (here and here), I enjoy seeing their continued success. From a wider perspective, I agree with Jim's point that the competition is good for all of us. Right now all three of them (plus Manning) are chasing the Pragmatic Programmers in the Ruby book space (well, two of them are, I've not seen anything from Wrox yet).

I've been talking to people at a number of publishers about getting into the Ruby pool for a couple of years now. I won't kid myself and think that I tipped things, but I'm very glad to see that the tipping point has been reached. I'm looking forward to a big batch of Ruby and Rails books coming out over the next six months, I think it will be good for the community and good for the publishers.

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This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.