Publishing is something that most academics are intimately familiar with because it's kind of an expected part of the job. In fact, the old saying is publish or perish, and there's a song that I heard one time that ended with publish or perish the ivory tower we cherish.So publishing for academics is quite a bit different than it is for best selling authors. We publish academic books, textbooks, trade books. A trade book being something like the book I wrote for this course, which is intended for a more general audience than just students. Novels are a different story. And I don't know very much about publishing a novel, though it would be fun to do sometime. Whether this is important or not, depends on your field. In business schools, the emphasis is on journal articles. But in some fields, such as in humanities, one needs a book or two in order to be promoted. The good news here is that there are lots and lots of books out there. This is a list of publications. I'm afraid the year is not all the same. That's when the data were available. In 2010, in the United States over 300,000 new titles and additions came out, 300,000. So I think the great news about this is the number of resources that are our world is devoting to knowledge and of course entertainment. I mean I write books that are intended to summarize and to promulgate knowledge, but I also enjoy reading mystery novels, adventure stories and other things for entertainment. So what's the process that an author goes through and how is the technology changing this process? Well you start with the author and the author generates a prospectus for a book. That is it's three or four pages describing what the book will be about, the purpose, the audience. If you're doing this for a commercial publisher, they'll also ask you to say something about what the competing books are in the field already. You might send this out to five or six publishers and hope that you get something back from that. If the publisher likes the prospectus they will send it out to reviewers who are either other authors or other academics and they'll pay them a small honorarium to review the book. And come back and say, yes, this looks like it would be a good book to publish or no I don't think you want to get involved with this. So at that point, if you've gotten one publisher or more who likes the prospectus, they'll offer you a contract and then you have to write the book. And when the book is submitted, they go to more reviewers, depending on the nature of the book. If it's a textbook there may be half a dozen reviewers because the publisher wants to be sure that the information in there is correct. Once you're finished with this review process and by the way, the author has made revisions all the way through this, the book goes to what is called production. And at that point it's the publisher who is working on creating the book. And there is also marketing that goes on at the same time depending again on the nature of the book. In production one goes through a stage of copy editing in which a copy editor looks at the expression, the grammar, the clarity of what you're saying, and changes things, or suggests changes to be made. You go through proofs. The publishers more and more, today, hire a professional indexer to create and index for the book. Finally, they print the book, and it goes into distribution. So the question is what's the Internet doing? What's technology doing to change this? Well, if I self-publish, I don't probably have to worry about any of this stuff. I'm not going to have a contract. I'm not going to have reviewers, though I actually might want to hire some reviewers or try to get some friends to review, because a review is really a helpful thing. So, I will write the book. I will have potentially reviewers here. I can go out and hire a freelance copy editor to do the copy editing. All the proofs and everything. It's electronic book, so it's really easy to create this and to post it. And the various electronic publishers, like Amazon, have procedures on their website so that you can go through and self publish a book. And one of the things I can do with this is I can have a pretty low price. I don't have a physical product. In fact, if you think in terms of marginal cost, the cost of an additional copy is about zero. So I can have a low selling price, and I can have a royalty rate that's a lot higher than what the traditional publisher offers. As an example, this is the book on which this course is based. The research for the book is what I've applied to this course. It's on Amazon, but the hard cover price is terrible. It's $48. The Kindle price, at least, is under $40. The author really doesn't have anything to say about the price. In fact when I told what the price was I complained to the publisher and was told that you know I had no role in the pricing decision. So a trade book is something that's for more general readers than an academic textbook as I just mentioned earlier. I did send the prospectus for this book to several publisher. It turns out that my publisher was looking for a book on failures. And this happen to be a publisher focused on libraries, which I think is the reason that the price is so high, because you sell copies to libraries and maybe a half a dozen or a dozen people read the book. It's shared among readers, and so they can justify a higher price for In the library. So, the author's influence, well, you do have the last word on content. There's no question about that, it is your content. When I first started writing books, the publishers did all of the artwork, all of the figures and all of the illustrations. I think, now, as times have gotten tighter and as we're not talking about a text book that will sell thousands of copies, I actually for this book, had to supply a lot of the artwork, the figures, the graphs and illustrations. What does the author not influence, well the format, that's the publishers choice, the actual design, the cover. Now I will say that on the cover. I was asked to look at a cover and say that I liked it or didn't like it, but I wasn't given five covers to choose from. And again, I said I have no influence on the price. So having done all this, what's the author's take? Believe me, at least writing trade books [LAUGH] one's not going to retire with great wealth. A typical trade or a textbook, take a guess. What do you think the royalty rate is ,that is what the author receives? The author whose provided all of this content. It's worse than you've guessed, probably, we have 15% of net. So that means that means that if the book sells for $48 and maybe the publisher gets, let's say, $30 for that, the author gets 15% of that or $4.50. But the author supplied all the content. The intellectual property for this project came from the author. Now bestselling authors can negotiate better deals. So if you're a novelist or you write books and sell hundreds of thousands of copies, you're going to have some influence with the publisher. But for those of us who sell a small number of books then there is not much room for negotiation. So we have looked at this traditional publishing process for a print book and we have seen the alternatives. We have seen that the technology really has a major impact all the way through this. It has an impact on the process of creating a book, on the distribution, and on the economics. How much it cost to produce, how much you charge for the product, how much the author receives in return. And therefore you can see why the electronic publishing process is so much more appealing to authors and to readers. And so while I mentioned the previous video that I hoped that we would continue to have physical books. I am afraid they are going to probably become a somewhat vanishing breed. But maybe we will be able to have enough demand to keep both going, though I do believe this creates serious problems for publishers. Trying to figure out their business model when they have such a contrast between the physical book and the electronic book, and all aspects of production, distribution, pricing and readership.
