I self-published Theory of Nothing after the first 10 publishers turned it down for "economic reasons" through BookSurge, which was later bought by Amazon.
It has sold somewhere in the region 550 copies to date. I made my costs back within a year - but the ebook version hardly sold at all, even though I insisted on it being DRM-free. So I then released it as a free DRM-free downloadle PDF, and it was downloaded more than 2000 times before being torrented 18 months later. The availablility of the free download had almost no impact on the sales of the hardcopy version - one could argue that it even sustained the rate of sales, when otherwise it might have trailed off. If you think how many people actually read your academic articles, this is a roaring success story. The one thing it is not, is a viable source of income. I can't give up my day job :(. Late last year, I produced a second edition, correcting a number of errors, most trivial typos. At the same time, I produced a Kindle version, which is sold through Kindle direct. Surprisingly, this has not done so well - surprising because the Kindle is a dreadful displayer of PDF documents (particularly with mathematical formulae), so the small sticker price should be worth it for Kindle users over and above the free PDF document. ---- My second data point is an electronic journal "Complexity International" which was started by a friend of mine in 1993. It is a peer reviewed journal in the traditional sense but is purely web based and openly available without subscription fees. It has run with fits and starts until now - at present, I gather, they're not accepting submissions, but aim to at least keep the content available. Part of that is due to funding being in fits and starts. Another problem was that it never got indexed by ISI. In 2005 I offered to run the editing of the journal on the basis of 0.5-1 day per week workload, for which I would receive a small fee from a government funded networking program for complexity science. My friend said that I was drastically underestimating the time commitment for editing a journal, but I was basing my estimates on what Mark Bedau said he and secretary spend on editing Artificial Life. Anyway, the upshot was that nothing happened at the time, although he did manage to find someone to process the back log of submission and conference papers they had at the time. And now, I guess funding has run out, and the journal is on ice :(. Cheers On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 09:39:20PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > Hi, everybody, > > > > I have signed perhaps a dozen Publishers Agreements over my life time and > each one was more onerous, self-serving, and stupid than the one before. My > favorite was the publisher who asked me to "hold the Publisher harmless for > anything that might occur as a consequence of the publishing of the work." > I asked a lawyer if this meant I was liable if a printer got his hand caught > in the press while my book was running and he answered, "Well, probably > not." And then he thought for a moment and said, "Oh, they'ld never come > after you for that!" Early contracts limited my liability to the income from > royalties, and one publisher actually provided authors' insurance for a > modest premium. But no more. > > > > Well today, I got an author's contract for a paper I am contributed to an > academic collection that asked me to warrant that the work had been > commissioned by the publisher and was "work for hire". Now, work for hire > means that one's surrenders ALL rights to the work including the right to > claim it as one's own work. It's the kind of contract you sign when you > write jacket copy for a publisher. ( The publisher in this case was Oxford > University Press, in case any of you are thinking of doing business with > them.) I am a wishy washy fellow, but somehow I could not sign a document > that said that my original work was "work for hire." Couldn't do it. > > > > It's too late for this work. I will have to sign the rights over to my > [young] collaborator, because she desperately needs the paper for her > career. But MAN! It got me to thinking. WHAT ABOUT self publishing. With, > say, Amazon" Does anybody on the list have any experience with Amazon or > other self publishing services that they would like to share? > > > > My Dad was a book publisher, and I grew up with conversations around the > dinner table about "developing authors" and trying to find new authors, and > how a few books might have to be published before a new author caught on. > They published Churchill's Memoires and Mein Kampf (!) and the Peterson > Field Guides, among many others. Now, it seems, publishers do very little, > and academic publishers, in particular, do nothing but scavenge off the > fetid bits coughed up the publish or perish system. Is is it time to dump > them? I am sure this is a party I am late to. Where do I get invited. > > > > Nick > > > > Nicholas S. Thompson > > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology > > Clark University > > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > http://www.cusf.org <http://www.cusf.org/> > > > > > > ============================================================ > 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 -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ 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
