What I've Earned (And Learned) From Writing a Ruby Programming Book
There are a couple books I've wanted to write for a long time. I'd like to pay a copyeditor to fix my long-winded prose, and pay a designer to typeset it, then post it online as a PDF that will cost, say, $15.<p>Peter Cooper's unusually successful Ruby book sold ~8000 copies in print and 500 copies as ebooks. He made $19,000.<p>To gross $19,000 with a $15 PDF, I'd have to sell ~1260 copies. Compare to ~8000/500 paper/print, noting that the PDF will be the only available format for the book, and this doesn't sound impossible. If I raised the prices to a place that still undercut an Apress ebook, I could get that number down to 900 copies.<p>Of course, whatever number I hit, I own the book free and clear, at all points.<p>I'm interested in what Cooper thinks about the strategy of foregoing publishers altogether.