PragDave

So the Hacker News folks are having a discussion about my email experiment last April. Many interesting points were raised. One fair question is "how did the experiment work out?" 

In short, it worked incredibly well.

I was mostly worried about annoying the folks sending me email. But the only feedback I got was positive. 

I was also a little worried about folks abusing the [urgent] flag. But that didn't happen, either. I had perhaps 5 or 6 urgent emails, and they were indeed things I needed to handle when I got back. Maybe I'm just lucky when it comes to the people who correspond with me.

The experiement had two positive effects on my life. First, the vacation was genuinely a lot nicer not having to worry about the sacks full of mail piling up for me when I got back. Was that selfish of me? Perhaps a little. 

I wasn't expecting the other side effect. Since I returned from vacation, the quality of email I receive has improved, and the quantity I receive has dropped. I still enjoy interacting with all the people I need to interact with, and I still get to answer all the questions that need answering. It just seems that my inbox is somehow more focussed.

I have a theory. I think that, during the course of the preceding few years, I'd become something of a slave to my email. I'd answer stuff as it arrived. And those rapid responses would in turn trigger another round of email, and another. There was almost an adreneline rush to it.

So my vacation broke that cycle. And now things are sane (or at least closer to sane).

For the next 2 weeks, here's my vacation message:

Subject: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

I know this sounds brutal, but here’s the deal.

I can't remember the last time I took a vacation where I didn't actually end up working a few hours each day handling e-mail. I felt I had to, because if I didn't, the Inbox would just grow and grow, waiting for me when I got back—the idea that I'd be flying home to 5,000 messages would always be nagging at me, detracting from my holiday. So I worked (which also detracted from the holiday).

 This time, I'm taking a different approach. I'm asking for your help to make my break more enjoyable.

 I'm going to be discarding email I receive. That's right—your email will be recycled into warm, fluffy bit-jackets for underprivileged children. I won't see it.

If it's something you think I really, really need to know, you can bypass this brutality by putting "urgent" in the subject line. But before you do:

It's an experiment. Bon voyage à moi!

Dave

So now I own part of a karate school!

My son Zachary has been studying karate for 5 or 6 years now. He got his black belt, and now he's teaching others while continuing to learn himself.

He used to go to a tremendous studio. What made it so great was a particular teacher, Teresa Paup. She's one of the most natural teachers I've ever met: strong and disciplined, but at the same time very open to the individuals under her care. Which made it all the more upsetting with the studio got into some financial problems and had to let her go.

It took our family about five minutes to decide that it would be a crime for someone that good to stop teaching martial arts, so we contacted her and asked if she'd be interested in starting a new school. She was, but she also was honest enough to say she had no idea about the business side of things. So we formed a partnership. My wife Julie and I said we'd get her up and running, and she'd concentrate on the program side.

At the time, I thought I'd be setting up some Quickbooks stuff, getting business cards printed, and helping out with the bank. But it has turned into a bigger job that that. Evenings and weekends have been eaten up with commercial leases, strange insurance policies, and landlord negotiation. (Landlords. Ah.) 

And it has been a blast. 

They say that a change is as good as a rest, and helping set up a retail establishment is definitely different to publishing books. Going back to being a novice is exhilarating.When you're an expert in something, the stuff you learn is subtle—often you don't even notice you're learning it. But as a total novice to all this retail stuff, I know I'm learning, and it feels good to be making progress. Every day we learn something new, and that's really motivating.

We're almost to the start of a short build out, and should be opening our doors in early December. We're called Karate for Life. I'm really looking forward to seeing the first students take to the mat.

(And in case anyone's wondering, nothing's changing at the bookshelf—this is just a fun, personal side project. Some people take a vacation—I go talk to lawyers and property managers. Now back to pushing a new beta of the Pomodoro book.)

When we started the Bookshelf, we wanted our authors to share in the success of their books, so we set our royalty rates to between 40% and 50%. That is, an author will receive between 40% and 50% of whatever gross profit we make on a book. We felt back then, and we still feel, that this is the highest overall royalty offered by any technical publisher (most publishers offer something in the 10–18% range).

But it isn't always easy to compare different publishers, because the definitions of gross profit (or whatever they use) differ wildly. Our definition is that we take whatever money we receive from the sale of a book (in whatever form), deduct the direct cost of production (which is zero for eBooks, and a couple of dollars for paper books), and then split what's left according to the royalty rate. We also account for our costs of copy edit, indexing, and typesetting by splitting them (again according to the royalty rate) between the author and us. So if a book costs $5,000 to copy edit, index, and typeset, and we're paying 50% royalties, then the author's royalty account starts with a $2,500 negative balance.

We don't pay advances, but we do pay royalties quarterly. If a book enters our beta program, the author starts receiving the royalties at the end of the quarter.

In the last few years, we're had a number of prospective authors tell us that other publishers woo them by saying that our 40–50% royalties are somehow illusory—that by the time the author gets a payment the figures have somehow been shaved down to the point where we pay the same as everyone else. And that's just FUD.

So, in order to help people compare, attached is a chart (click for a bigger version). It shows the royalties we've paid so far on our titles that have been in print for at least a year. Eight percent of the titles have earned less than $10k. Several of these are vanity titles we produced on behalf of private companies, the others are books that sold into very specific, narrow niches (because we felt someone should do it, and even at these low volumes we can do so profitably).  Ninety-two percent of our titles paid more than $10k in royalties, and forty-two percent paid more than $50k. Twelve percent earned into six figures.

I'd welcome publishers who talk down our royalty payment schedules to publish their figures. I know many will have some titles that earn a lot more than $400k. But I'd be most interested in the distribution—how much does a typical author make? I'm proud of the fact that we've set up an environment where authors of good books can earn back at least a reasonable portion of the investment they made in writing.

I've known Chad Fowler for almost ten years. He's a seriously good guy: musician, developer, leader, and friend. So when he came to me some years ago with an idea for a book, I jumped at it. I was hoping for something good, but what we got was something truly great.

Andy and I wrote The Pragmatic Programmer over 10 years ago. It was a book full of advice on the job of programming, from low-level coding to teams and projects.

Well, Chad had written the companion book. Where our book looked outward at the job you were doing, The Passionate Programmer looked inward at the person doing the work. It's a book about finding fulfillment in what you do. It's a book about rekindling the fires that you felt when you first entered the profession. It's a book about creating a career, rather than turning up for a job.

I was blown away.

And then I did something really stupid. The book came out about 5 years ago, and outsourcing was big on everyone's mind. So I thought "let's make a jokey title that'll grab people's attention." I called the book My Job Went to India (And All I Got Was This Lousy book).  I've already blogged about how stupid that was—it was probably the single dumbest thing I've done since I got into publishing. The title put people off; it gave them the wrong idea. The book was really nothing to do with outsourcing, but you wouldn't know it from the cover. This book deserved so much better

So, four years later, we revisited the book. Chad's given it a spring cleaning, revising and updating it. And we gave it a new title and a new cover, both of which do a better job of conveying the energy and enthusiasm that lie within.

I'm not into selling: my philosophy with our books is “if they're good, people will buy them.†But this book is different. I really think it can make a difference. So I'd love for you to read the extracts and maybe take this book home with you. I honestly think you'll thank me (and, most importantly, Chad) if you do.

I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with my Kindles. The original was not much more than a toy, but the Kindle 2 was a more usable device. It still needs work in the formatting department (hopefully the Lexcycle acquisition will help with this—I very much hope to see epub support rolled in to the Kindle at some point courtesy of the folks who brought us Stanza). But the distribution model is a good one. If you buy a book from the Amazon store, it gets delivered over the air to your Kindle.

Now, the Pragmatic Bookshelf doesn't participate in the Amazon eBook store: it is frankly too expensive for us, and we value having a direct relationship with our readers. So when we announced our support for the Kindle, we did distribution from our own site: you download your .mobi file from us and drag-and-drop it onto your Kindle via USB.

But… Amazon also let you send files to your Kindle via e-mail. In the old days, this used to cost $0.10 per file. So we modified our store. If you have a Kindle, you can register it with us and we'll send your eBooks to it automatically. If we release a new beta, it'll get sent to you, and we'll send you an e-mail to let you know it's there. It was a nice compromise, and at 10 cents a pop, not a bad proposition for our readers.

But then, yesterday, Amazon changed the rules. They now charge for transfers on a metered basis. Send a file to your Kindle over the air, and it will cost 15 cents/megabyte. Suddenly what once looked attractive now starts to become expensive. If we update a beta book 10 times, and the .mobi file is 5.5Mb (about our average), then you're out of pocket $9. Because we don't want our readers to get hit by surprise Amazon bills, we'll probably remove the feature from our store over the next few days (let us know if you think we should keep it).

Color me paranoid, but I suspect, that's exactly what Amazon wants publishers to do. Of course, they could argue that it's fair for readers to pay for bandwidth usage, but in reality I suspect that these transfers are a vanishingly small percentage of their overall network usage.  Instead, Amazon probably realizes that this facility allows publishers to bypass their store and have direct relationships with clients. And Amazon d0esn't want that. This charge is just enough to discourage most readers to sign up with publishers such as ourselves to receive automatic updates to the eBooks they own.

I think that's a shame. We were looking at an entirely new model. Imagine how cool it would be if your books updated themselves while you slept. Now we'll have to wait for another device to become popular before that becomes a reality (Apple tablet, I'm looking at you…).

In the meantime, if you own a Kindle, and you'd like to receive automatic updates on it without having to mortgage your house, you might want to consider asking Amazon to reconsider this charge. I don't hold out much hope, but you never know.