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Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by rmason on Saturday June 01, 2019 @05:47PM (#20071894)
There were a few publishing startups that only published electronically and let the author keep 60% of the title's price. I can't find them anymore so perhaps the experiment failed.
Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by peterarmstrong on Saturday June 01, 2019 @08:46PM (#20072749)
At Leanpub, authors keep 80% of the title's price. We've paid over $7.5M in royalties to authors, and we're alive and well :)

Write in Markdown, click a button, get a book (PDF, EPUB, MOBI). Click a different button and your book is for sale with an attractive landing page, etc. You can even create a MOOC with one click, again based on Markdown...

(disclosure: cofounder)

Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by sytelus on Sunday June 02, 2019 @02:25AM (#20073840)
Do you also provide services for proof-reading, cover design, marketing (or connect people with these expertise online)? It would be great to have community of people offering services to book writers for money or royalty.
Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by sytelus on Sunday June 02, 2019 @02:34AM (#20073869)
A big problem is that even 100% cut doesn't amount to much if you are writing technical/programming related books. So this should probably not be the biggest decision factor. The advantage of not going with publisher, however, are MANY:

- You can open source the book. This can help you gain much more audience and career recognition.

- You are not bound by having to fit in to publisher's specific series, its style of writing

- You can chose your own title. Most publishers in technical books arena will force you to have title that is consistent with their series.

- You do things in your own time without pressure, may be even open sourcing book from day 1

- You are not bound by page limit. Most publishers would force you to have 250-400 pages, no matter what. My personal philosophy is that the most useful books are the shortest and personally I would prefer to write books that are as little as just 50 pages.

Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by marvindanig on Saturday June 01, 2019 @06:04PM (#20071973)
Up to 85% of the title's price. Meet Bubblin @ https://bubblin.io

Discl.: founder here.

Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by Silhouette on Saturday June 01, 2019 @06:47PM (#20072204)
Interesting idea. FYI, the layout of your home page breaks if your browser default font size isn't 16px, leaving most of the important text unreadable.
Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by marvindanig on Saturday June 01, 2019 @07:45PM (#20072512)
Can you send a screenshot what you see/inspected to my mail?

[email protected]

Edit: I understand the issue now. Thanks!

Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by Silhouette on Saturday June 01, 2019 @09:00PM (#20072806)
Sorry, I'm commenting pseudonymously, so not really. But if you just change your browser default font size to say 20px you can't miss it.
Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by asicsp on Sunday June 02, 2019 @12:46AM (#20073525)
I'm using leanpub [1] and gumroad [2] and very happy with both (get to keep 80% or more) - there are small differences between them, and I feel putting your book on both these sites will cover most of the needs for the user

[1] https://leanpub.com/

[2] https://gumroad.com/

Re:Tips for Writing a Technical Book by ivan_ah on Sunday June 02, 2019 @10:20AM (#20075611)
One of the better ones in that space is https://www.softcover.io/

The build pipeline looks like:

  .md --> .tex  -->  .pdf/.html/.epub/.mobi/.html
or you can start directly from the .tex

  .tex  -->  .pdf/.html/.epub/.mobi/.html
If you're looking to write a book that has a lot of latex math equations in it, this is the "book builder" you need. The tech is open source, see https://github.com/softcover/softcover and https://github.com/softcover/polytexnic