@fablefox: that might indeed be a reason, in fact I am always a bit reluctant myself to hand over my credit card number to yet another retailer.
@yamakashi: the large user base of amazon is indeed its biggest attraction for an author but unfortunately you cannot set a higher price because amazon reserves the right to set a price equal to the lowest price at other retailers. I am (as a consumer) not a big fan of their drm policy either. Anyway, soon the book will be available at Apple, Barnes & Noble and others, after that I probably will put in some effort to make a .mobi (and pdf) version available, first at Smashwords and then maybe put my reservations aside and upload it to amazon as well
thank you for your comments and for buying the book, I hope you enjoy reading it ad much as I enjoyed writing it
As others said, I prefer amazon to keep all in one place. Maybe is fanboyism, but I really like the way they do things, and so far I really didn’t have the need to keep 2 different providers.
But yeah, in CG books there are quite a few that are only apple, so I might also consider going there as well.
In anycase, I’ll buy eventually ! thanks for the efforts
btw, why not self publish with no drm, like packt publish or even Andrew Price and his “wow factor” ?
@Brachi: thanks for your reply, i can see your point.
just to clear things up, the book is self-published but distributed by Smashwords and is drm-free It’s the retailers (amazon, apple, barnes&noble) that add drm even if the publisher didn’t. Some major publishers (like o’reilly and packt) indeed offer a drm free version if you buy it from their sites directly but neither of those offer self publishing possibilities. Of course I could have solved the issue like Andrew Price did and set up a payment and distribution system myself, but Andrew is a full-time businessman, while I am just a free lancer with no experience in setting up something like that (although these things are getting easier as well for example with amazon check-out and other services like that).
Anyway, a fairly transparent and author friendly operation like Smashwords seemed to me a good alternative and I am quite pleased with them Self publishing is a lot of work but once you sort things out, it’s quite doable.
I’d still prefer to work with a publisher (as I have done with Packt for my previous two books) because the do a lot of work for you and pay you an advance, but in this case all publishers I contacted thought OSL was such a niche subject that they thought they couldn’t sell enough copies to break even. Of course I want to prove them wrong The upside of self publishing is of course that you don’t have to factor in expenses and keep the price far lower than any publisher can
I really like packt because they offer pdf, mobi and epub DRM free, and they have good prices/promotions.
I read in codinghorror that technical books are hard to sell and one does it for the love of it more than profit.
I just realized I own your python 3 web development ebook from packt!
cheers man, now that I know your style I really want this OSL book
@Brachi: glad you liked my Python book I enjoyed writing it, but I enjoyed writing my OSL book even more, partly because I like tinkering with Blender a lot but also because the Blender community is really nice: despite what happens in some discussions (like the UI thread), most of the time people are really encouraging and appreciative of someones efforts.
And indeed, technical books don’t sell many copies. For most niche subjects a thousand copies or so is considered a success, so if their market researchers think a title will only sell a few hundred copies they won’t do it.
I certainly do it for the love of it although of course it is nice to earn a few euros as well. Fortunately the option we have today of self publishing a book means that people who like writing can still reach an audience, even if a publisher doesn’t think it can break even. But of course this means you have to do everything yourself, even tedious stuff like spell checking and formatting for publication, marketing etc. i.e all the stuff that isn’t about writing and teaching people Nevertheless, I am thinking about a follow-up already (that’s why I use this thread to ask for suggestions
