If my legalese is up to scratch, the contract appears to entitle Springer to charge the author for copy editing on top of everything else. Why shouldn't the author hire a freelance copy editor and distribute the book himself through an on-demand printing service?
I loved the Ggplot2 when I used it several years ago. But at the time (not sure if it's still true), I found this book essential to understand how to use the library beyond the simple examples.
This github repo is interesting because it has so much stuff -- even the contract with Springer and a textfile about marketing strategy. Seems like the author wanted to be as super transparent as possible.
Not sure if that's why it was posted here, but cool in any case.
Some are critiquing the 18%. As someone who has authored a technical book with a similar caliber publisher, I can confirm that it’s on the generous side. Though typically there would be some form of book advance (few k) and copy editing included as well.
The thing is, the the technical literature industry is kind of like venture capital. Publishers will throw a lot of things against the wall and whatever sticks will net them enough of a return to cover the rest. It can cost upwards of 50-100k to produce a book and most of them tend to flop. It’s really hard to understand which ones will flop as well, unless you have intimate domain expertise and can judge the technology and the community around it as well. At that point however, you may as well write the book yourself.
> 18% share of revenue for the author of this tech book ...
What kind of system of commerce is it, when the stars and the accomplished fall to ruin, rent and low-cost bus passes, while coffers swell to record size, and abusive money lending , addictive drugs and casinos prosper standing littered by the wreckage of their victims.
Maybe paperback books were more of a treasure than we realized ? .. including the livelyhoods of the participants ? Is there one person or player or style to blame for the aggregation economies that are consuming its citizens, farmers and aspiring creators mercilessly ? USA here.
Seems low but I'm not familiar with the for profit publication industry.
Wickham is one of the leads in providing data visualization/graphics for R. He authored ggplot2, one of the better plotting libraries available in R.
With data analysis/science trends of use in Python (especially with IPython/Jupyter/JupyterHub and an R kernel available) ggplot2 has some real competition now (poltly, matplotlib, etc.).
There's still heavy entrenchment in R due to the amount of useful libraries in CRAN and previous work but I predict much new work is and will continue migrating to Python as newer professionals enter the domain.
We got 6% from Springer for a textbook (6% total split between the authors, not per-author) [1].
However we were first-time authors, and also insisted that we be allowed to leave the "author version" PDFs online as open access [2]. So it's possible the lack of a fully exclusive contract made our royalties lower.
