Why Do We Use Self-Publishing?

We have chosen to publish our book using Lulu, an independent self-publishing company. Our book still has an ISBN and can still be ordered by most university bookstores, but it must be ordered through Lulu.com and not through other online retailers such as Amazon. Why did we choose to publish this way rather than through one of the major publishers such as Addison Wesley, Prentice Hall, Wiley, McGraw Hill, etc.? Here are some of the benefits, to us and to you:

• Lower prices. Many textbooks cost $75-100 because of the necessary markup publishers must charge. By reducing the number of middle-men, we can charge a lower price for our textbook.
• Revenues. A much larger share of the profits go straight to the authors, rather than to a corporation. This may not matter much to students, but it again means that we can charge less and provides motivation to do our best work on the textbook, knowing that we reap a larger share of the rewards from its success.
• Faster turnaround. When instructors email us errata or requests for additional coverage or chapters, we can respond to this in a more agile way than if we were bound to a traditional publisher. We can often fix typos and other minor errors within a few weeks of their being reported, and we can release new editions as we see fit.
• Continued availability of past editions. Many publishing companies try to release new editions frequently as a way of flushing used copies of the old editions out of the market, so that instructors and bookstores must discard their used books and purchase new ones. This does create new sales, but it can be frustrating to the teacher and students if they didn't really need the new features of the new edition in the first place. By publishing with Lulu, we have total control over how long which editions remain available.

  We are committed to leaving each edition of the textbook up for purchase indefinitely to make sure that everyone can order the edition that best suits their needs. (Of course, we plan on adding so many great new features to our second edition that we hope everyone will want to purchase it to get those new features! That's how it should be.)

• Direct contact with authors. If you're an instructor using our textbook, any questions or help you need will come straight to us. We are happy to receive questions from educators who need help with the textbook material, or need supporting resources, or anything else needed. We also maintain a web-dev mailing list where instructors can ask their peers about topics of interest to them.

Working with an independent publisher is not without its negative aspects. We still fully respect the larger publishing companies and don't discount the value they have in the process of creating, marketing, and selling a textbook. In the interest of honesty and full disclosure, here are some of the drawbacks of the fact that we have published our textbook via Lulu:

• Book's design and layout are done by the authors. We have had to do a lot of extra work to account for the lack of a major publisher, such as copy-editing, drawing art, doing layout, indexing, designing our own cover, and so on. This wasn't easy, and presumably some of these aspects of our book would be even better if we had a large publisher's help. A real designer and layout editor could probably produce a more stylish look than our book currently features, though we don't think it's too terrible as-is. We hope that the above benefits outweigh any drawbacks in the design of the book, and we welcome feedback on how we can improve the design.
• Not available as an e-book. We don't provide PDF or ePub or Kindle or any other digital formats of our book, partly because this is harder to do independently, and partly out of concern for piracy. We are not likely to offer a digital version of the book anytime in the near future.
• Possible delays in shipping. When you place your order from Lulu, they literally go start printing up a copy on demand to ship to you. This takes a bit longer than if they had a warehouse full of them ready to ship to you. So it takes 1-2 weeks to receive your book from the day you order it from Lulu. This is not a huge delay, but for some students or teachers it is bothersome.

  To help ensure that your school's bookstore gets the books in stock on time, it can be very helpful to explain to them that Lulu is a print-on-demand independent publisher, and that it takes a little longer between the day the order is placed and the day that the books arrive. Knowing this ahead of time can help the bookstore know that they should place their order earlier and avoid any delays.

• Not available on Amazon or at various retail stores. Literally the only way to buy a new copy of our book is to order it through lulu.com by the links listed on this web site. It isn't available for purchase on amazon.com or other online booksellers. This is partly due to licensing issues and partly because when you list your book for sale on amazon.com, Amazon keeps almost all of the revenue and the authors make almost nothing. We want to keep our prices down and also receive reasonable compensation for our work.
• Potential issues with university bookstores. Most instructors submit book orders to their university book store, which then orders the copies of the book and stocks them on their shelves. This is certainly feasible with our book, but the bookstore has to order the books through Lulu. Some booksellers for whatever reason are reluctant or unwilling to do this, often because they haven't heard of Lulu.

  Some bookstores are only willing to buy books from publishers who are willing to "buy back" unused copies after the course is over. For example, if the bookstore orders 50 copies and only 30 sell, they ship them back and get a refund on the other 20. Since Lulu prints on demand and retains no stock, they don't accept buy-backs of unsold copies. Therefore some bookstores don't like to order from Lulu because they don't want to be stuck with unsold copies on their shelf. In these cases we either encourage the bookstore to order a conservative number of copies, or if they are completely unwilling to place an order, we suggest that the instructor tell the students to individually order their own copies from Lulu directly.

  Some bookstores don't want to order copies from Lulu because they face a price disadvantage. That is, if the university bookstore has to order the book at its full retail price, then mark it up to earn some profit, students will notice that they can order the book themselves directly on lulu.com and will avoid the bookstore. If your university bookstore is concerned about this issue, please have your bookstore ordering representative contact us directly at the following email address, and we can provide them with a special means of ordering the book at a bookstore-only discount, allowing them to make their profit.

  

• Lack of marketing and sales team. Major publishers can afford to fly marketing reps to all the various schools to promote their textbooks and offer sample copies. We have to rely on word of mouth. So, we need your help! If you like using our textbook, please let your friends and colleagues know about it. Hopefully we can build a larger community of web programming educators together. Thank you.

We know that the above issues can make things more difficult. Overall we have decided that what we value the most is being able to independently produce exactly the book we want to write, and sell it to you directly at what we feel is a reasonable price in this era of skyrocketing textbook prices. If there is anything that we can do to help accommodate you and your students, or if you have any feedback for us about Lulu or your experiences ordering from them, please don't hesitate to contact us. Many thanks.