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.?

• 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.

Of course, 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. 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. We hope that the above benefits outweigh any drawbacks in the design of the book, and we welcome feedback on how we can improve these issues.

A major thing we lose by not using a larger publisher is their marketing team. 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.