I have self-published my two textbooks, Data Science for Crime Analysis with Python, and Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python. I have written about my set up previously, long story short use Quarto to compile the books to epub and a nice PDF, and then use LuLu for print on demand.
I figured a blog post on why I think all academics should take this route when publishing textbooks is in order though.
Reason #1 – you can set the cost.
Most textbooks are ridiculously overpriced. My two books I sell at print prices of $50 and $60. These are textbooks that are over 200 pages in a larger letter paper size. If they were the smaller size, they would be 400+ pages, and priced for print well over $100 (and possibly over $200). The actual print costs for each of my books are around $20 and $30 (and then $6 to $10 for shipping). And of course selling the epub is basically zero cost.
Many professors write their own textbooks because they teach a course that does not have a standard text. (Most are not doing it to make a buck.) You can make a buck if you want, and still sell the books for less than half of what an academic publisher would charge for the book.
So without a coupon, I make about $30 when I sell a print version of either of my books. (If professors adopt one of my books for the course, I give coupons so I only make $10 margin per book, either print or epub.)
To be clear, I do not suggest writing your own textbook to fleece your students. But if you do write a good textbook for a course, why not make it more broadly available to everyone?
Margins for professors selling a book through a traditional publisher are typically around $1 per sale. Again I sell my books for less than half of what an academic publisher would sell them for, and make closer to $30 per sale on average.
Reason #2 – you have full control over the content and layout.
My books are letter-sized (8.5 by 11 inches), not the more typical 6 by 9 inches. This is based on personal preference, one I think many will share when writing technical textbooks. The code snippets in the book look much nicer with the larger pages – I can have larger code-snippet sections. It also allows me to have larger images, without odd artifacts with the ragged bottom for the print version.
I have posted my Quarto and LaTeX notes on my book set up. If you are not familiar with Quarto, you write your book in plain text Markdown, and then have a tool compile the book to the different end formats. For those not familiar, Markdown looks like:
# This is a title
A section describing something ...
So you write in a plain text, and then have a tool turn the plain text into different formats. For print, you will make a PDF version to send to the service that prints the book. You can also make an epub (or just share the PDF) as well, or make an HTML website. (Jacob Kaplan’s Crime by the Numbers: A Criminologist’s Guide to R is a good example website that also has a book, which costs over $100 for the print version.)
One of the points I have never seen another editor make – epubs should be formatted differently than print. I use different fonts for the different versions of my books. This is easily possible with just changing the meta-data in Quarto (and would work the same if just using Pandoc to directly convert as well, this advice is not specific for those writing coding books).
Reason #3 – you can update the content as much as you please.
If you want a textbook, printed through a traditional academic publisher, it would take around a year to go through the motions of updating the draft, getting editor feedback, and going into print. You can do updates as fast as you want when self-publishing. You spot an error, you can have an errata and simultaneously fix it for all future versions as fast as you can do the edits.
Many academics do not care about this very much, but when writing textbooks that include code, I do. Code can go bad, particularly when writing about contemporary topics like large language model APIs.
Pre-empting some reasons to not self-publish
Now some will read the above statements and (reasonably) think those benefits can be bad. It can be bad that you have full control over the layout, most people will not care. It could be bad you have the obligation to update the text yourself (without an intermediary copy-editor).
I have published two other textbooks through traditional academic publishers, and to be honest these things are not something you should value all that much. The amount of copy-editing you get from a traditional publisher is pretty minimal. If you read my description of markdown above and think, I don’t want to have to figure that out, just get a $20 subscription to OpenAI or Claude, give it the link to this blog post, and ask it to set your computer up for you. Even if you do not want AI to help you write (you should definitely use it as a copy-editor for slight grammar and spelling errors), this is worth your time.
There are two aspects that self-publishing are clearly worse though than going through a traditional academic publisher – distributing your book and potential prestige. For the prestige point, I am talking about academic textbooks (like those published by Springer, Wiley, Pearson, university presses, etc.). Most people do not consider them prestigious, but I have no doubt some fool Dean bean-counts those as publications for tenure and will discount self-published books. They should not, but I am sure some do. For the small number that have a fool for a dean, I am sorry about your current lot in life.
For distributing your textbook, it is easier to get a textbook in a university library through a traditional academic publisher. I go through the whole process of getting an ISBN, copyright, and submitting my books to the Library of Congress. So libraries can (and have when professors request it) made purchases of my textbook. I imagine if you publish a textbook with Wiley though they have standard ways to get books into libraries, go to conferences and have a stand, etc.
Ask a friend who has published a textbook the benefit of this next time you meet. They will tell you something like “I don’t know what you are talking about, I only sold 12 copies last year”. If you can get a For Dummies book, this is not the same as an academic publisher. The University of Punxsutawney press is not hustling to sell your book in Barnes & Noble.
So do your students and yourself a favor, self publish that textbook.
