I am now retired, but I still enjoy the beginning of a new semester. Every few days or so I check Amazon to see if anyone has purchased our textbook. Sales are nothing like earlier times when we were selling an expensive paper version through a publishing company, but the present circumstances are more about feeling relevant.
Our transition from big publishing company to self publishing was originally motivated by our interest in a different model for the college textbook. The motive was partially to offer a less expensive textbook (I called it the $29 textbook project), but also to offer a different approach more suited to the content – technology in education. We thought it ironic that our orignal project sought to develop classroom technology integration skills in educators using a book. We wanted both to differentiate the content sources by creating a primer rather than a book for more static information and web content to improve the recency of information and to offer actual demonstrations and examples. We also thought it made more sense for authors to write continuously rather than intensely once every three years. We went back and forth with our publishers for several years and could never get to the point of implementing our project. Book companies see efficiencies in using standardized tools and approaches. For example, they wanted to offer professionally shot and edited videos of a topic such as problem based learning they could use in several of their education books. These videos would not necessarily involve technology. We wanted to offer videos of the problem based activities featuring the teachers who implemented them we used as examples in our book. We wanted to create the opportunity for the educators who adopted our book to share among themselves. For example, we were promoting the idea of an “interactive syllabus” – just a web page serving as a course syllabus and linking to tasks and resources used to augment assigned readings. There is no reason to treat the book authors as the experts when profs and students have their own experiences and tasks that could be shared to our Primer.
Eventually, we agreed our priorities were not compatible and after 5 successful editions we were given full control of the copyright on our book to do with what we wanted.
So, we became self publishers and have tried to offer a scaled down version of some of our ideas. We went from selling a $140 book receiving royalties (12% on the wholesale value) to a $9 book receiving 70% minus a fee for the download size of the ebook. The one frustration we have is that while we get instructors adopting our book is limited and while we don’t know for sure the activity associated with our online content seems unrelated to use of the book. For example, one would expect to see content associated with early chapters to be used early in a semester and indicators of this nature. We can only guess at why this is the case because we really don’t have a way to ask the adopting profs as would be the case with the book reps who make contact with profs for the commercial textbook companies. I still think the diversity of resources and a closer link between book and supplemental content are good ideas, but we have found over the years that it can take time for new ideas to be implemented.
