World Scientific Publishing is marketing my book. They have put out a flyer for several of their electronics books (https://www.worldscientific.com/pb-assets/wspc-site/catalogue-pdf/Electrical-Electronics-Engineering2024-25-1705395593457.pdf), and my book is the first one on the flyer!
Of course, they don’t mention that the PDF for the book is also available on LeanPub for only $7.99 (https://leanpub.com/applied_analog_electronics), but I wouldn’t expect them to.
The Amazon link for my Applied Analog Electronics textbook (https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Analog-Electronics-First-Course/dp/9811254966) just went from pre-release sales to fully live (2023 August 8). They are selling the hardback (978-981-125-441-3) for $176.30 and paperback (978-981-125-496-3) for $85.03, which is 11–13% less than the list price from World Scientific Publishing.
If you liked my book or course, go ahead and leave reviews there (though you should mention that you used a pre-publication draft of the book)! Reviews are important to book sales, but there aren’t any yet.
The PDF of the book (with the same content, but different pagination and different cover) is still available through LeanPub for $7.99 at https://leanpub.com/applied_analog_electronics. I get a little bit smaller royalties per copy from these sales (unless you pay the “recommended price” of $14.99, instead of the “minimum price” of $7.99), but I really wanted to make sure that a non-pirated, low-cost option remained available for students, so I got the publisher to agree to a contract that allowed me to sell electronic versions on LeanPub or on my own website (should I ever have one that enables sales). Also anyone who bought the LeanPub edition (even with the free coupons I distributed to the class) can get the latest version of the PDF for free by logging into the LeanPub site.
Note: this post updates the earlier Amazon site live! post.
The Amazon link for my Applied Analog Electronics textbook (https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Analog-Electronics-First-Course/dp/9811254966) just went live (2023 June 19). They are selling the hardback (978-981-125-441-3) for $184 and paperback (978-981-125-496-3) for $94, which is $4 less than the list price from World Scientific Publishing. (Technically, the Amazon launch date is 2023 August 6—so until then are just pre-orders.)
If you liked my book or course, go ahead and leave reviews there (though you should mention that you used a pre-publication draft of the book)!
The PDF of the book (with the same content, but different pagination and different cover) is still available through LeanPub for $7.99 at https://leanpub.com/applied_analog_electronics. I get a little bit smaller royalties per copy from these sales (unless you pay the “recommended price” of $14.99, instead of the “minimum price” of $7.99), but I really wanted to make sure that a non-pirated, low-cost option remained available for students, so I got the publisher to agree to a contract that allowed me to sell electronic versions on LeanPub or on my own website (should I ever have one that enables sales).
I just received yesterday (2023 June 13) the first 4 author copies from World Scientific Publishing of my Applied Analog Electronics textbook. My initial contact with World Scientific Publishing suggested that they would be very quick (only 48 days from their expressing an interest in the book to our having a signed contract: 2021 Oct 7 to 2021 Nov 24—I put the contract on the blog in the post Contract signed with publisher!).
Their publishing process has some archaic hand-done steps—like retyping the entire reference list by hand (or maybe OCR from a bad fax, given the awful typos), and it took about 15 rounds of proofs to remove most of the damage done to the book by the typesetters and copy editors, so the book has come out about a year later than originally scheduled.
The most surprising thing in the contract is that they are continuing to let me sell the PDF through LeanPub (and my own web site, if I ever create one). The royalties per book for Leanpub sales are about the same that I’ll get from World Scientific Publishing (at least at the recommended price), but the price from LeanPub is a lot lower (recommended $14.99, minimum $7.99). But hardback ($198) and paperback ($98) copies are now available from World Scientific Publishing (though at higher prices than originally quoted to me).
The LeanPub edition has my typesetting so the pagination is different, but the text is essentially the same (there may be some punctuation that I decided not to fight World Scientific about and there are minor differences in the title page, copyright page, and colophon). The book cover is completely different, as I did not get any rights to their cover design for my LeanPub edition.
Here I am with my author copies.
The printed book looks pretty good inside.
I don’t really need 10 copies of the book for myself (4 have arrived, the other 6 are coming via surface mail and should be here in about 3 months), so I need to figure out what to do with the 9 that I don’t need. Some thoughts I’ve had:
If my parent were still alive, I’d send them a signed copy, but sadly, I published much to late for them to see the result.
If anyone has any ideas about other useful things to do with books, let me know in the comments!
My royalties for my textbook have just exceeded $2,000 (though I won’t get some of them until August 1). Book sales started (with a very preliminary draft) in 2015, so the average royalties are only about $21.40 a month. The pay rate is probably a little less than $1/hour of work on the book, but I didn’t write the book to make money, and I was on sabbatical (paid by the university) for a lot of the writing time.
One thing that surprises (and pleases) me is that many of the people buying the book are paying the suggested price of $14.99 instead of the minimum price of $7.99. Given that the paperback version will be $88, the PDF prices are quite cheap. (Even $88 is a good price for an over-600-page college engineering textbook.)
These royalties are entirely from LeanPub (https://leanpub.com/applied_analog_electronics), where I am now selling the PDF of the book for $7.99 (which is the lowest non-zero amount LeanPub allows). The royalties from World Scientific Publishing won’t start until they get the book printed and sold—I just returned the fifth (or is it sixth?) round of proofs yesterday. They finally have someone competent working on it, and almost all the errors that were pointed out in the previous rounds were fixed (some had been pointed out in several previous rounds of proof-reading).
The only new material in this round was the index, which had a couple of systematic errors: 1) omitting all the “see” and “see also” cross-references and 2) changing all the index ranges marked in the .tex files to separate first-page and last-page marks. If they finally have someone competent working on the book, these problems should be fixed quickly.
I’ll release a new version of the LeanPub book (which my contract allows me to continue selling) when there are no more changes to be made to the World Scientific Publishing proofs. There are no major changes from the current version, but the proofreading process did uncover a few typos (though I had to undo many more errors introduced by the copy editors than corrections they made to my manuscript). I’ll continue my practice of paying 25¢ for the first report of any error in the LeanPub edition, but I don’t think that I can extend that to the World Scientific Publishing editions, as those are outside my control (and I let a couple of things slide in the proofreading, as being not worth correcting—places where reasonable people could disagree about the best punctuation, for example).
Gas station without pumps 