Knowing .NET

Once upon a time, I wrote a book about C#. More accurately, I talked to a friend who had written a Java book that I thought was proven to be a good way to teach that language and I said “Hey, can I license the content of your book and port it to C#, which, since you hate Microsoft, you have no interest in?” And he said yes and, nine months later, I had this 1,100-page book on the verge of being published. Now, my friend had, in the days when publishers really had no idea of what the Internet was, secured the electronic distribution rights to his work and, as a matter of fact, he gave away his Java book for free. His publisher was eager to publish the C# book and, lo and behold, my contract ended up with the same electronic rights. So I said to him “I know that having given it away for free for years, you’ve said you can’t do this, but I’m thinking of charging $5 for the download via PayPal. Waddya’ think?” And he said “Yeah, sounds like a good experiment.”

So I wrote a little thing that hooked up to PayPal and when the postback happened, sent out the obfuscated but totally un-encrypted URI of a PDF version of the book (complete with trim marks for the printer, etc.). Oh, and just for fun, I hooked it up so that every time I sold a book, a little “ka-ching” wav file would play. And for a couple of days I hung out in the NetNews C# group and answered a bunch of questions and ended all my posts with “If you found this helpful, you might be interested in…” and linked them to the $5 download.

Well, let me tell ya’, it’s a really good feeling to be watching TV and to be bothered because every minute or so you make $5. And, within a week, it was being traded on the filesharing networks because, despite what utopians say, it’s not really about affordability or the “cut” that the media companies take. Someone paid $5 for an 1,100-page book and then turned around and said “Yeah, I’ll put this up for sharing.” But y’know, what can you do? I was certainly making enough off the PayPal to consider the experiment a roaring success.

Now comes the sad part. Very shortly after the money started rolling in, I made the incredibly foolish mistake of mentioning my system on a mailing list that was read, not only by computer book authors, but by computer book publishers. Including my own publisher, who was in the process of finalizing the cover design and getting everything nice and tidy for the print run.

Well, let me tell ya’, it’s a really bad feeling when your own publisher feels thwarted. You see, as far as giving away for free the Java book, the accountants at the publisher couldn’t quantify their losses (dividing by zero, the lack of download statistics, etc.). By charging $5 for the download, all of a sudden their spreadsheets became unstuck and all of a sudden they weren’t being nearly as nice to me as they had been the previous week. One of the things that they said was “Sign over the electronic rights to us or we won’t publish the book.” And I said “Why would I do that? My per-unit profit on electronic sales is greater than the royalty” (For a $50 cover price! Don’t get me started). And they said “Poof! You don’t have the right to publish any version of your book. It is derived from our property and you cannot create a derivative work.” And I said “Hah! I’ll change the title and any text that directly quotes the Java book!”

And they said… And here’s a point of copyright law for all you kids out there … “The majority of your 400 sample programs are structured the same as the Java samples. You can’t use the structure without infringing.” At which point, I started paying a lawyer $300 to do my speaking for me. I would have been much better served to just bend over and grab my ankles.

The worst part of it is that if I hadn’t immediately complied with their first informal request to cease selling the electronic version (back when I was under the impression we were all on the same side and just needed to work out this kink), I probably would have made enough money in a couple weeks to at least pay the lawyer’s bills.

I swore that if I were going to write another book for no monetary gain, it sure as heck wasn’t going to be a programming book, it would be a novel, thank you very much.

So, this year, I wrote a novel. Well, a really bad first draft. But still.

And no, I’m not selling it online. Who in their right mind would buy a novel online?

I just posted my three final invoices for 2005, my first full year of living in Hawai’i. The good news is that I beat my budget targets by 16%. The bad news is that, because of the move, I reduced those targets by 15%! The other bad news is that the cost of living in Hawai’i is higher even than in the Bay Area, so when I calculate our budget for next year, I’m going to have to ratchet up my income targets, which means either charging my clients more or taking on more work. Sigh. The other good news, though, is that it does seem possible to live on a tropical island and make a living wage as a programmer and writer.

I’ve long felt that it is impossible to get rich if the only thing you sell is your own time, and although we’re doing okay, our lifestyle is quite modest (I drive a ’92 Honda Civic that we bought new and which just passed 100,000 miles). I make the large majority of our money — Tina works part-time in a plant nursery and hasn’t sold any paintings this year. I’m not particularly interested in “advancing” in my career. I’ve done lots of stuff and, like Nora Desmond, I feel I am big, it’s the pictures that got small. (Microsoft and Mozilla agreed on an RSS icon ? I take back everything!)

I can’t justify charging people $200 an hour. More truthfully, I can’t justify it to myself. I know a few people who charge $200 or more an hour and the thing is: if you just do it, you can do it. You have to travel a lot, though, and you probably shouldn’t put pictures of yourself wearing a t-shirt on your blog and you certainly don’t tell people you drive a ’92 Honda Civic. I used to think that when I taught, for which I generally charged $2,500 to $3,000 a day, I made good money, but the problem is that you have to amortize your development and practice time, which, for me, is about a 20:1 ratio. For me the worst thing is that I have a strong novelty-seeking personality and I cannot stand to give the same lecture more than four or five times. Including practice run-throughs. Which means that, essentially, I’ve never amortized the cost of developing a talk. Not even close.

I think to make more than a living wage, you have to sell a product.