There were a few publishing startups that only published electronically and let the author keep 60% of the title's price. I can't find them anymore so perhaps the experiment failed.
At Leanpub, authors keep 80% of the title's price. We've paid over $7.5M in royalties to authors, and we're alive and well :)
Write in Markdown, click a button, get a book (PDF, EPUB, MOBI). Click a different button and your book is for sale with an attractive landing page, etc. You can even create a MOOC with one click, again based on Markdown...
Do you also provide services for proof-reading, cover design, marketing (or connect people with these expertise online)? It would be great to have community of people offering services to book writers for money or royalty.
A big problem is that even 100% cut doesn't amount to much if you are writing technical/programming related books. So this should probably not be the biggest decision factor. The advantage of not going with publisher, however, are MANY:
- You can open source the book. This can help you gain much more audience and career recognition.
- You are not bound by having to fit in to publisher's specific series, its style of writing
- You can chose your own title. Most publishers in technical books arena will force you to have title that is consistent with their series.
- You do things in your own time without pressure, may be even open sourcing book from day 1
- You are not bound by page limit. Most publishers would force you to have 250-400 pages, no matter what. My personal philosophy is that the most useful books are the shortest and personally I would prefer to write books that are as little as just 50 pages.
Interesting idea. FYI, the layout of your home page breaks if your browser default font size isn't 16px, leaving most of the important text unreadable.
I'm using leanpub [1] and gumroad [2] and very happy with both (get to keep 80% or more) - there are small differences between them, and I feel putting your book on both these sites will cover most of the needs for the user
