The Game Engine Black Book: Doom

All of the comments so far are about the author’s cut. This is the second book he’s written, with the same situation. Clearly it’s worth it to him. You should just consider it a hobby project, and he’s giving readers the option to get a full color print copy of the book.

The first book, Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D is fantastic. This goes back to an era where one person can read the source code for a game and understand what it actually is doing at the hardware level. It would be fantastic for an entry level computer science class or someone who just wants to understand how a game engine works. The exhaustive color illustrations and images, the reason why the author makes no money, make is so much easier to grasp the concepts. If you are an experienced developer or someone who can understand complex topics just by reading text and formulas, the this isn’t such a big deal.

Can’t wait to read this new book.

Being transparent about pricing is working against you. If I want to pay $54 for a book and I know only $0.77 are going to you, I'm simply not going to buy it.

The production costs might be reasonable, but $20+ to Amazon just for existing? Fuck that. I mean I use Amazon when I know their margins are razor thin (for most things they are), but in this case, big nope here.

EDIT 2: I sent a direct email to the author asking if he could place a direct buy link on the page, or if I could directly send him some money for the book.

I’m extremely confused and curious as to why on Earth the author simply didn’t place a PDF on their site with a PayPal (or less evil alternative) button on his site.

I personally absolutely refuse to purchase it knowing that Amazon is taking all of the Author’s money.

I actually think it’s detrimental to display that data - as it seems it’s not just myself that seems less likely to purchase based off that data.

Instead of many of the comments here being about the staggering loss the authour is taking by not following this simple route, at $10-20 a PDF we could all be discussing the contents of the book, instead.

Hopefully the author sees this and can make some sensible decisions for themselves - from what I hear their last book was fantastic.

EDIT: To the author: if I see a direct buy link on your page I will buy two copies within the day, as it seems that even $5-10 profit off two sales at $10-20 would provide you as much as up to 15 sales. I’m in the music business. I get slim royalties and I get how much effort we put into art.

The reality is even worse than what this graph suggests. From the $1.59 royalty only $0.77 stay with the author (the rest is tax), but the $0.77 are barely any profit if you account for the cost of human labour that went into writing this book in the first place. Depending on how many copies he'll sell through Amazon I think it's likely that the time spent on writing this book could have earned him more by cleaning the floor at McDonalds, which is a really sad state of affairs.

Why doesn't the author just put up the PDF for sale on this site? I'd pay ~$20 with Paypal right now for the PDF, straight to the author.

Similar story: "My Amazon bestseller made me nothing"

https://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/hey_amazon_wheres_my_money/

Authors make little or nothing, but Bezos keeps getting richer :)

I'm quite sure it's a great book. But like I'm really impressed for the first thing this book has taught me and it's not about games... It's just unbelievable how much money Amazon makes selling books!

I don't know where he is getting his pricing. I can do an 8.5x11 400 page color perfect bound for a print cost of $16.31. Using a list of $30 and Amazon/B&N (ie, online retailer) distribution wholesale discount of 30% gives author $4.69 per copy.

(I have no idea what size author intends, if he has it in 6x9 trade size cost is even lower)

wait, how can the distributor take 40% and production 57%?

why isn't there a competitor that takes a lower percentage? say 10% for both.

are the economics of book selling so atrocious for the authors in general? how can one accept .77ct profit on $54 of sale?

it's probably just me not being accustomed to the book selling ripoff, but still feels like a monumental, epic-level ripoff.

I am baffled at the amount how much the author makes from each book. 31$ production costs seem high but since it's 427 full-colored pages it seems reasonable. However, how come Amazon takes 22$ dollars on top of that? There is no way it's that expensive to distribute the book, there must be some other services involved?

Although the pricing seems weird, the pie chart shown on the page is even more so. How it's possible that Amazon is most of the pie with 40% percentage?

> The result is $1.59 royalty and $0.77 profit per book sold.

That's brutal. I mean I get it that production and distribution is costly (books are heavy), but only taking a 77 cent profit on one year of work seems insane.

What does the breakdown usually look like for e-books?

(Changing the subject away from the cut)

I applaud Fabiens' work. I have been following since his blog days on the source code analysis of games and I'm so happy he's writing books on the matter. I will fully support him going forward.

However, the first edition of the Wolfenstein Black Book left me a bit miffed. It had many grammatical errors and even some layout awkwardness that would not pass an editor's review. I understand the reasons: English is not his first language, this was a work of passion, etc. But it still mars the experience. I assume the second edition fixed those; I wish I had waited.

I've been eagerly waiting for his book on Doom. But I recommend waiting for the second edition, once he had time to take the readers' feedback into account.

What do you guys think of a kickstarter for his next book?

He sets a funding goal that achieves profit for him and then people can pledge $10 for an e-book, $25 for b&w or $50 for color.

This way he gets to hold onto the intellectual property until he has cleared his goal and make the prints of the books a limited time offer which could drive up their demand.

Wow, not a single comment about contents or quality of the book.

You can upload it to peecho.com, according to their website printing and shipping would be about 50USD in full color. So setting the same 55USD as Amazon would give you a 5USD profit (instead of the 77cents).

Very happy to see this published. I bought the book on Wolfenstein 3D and read every single word of it even though I don't much care for Wolf3D - the book is inherently interesting.

I immediately ordered the physical version. It's a pity that the profit is so incredibly low. I'd consider just selling it for $69 or $99 or whatever. I'm not sure it would make such a difference in term of sales - the people who can read this book are in a very nice industry after all. The PDF can be sold at a much higher margin for accessibility for those who really can't pay for the physical book.

I wonder how much Google Books takes compared to Amazon and if Fabien considered other publishing platforms, with less egregious profit cuts.

If you're outraged at the author's cut, then i have some bad news for you, you'll need to stop buying food and clothes.

Damn shame the author only gets 77 cents per copy. No wonder Amazon started as a book seller.

Apparently the Amazon low margin strategy doesn't count for their book sales... that is absolutely brutal! Wouldn't it make more sense for the author to sell the book directly on his website as well?

Publish the screenshots & drawings as a separate book in color. Sell it as an optional bundle for those who want it in published form. For those who don't care, Publish the book in black and white, with a QR code to open links to a web page with the screenshot & drawings. There's no way in hell I'm going to put in all that effort to earn 77cents :-( when other's are profiting much more. I'll rather give away the book for free. I can't believe in 2018 folks are still getting gouged to publish.

Could be nice to have a list of chapters.

Is this book relevant in the current scenario of game development tools?

Just curious.

Amazing how many people think they know better than the author on print and distribution- like a guy who spends years researching and writing a work like this is some sort of rube taken by the first huckster he runs across. There are several well known options in POD, he went with Amazon, maybe he knows something we don't.

$0.77 from $54 for the author is a disaster.

It's a niche book, why not sell it for $60? That's 10% more for the buyer, and 380% more for the author.

The optimal price might even be higher than that if you're looking to maximize author profit.

It seems that book authors make almost no money across the world in this era (especially they put a lot of efforts into writing a book), I feel pathetic

Is this a historical piece or is there enough detail on how you would recreate your own version of Doom? If not, is there anything like the latter?

Wierd, I can get the ebook from google play books but not for the kindle. Amazon is only selling the paper book.

I don't understand the point of selling a DRM free eBook. It's going to be pirated, wouldn't it? What could be some reasons behind him doing so?

Im confused how to buy it.

If it just was a link with PayPal or credit card I would have already bought it.

Instead I get linked to crap sites Amazon and Google