Speaking as another O'Reilly author, I'd agree with this and add that for tech books the publisher is even less necessary. If you've written papers with Latex/MD/asciidoc, and drawn figures and tables, you're already doing most of what you'd do with your publisher's toolchain anyway. Hook up with Amazon's on-demand publishing service and (except for the nice cover) you've got it almost end-to-end.
[I assume you can write and organize thoughts decently well, and have some people who can proofread for you. If not, a publisher really won't help too much with that anyway.]
So what does a publisher provide? Marketing, promotion, distribution, reputation. No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will. They can arrange promotions through conferences and email distribution that you probably can't. I wouldn't underestimate this, but I also wouldn't necessarily think it's worth their 80%-90% cut either.
No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will.
Perhaps, but as they say, credibility doesn't pay the rent. What matters in commercial terms of how much money the book ends up putting in your pocket.
If a publisher is keeping 90% of the revenue, the services they offer had better generate at least an order of magnitude more sales to break even, less anything it would have cost you to obtain any other relevant services they provided directly instead. Does anyone here believe that this is in fact the case with the level of marketing that a typical tech publisher will do for a new work from a previously unknown author?
For a lot of the authors of technical books, credibility is the whole point.
The goal is not to write a book that directly makes money. The goal is to write a book that gets the author hired or promoted, or to land consulting gigs, or to get VC backing.
I have heard authors making as little as $500 and very rarely someone making more than $5000 from technical/programming books (outside of top 1% books). Given you easily put 500 hours of work in a book, the best possible outcome for vast majority of authors is literally minimum wage payment. Most authors are competent enough to make 5X more on their regular jobs so they are certainly not writing book for money.
[I assume you can write and organize thoughts decently well, and have some people who can proofread for you. If not, a publisher really won't help too much with that anyway.]
So what does a publisher provide? Marketing, promotion, distribution, reputation. No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will. They can arrange promotions through conferences and email distribution that you probably can't. I wouldn't underestimate this, but I also wouldn't necessarily think it's worth their 80%-90% cut either.