The Geek Atlas
The history of science is all around us, if you know where to look. With this unique traveler's guide, you'll learn about 128 destinations around the world where discoveries in science, mathematics, or technology occurred or is happening now. Travel to Munich to see the world's largest science museum, watch Foucault's pendulum swinging in Paris, ponder a descendant of Newton's apple tree at Trinity College, Cambridge, and more. Each site in The Geek Atlas focuses on discoveries or inventions, and includes information about the people and the science behind them. Full of interesting photos and illustrations, the book is organized geographically by country (by state within the U.S.), complete with latitudes and longitudes for GPS devices. - Publisher.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
40mentions
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2008–2024years
25% recommend75% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- That you can write well outside of blogs is evident from your posts. You obviously put in a lot of time sweating how to write before you joined Cloudflare, and that makes your blog posts a joy to read.
The Geek Atlas is one of my favorite books by anybody, BTW.
- You might be interesting in "The Geek Atlas" by JGC
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Geek-Atlas-Places-Science-Technolog...
- My book is three years old now, but it's still relevant. The Geek Atlas: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596523213.do
- You might like to read my book, The Geek Atlas, which contains many places related to the history of computing.
- It's not exactly what you outline, but The Geek Atlas by John Graham-Cumming lists many places that would fit the description "hacker tourism." It's a travel guide... but it's published by O'Reilly!
- I just did a lot of looking into this. First, yes, you nailed it - if you publish with a publisher, you do it because they're going to help you with distribution, presentation, and get you wider reach and impact. It's good for art and exposure, but not as good for getting cash, especially if you already know how to promote or have a significant fanbase.
With that said, a couple of things for anyone thinking of getting into this.
1. You really want your royalties to be based on "suggested retail list price" if possible. That means you get the same amount no matter what price people sell it at. Here's a link that explains more:
http://www.ivanhoffman.com/royalties.html
> The significant question to ask is: "Upon what figure is the percentage royalty rate to be calculated?" In other words, by what number do we multiply the royalty rate? Examples range from "net monies received by Publisher," "gross cash receipts," "the suggested retail list price," "wholesale price," and perhaps other variations on that theme.
You're on net, which kind of sucks, because the publishing house and your incentives don't always line up. Generally speaking, publishers want to maximize their profit across the catalog, and might be happy to "price your work to move" - I won't get into complicated maths about demand elasticity, but publishers sometimes prefer to sell lots of books at lower prices, even if an individual author would make more at higher prices. If you're on suggested retail price royalties, this is a non-issue and your incentives don't really clash at all. In fact, then it's a big win for you if the mark the book down to sell more copies, which they still likely will as it's the current model of the publishing industry.
2. I looked into self-publishing, and you can pick up a 60% royalty rate from Amazon Createspace, but your production quality is going to suck, you're going to need to eat a lot of upfront fees, thus you're taking on a lot of risk, and you're going to have make your own connections with distributors and bookstores and things like that (and you'll be approaching them from a position of lower credibility - they're still quite wary of self-published books).
I was going to self publish, but then realizing what Amazon wanted it's kind of ugly. They want an exactly formatted pdf of what your book would look like, and then the production quality is very so-so. And IMO, Amazon Createspace is the best self publishing route because of its tight integration with Amazon. If you go with a different self publishing company, you're looking at even more hassle trying to make distribution work correctly.
Geek Atlas looks good - congrats on that. I'll pick up a copy next time I'm settled down and not on the road. Congrats on that, it's a cool project and piece of art that I respect, notwithstanding our internet scuffling.
