As I wrote and published a book based on my posts with Habr

Hello!
I have a small holiday today. My book “Business as a game” finally reached the shelves. Still warm.

From the posts that I've been writing here for about five years, the book has grown. Uprooting, with things that usually do not write about business. Inside - 140 small chapters per page - two about different aspects of the business, in fact - stories. It all started with habraposts - and gradually it became clear that they should be changed very much, plus writing a lot more about business and management.
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Below, I will tell you what I learned while I was publishing. For example, about the fact that you can not make money on the book, about the usual circulation, about the process and in general.

What you need to know about the market and pirates

The starting circulation of 2-3 thousand (well, if not a thousand), deductions - a few percent of the wholesale price of the publisher, and for actually sold books. Minus copyrights, minus promo, minus something else. Plus the mythical interest for translation into other languages. Total - from 20 to 60 thousand rubles, at best, after the tax. But, of course, it can be critical, but there are few such publications, therefore, we don’t consider them in Matmodel.

Therefore, the book is a hobby. Well, or PR, as in our particular case. Or the social role of business, but let's be honest - without PR, it will still be done only by completely separate individuals. The principle is this - we are changing the benefits (many benefits) to your deeper knowledge of the company.

Well, it's just awesome to finally write a book.

The electronic version of the book in Russia is always published. Sometimes it is just released by the publisher, and sometimes without notice to the copyright holder. Sales of electronic versions make up about 10% of the market as a whole, in the business literature and all self-development the share is greater.

That is, the coverage of the book to the pirates - 3-5 thousand after the first edition. Only Flibusta (when it was open) did an average of another 15-20 thousand downloads. And at the time of the appearance of the book on Flibust, the author experienced the most terrible batthyrt, because sales immediately fell on all fronts.

I have already rummaged a bit and I can say that pirates play a fuckingly useful role in the popularity of the book, but I can’t check it out yet. But for some reason it seems to me that I will soon be back with new data.

At the same time, the paper is not dead - with the domination of electronic devices in America, the renaissance of paper has now begun - there young people read non-fiction from ordinary media, because it is difficult to learn from the tablet. Do not run through the bookmarks, do not write in the margin.

Now another trick. No one knows exactly how paper is sold. Publishing marketing runs across the field with a rake in the dark - because they do not receive operational sales data, but see well if semi-annual reports. The only objective metric is its stores, but they are not always representative. Therefore, the role of ass-filling is great. And therefore, the first print runs are precisely small - if it is suddenly necessary, a prepress is launched. By the way, I ripped off the achivka - my prepress started even when the first print run did not come out of the printing house.

So let's do it again. The book can not be directly earned, and the average readability of it is much lower than that of the topic on Habré. And there is a big contradiction, about which I will talk about later separately. In the meantime, back to the publication.

What happened

140 of these are the main chapters divided into 4 parts: start of business, operational management, work of a physical store, marketing.

Examples:


<sup>The topic is clearly not for Habr, at least the old one


This is a rewritten and uzhaty 5 times post about negotiations , on the screen the first part, there is another chapter further. One of the few included "directly" in the end.</sup>

Wandering in the process

Three or four years ago I wrote to Uncle Mann from the publishing house “Myth”, they say, look, posts, 50-100 thousand readings, people are interested. Ooh, yes? Want a book about our fun retail?

Igor answered in two lines, they say, carry the manuscript here. But I didn't need that. I had to understand that our stories are interesting to readers. I asked the question again, hoping that he would draw a niche for me. Uncle Mann never answered again. I scratched my head and went to the site Alpina, where the process was painted right on the notes.

And it became clear that I was inadequate for publishers. They have the whole process sharpened by the fact that they bring a large amount of material (up to a dozen manuscripts per day), they look at it and say - take this one and this one, and throw out the rest. They can only form a market with translations, by and large.

At this point, we needed to update the Frenchbook - our own internal hyperbermegamanual, where we teach franchise partners to do business without sentiment. Everything is dry, as it is, right in the case. The finished edition is brick-thick and covers all aspects of doing business. In applications, all exact job descriptions, store layouts, calculations, sample documents, music subsystem switching schemes, even letters for refusal to candidates for different vacancies. In short, EVERYTHING.

The joke is that this book was divided, conditionally, into two parts - how to do the Mosigra and how to do business in general. For example, the choice of the room just need everyone. But how to distinguish a good game from a bad one by smell - only for us.

I singled out the part that is about business in general. It turned out something similar to habraposta, which you read for five years, but only very dry. In the form of a book, this is not a channel for sure. Here is an example:


^{Obviously not the case; this version of the book still lies at the stage of "Thinking ... 55% complete". Not enough lightness and drive.}

At the same time, one Petersburg publisher (well known to me from childhood on IT books by Bohumirsky) contacted and suggested publishing a book about the company's history. Ok, also set. I wrote a plan, tried to state chronologically - it turned out to be bullshit.

Judging by the reminders, 238 days have passed since I started working. 25 minutes a day I wrote something. But instead of the book posts were obtained.

At this moment a girl called Vera from the Myth called me and called me to visit. As it turned out, they wanted to discuss the options for selling books in our network, and I asked around what was selling. And I realized that I did everything wrong. And as it should.

And it all came together right away.

4 blitz weeks

As soon as there was a clear and understandable goal, everything went like clockwork.

The idea was very simple. When I first arrived in Moscow, I did not know how to do anything in terms of business and did not know anything necessary. He was such an exemplary IT person geek. I had to learn. I got something from Habr, something from blogs (I remember especially “How I Traded Meat” about an IT person who made meat), something suggested by older comrades.

Real knowledge passed on the top shelves of trains on the road. The most valuable things about making a decision are 5 minutes before important negotiations. Calculations of business plans - in the kitchen in our basement. Exchange of experience - when I went for different people and just did something with them. Trade - when he fumbled orders, stood in the store, traveled around the country and looked at who was doing what.

Conferences were not close in utility.

But for some reason they don’t write about such things in books.

As a result, we collected all the stories that taught us something, carefully listed our rakes and added mechanics that proved to be successful everywhere in the country.

It turned out 140 tales, each of which has a certain principle. These are not rules; There are no rules at all in business (especially in small and medium). This is our rake, which we ran.


^{One of the shortest chapters. Because everything is clear, why pull something? Not in America.}

Finish line

As soon as I got about half of the book, I took 8 chapters and sent them to the publisher. They responded immediately, which is very pleased - yes, they say, dude, write more. Agreed on a date, sent a complete manuscript. It was, it seems, in June. After 3 days they looked - they say we will publish.

It turns out that the process takes at least six months. The minimum is because I specifically signed December in the contract, otherwise I would have received the book in February, probably.

Another significant change in the contract - I left myself the right to place up to 50% of the texts of the book on the Internet and in our promotional materials. Which allows me to scatter them in this post (screenshots from the intermediate version, in the final they are a little different).

So far we have agreed, quite a lot of time has passed - they wrote it down in their own right, then I come to the meeting, but there is no lawyer, then something else. True, again, then went smoothly. Another feature of the contract is that it’s one-sided for the publisher, in terms of what “the author is obliged”, and “the publisher can”. For example, the cover and title - the publisher suggests three times, and if the author does not want it - everything, the author no longer decides. The publisher himself does. Editing - no more than a percentage of a book, etc. Apparently, they were lifted up by doubters. I carefully listed all these points and also threw them away.

The editing took place without incident, because there was nothing special to touch there, except that the order of the chapters changed, plus some facts were added.

Proofreading is a small, fierce hell. First, as it turned out, the proofreader does not like the word “horseradish”. I do not know why they got to the bottom of the poor plant. For example, the phrase “All contracts were in dollars. When the bucks jumped, the whole street got up and went to hell "turned into" When the dollar exchange rate changed, the whole street went to where it was not worth going. " Reality is rapidly leaking from the text. I have defended most of the edits, but if you see a turn that is too smooth somewhere, you know, this is despicable censorship. By the way, my footnote about the fact that this is a mean censor, they also cut out. The proofreader did not always understand the terms. So "molting" became "rulers", for example, and "economy" - "economy". In total, I read the book nine times exactly, so that I learned it by heart. And still, finally, I missed the joint. In the calculation of the business plan, in one of the chapters, a zero was missed as a result, which created an error by an order of magnitude (it was already corrected in the reprint). And yet, in spite of the chapter on Russian, where there is about "brands lean," and my deep conviction that Samsung is Samsung, and not Samsung, the corrector with the inhuman perseverance of the rule, everything into intolerable official business. And as the child explained that this is an internal standard. At the same time in the chapter itself brands in Russian. Oooke. On the other hand, when I clarified on about a dozen edits, why this is so, I immediately received an exhaustive professional answer with references to the rules of the language and in general all proofs. Very convincing and professional.

At about this moment an announcement appeared on their website. The quotes were in the best traditions of epigraphs to fiction. I had to change. Fortunately, they go along in such trifles. A nice bonus - managed to push without a corrector.


^{Another nice achivka}

Layout is generally normal, but there are three problems. The first is very clumsy hyphenation. By the way, I didn’t understand at all what to do when turning it off to the left. The second one is the indent of the first line of the paragraph (right along Chicheld), but without taking into account the dialogues. It looked weird in the prefinal. They did not want to edit, long and expensive. Moreover, the issue price for transfers is a few dollars for the vocabulary module of transfers to Indizayn. Two or three absolutely terrible cases were corrected, the rest remained. The third - on the race deleted quite a lot of breakdowns between paragraphs, which made the text a little messy.


^{Pay attention to the layout of the dialogue. And, yes, and they also cut out all "e."}

By choice of the name and selection of the cover - I insisted on the red cover, but the name wanted a different one. Plus I really wanted to put the logo on the book - they will recognize not some abstract dudes with incomprehensible surnames, but Mosigra. It turned out that to bring the logo, you have to pay for the circulation with the myth.



In general, the process went very quickly, because everyone understood that the terms were on fire. I remember the first two times I read the book in Greenland, where it was about 700-800 rubles to just check the mail. Our boat mercilessly rocked, the laptop went around the table in the cabin-campaign (it still has such rounded sides so that the dishes would not roll down - they are damn comfortable), and I made the edits.

Their impressions of management are very positive. We obviously communicate with the authors of our games not so quickly. Vera answered even at night, which was especially cool given the difference in time zones. In general, at Myth, as I understand it, only the core of the business is sitting in the office, and all the others work according to the 37signals model - hence the flexibility.

Total

Physical performance is very cool. Of the approximately 140 thousand characters, a book is obtained in the size of an average NF-edition with a hard cover and braid-bookmark.



Knowing the Myth editions, I was afraid that a quarter of the book would be filled with advertising at the end, but now they don’t do that - literally 3 pages about what kind of publishing house. Also from the useful one, we were given to edit the list “recommend this book”, which made it possible to answer for the market even in this (usually the author is not allowed to touch this, as I understand it). In general, I am pleased as an elephant.


^{Table of contents took as many as 6 pages}

The book is here, already in our stores . More precisely, right now only in the online store, but within a day will go to Moscow. UPD: it already reached a couple of shops in order to immediately end. It seems, it is habraeffekt. Operators know where there are books in fact (they came, but they were not credited), so please call. UPD: they have fixed the availability in Moscow stores, everything is already OK.

We brought it to us directly from the printing house, so it will arrive later in Ozon, Chitai-town and other stores. In Moscow by the beginning of the next week, but, most likely - after the holidays. Prices in other stores will be the same (plus or minus 50 rubles and another surcharge for shipping to other regions). Immediately I say - even with the registration of the already running prepress, the circulation of the paper is small.

On the same page of the book there is a little more text (and links to the texts of the chapters, which are attached here with pictures). And there is also a full table of contents. Traditional habraskidka .

Everything.

And, friends, thank you all for supporting me, writing after the posts about the fact that it’s cool and should be published. And generally helped.

UPD : there is an electronic version