Show Networks & Control Systems Book Price Cut And New Supplier
After nine years distributing my self published books on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), and generating what I estimate to be over $200K in gross sales for them, I have now moved my “classic” book, Show Networks and Control Systems off of KDP completely. Starting this month, the print edition of Show Networks and Control Systems book joins my new 2020 book, Introduction to Show Networking at your favorite book seller via IngramSpark at a new, lower price. The print book will still be available through Amazon, but you now have many purchasing options and can instead support a more ethical operation if you like. The EBook of the Show Networks and Control Systems book is no longer an Kindle and is now available as a PDF to read on any device you like. Purchasing details for both old and new books here.
The print quality on IngramSpark looks great:
The Future
The first edition of my book Control Systems for Live Entertainment was published in 1994 (you can now download a free PDF scan of that version here), and then evolved over 23 years, through five editions and a title change to the latest update, published in 2017. This Show Networks and Control Systems book is still quite relevant and mostly up to date, but contains a lot of information that many entertainment technicians no longer need, since networking is the future for entertainment control, show control, and media distribution. So I believe that my new, cheaper 2020 Introduction to Show Networking book better addresses the core of the market, and that is the primary book I’m recommending at this point and into the future. With the market maturing and coalescing around Ethernet (part of a larger process I’ve written a lot about here), there is a decreasing need for a massive, comprehensive, low-level book. So my plans at this point are that this 2021, V2.1 update to Show Networks and Control Systems will be the last. For those interested in the specialty of show control and low-level control connection details, the Show Networks and Control Systems book will remain available. My plans are to eventually extract out the show control information from the big book and publish that into a smaller book focused just on show control. I don’t have a timeline for that, but once I get that done, I’ll likely retire the big Show Networks and Control Systems book, after a more than 25 year run.
If You’re Interested In The Details: Why Move Off Amazon KDP?
If you’re interested in self publishing, you can read the epic saga here. But here’s the short version:
This summer, in preparation for my new book (Introduction to Show Networking) I wanted to update my classic Show Networks and Control Systems, removing obsolete “master and slave” language (details here).
I took the same exact production files from my 2017 update, added one paragraph and made a handful of edits. I used the same export process to create a print-ready PDF for Amazon. They rejected it with some vague problems with vector graphics. (This exact same file was later accepted with no problem by Ingram and it prints great).
For weeks I went back and forth with their offshored tech support, who were nice but helpless. I got escalated to the top tier of support and they couldn’t help.
What I didn’t realize was that once I submit a new file, KDP DELETES the old file. So now, I was stuck with a rejected print file, and no way to even go back to the file they have printed since 2017. This meant I could not change anything for the book. Not the price, a description, nothing. I couldn’t even turn off KDP’s “Expanded Distribution” so that I could move the ISBN-which I own—elsewhere. And—shockingly—KDP’s tech support couldn’t even override any of these things. I mean the distribution is a single entry in a database, but KDP was unwilling or unable to even go in and fix that. So KDP was (still is) holding my ISBN—which I own—hostage.
In frustration, I left the situation as is, and moved on to write and publish the new Introduction to Show Networking via Ingram. Now that that new book is out, and I’ve learned the ins and out of IngramSpark (which is far, far superior to KDP), I have now gone back to this KDP situation to finally resolve it—by leaving KDP altogether and publishing with a new ISBN.
I used to think that Amazon was an innovative company, and I even bought some stock years ago. But—in addition to their other abhorrent behavior in recent years—they destroyed a technological solution which had enabled me to self publish my own work and make a decent wage; and in the process they left me hanging. I sold my Amazon stock this summer, and am happy to fully extricate myself from KDP today.