Author of the Books in the field of Library and Information Science and the Revenue they Generated: A Proposed Study

[Dr. Badan Barman]

As an author, in terms of revenue generation I treat myself as a very successful person. However, I came across with some authors who are paying a huge amount of money to publish their own book. It makes me interested to study about the revenue generated by the authors in the field of Library and Information Science and its trend. In this connection, I seek the guidance of all my professional colleagues so that we can share the best practices to make the field fertile for all of us. If you have anything to say in this connection, you are requested kindly to share your thought. Later on, within this week itself, I will prepare a questionnaire and will distribute to all the authors for necessary analysis.

[Ramreek Kumar Pandey]

Their are a lot of publishers available on net who make money. They published articles for money. Very bad.

[Siddhartha Shankar Ray]

Dear Dr. Barman
Here I am attaching my comments. Actually I tried to post it straightway but owing to slow internet speed, I could not send it.

Thanks Dr. Barman for your post and the proposal to suggest for "Best Practices" for writing a book. Incidentally, writing a book & publishing it is a phenomena which include & involve

(a)Intellectual discourse, (b) compelling necessity and (c) peer appreciation.

Needless to say that the first type enjoys supremacy among the three as they are mostly written by stalwarts in the concerned subjects and often they attain huge popularity among students and scholars. Some of these books are however, sort of more "Market-Driven"  (like those with proverbial Sure Success in...." ) as such, they are always in demand. 

The second type is "purposive". Like in the UGC APC Scoring system, authorship of books brings higher points and people, irrespective of their abilities, go for publishing books. A section of this includes publishing Ph.D Theses as books; of course a section of these books are really of high quality but mostly they are not. During my tenure in an ICSSR institute I came across streams of such books. Since ICSSR provides funds to publish books (in the field of Social Sciences) people often utilize this facility. Customarily, we used to receive those books from ICSSR free of cost and as I observed, a significant number of those books were NEVER consulted by the readers!!  They also includes popular Textbooks; however, "Text Books" are not always cheap in nature. For example, In our days, Prof. B. Guha 's Book Documentation & Information, Services, Techniques & Systems  was virtually unputdownable for LIS courses and as such, it had a huge market success. But I am absolutely confident that both academically and professionally, the book is of immense value.                                                                                                                                             

Third type is to establish a 'POZISON" among peers and followers/students. Often they are kept in the most visible space in the drawing rooms or office chambers; some times they bear coloured page markers supposedly to attract viewers' attention- simply to impress them!! 

[On a different note, I would like to add here a true fact which I heard from one of my M.Lib. Sc. Class mates (senior to me in age and service for around a decade) which seems funny but has  somewhat relevance in this context. During 1960's there was an Indo-US Agreement named PL480 which offered Indian Scientists to visit USA and "Many Tie, Coat with Chappal clad Scientists used to flaunt when I HAS BEEN TO USA... after every four five sentences..."

Incidentally they were sent abroad according to seniority on the basis of Govt. rules irrespective of their efficiencies.

Anyway, coming to the context, The indicator you have used can be quite useful to understand the usability of a book albeit from marketing point of view but if your questionnaire includes (1) types of books like those for Competitive Exams or Text Books and (2) their impact in understanding of the theories.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta,  

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Sir,

O God! More than happy to have your feedback on this. Actually, I was waiting for it for last three days. Now I got it. Thanks a ton Sir.

Regarding your "Thanks Dr. Barman for your post and the proposal to suggest for "Best Practices" for writing a book", I just want to point out that I am not going to suggest best practices for writing a book as I treat myself as very inferior in this regard. What I am going to share is the practices (it may be the best!) to market a book and ways to monetize it.