Ken's book venture has inspired me to think of writing a book of my own. It would be a book of tutorials to teach A:M, a bit like TAoA:M, but with a Sci-Fi theme thru-out and emphasizing core concepts that I think need more emphasis.

I'd try to make each one a fun-to-do-and-show project in itself. The book might start out with lathing a simple flying saucer and making it fly over your house, and maybe work up to modeling, texturing and rigging a dinosaur. And each project would try to impart some bit of general animation know-how.

And I'd make a trailer showing what some of the projects are.

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The publish-on-demand biz is developed enough now to make this possible, but I'm wondering how microscopic the sales would be none-the-less.

well...would already like to know how to do the streaky star effect

I might buy it

A poll might give you a rough number of possible initial sales.

I'd buy one. Would the autograph be extra?

Count me in. I would buy it!

Steve

I'm good for at least one copy...
Knowing how thorough you are with your tutorials most like a few more.

If the book covers the basics all the better as I'm always looking to share books with younger folks just getting started in animation.

Not sure if the sales will make it worth your time but by focusing on the principles of animation applied to A:M it'd be accessible for a long time to come.

For what its worth Sci Fi would make a great theme.
Keep it simple yet focused and you might sell multiple volumes with other themes.

My vote would be for a CD/DVD of video tutorials. Of course, an e-book included on the disc would be cool as well. Using something like lulu.com would make it possible. Even with a printed book, a disc of examples/models/etc would be a benefit.

I would have one ,either way

Depending on cost, I would most likely get one as well.

Al

Having owned a publishing business for 10 years that sent me to the poor house..I can speak a little bit to the cash flow issue. Here are some of my thoughts:

1) your costs could be near zero if you did it as a download (the folks at the IRS don't consider your time as a deductible expense)
2) in spite all of the ayes you might get on a first blush poll of the forum, you should approach this with a worst case count. So if 40 forum members say they'd buy a copy, figure at best that would translate into at best a 12 percent buy rate when all is said and done.
3) When considering a business venture always view it as a money making venture (so don't consider making it cheap for forum members out of the goodness of your heart)
4) When you figure the time you would put into it, how much would you have to charge to make it worth your while? A good formula is if you could earn x $'s per hour doing your normal work, at least double it. If you can make $25 / hour doing other work, your cost is $50/hour. If it takes you 100 hours to produce a dvd is $5000. If you plan on say 100 sales break even is now 50 units. Remember when you work for yourself you are responsible for all income taxes, or roughly 30 percent, plus social security and medicaid, and it becomes painful at years end paying that out.

These are general thoughts, not meant to discourage, but as a reality check. If you feel comfortable with the idea of going for broke, then most certainly do it. But I'd take a look at the sales volume of A:M first, specifically how many NEW sales are made each year, since that would seem to be your best target market.

Believe me when I say I am the consummate entrepreneur, having started and sold two business, started and got seriously hurt financially with the publishing company. Largely because I had stars in my eyes, and didn't know when to say enough is enough and quit. Lessons learned there, and I do my best to pass those lessons on to anyone who cares to listen.

btw, if you do these tuts, one thing I always find helpful when learning now things is a cause and effect demonstration, something that lacks in many demonstrations. In other words it is helpful to explain WHY things are done a particular way. Show the wrong way, what happens, then the right way, and the difference.

I'm currently in a bad way financially, but when that improves, I'd buy one.

I think Paul's advice is sound. My approach would be that if you enjoy doing it and then at the end there's the potential of making a little bit of scratch from it, then go for it. If you're doing it for the money, I don't think the money will justify the amount of time and effort.

I ran into a similar thing recently. In my sig, there's a link to one of the websites that provides clip art/photos. I looked at it as a way to make use of some old illustrations of mine that were never bought by clients and were just collecting dust. I even thought I'd do some new illustrations to try to earn some extra dough. Unfortunately, the site pays you 25¢ per download. It's hardly worth the time to do a new illustration that in the end I might never get a penny out of. However, a friend of mine did hundreds of illustrations for his own clip-art CDs in the 90s and this is a way for him to get some dough out of stuff that wasn't generating any money anymore. At one point, he still railed against the small compensation and wanted to set up a website to sell his art himself. I told him it was foolish to do so, because it would cost him a fortune to buy enough advertising to generate sales.

POD does remove a lot of production and distribution costs, but the thing it doesn't remove is advertising and awareness. Getting the word out is extremely difficult and expensive. And A:M is already a very niche market. Plus, for the most part, the only people perusing the POD stores are people who are selling stuff their themselves.

It sounds like you might have fun doing them, so that could be your reward and the minor sales just icing on the cake.

Here's an idea: do some of the chapters here on the forums for free. Then when it's all done, offer it for sale. Appreciative people will purchase one and there's the added plus that you get additional tutorials that weren't available for free.

I might get it if it was something that went into more extra topics, FX and things. The Dave Rogers book and TAOAM covers the basics of modeling and basic texturing and whatnot, but they don't really touch on special render things, radiosity, fluids (course fluids wasn't around when Dave wrote the book) AO and then go into more challenging topics, photorealism techniques, movement etc. I dunno, just suggestions

The print on demand companies I've looked into recently all seem to still take an overly healthy chunk of change out of the bottom line of any given print run. I've shied away from doing small press publishing/print on demand for this reason alone.

I still plan to print a few books to test the waters and the sites I looked into (mostly for comics) should satisfy my curiosity enough by printing a few copies of collections of doodles and such for my own pleasure. After retiring from the military I plan to do a little freelance work and try to pick up where I left off twenty years ago. I may try to give a few comics/books away as over-sized business cards.

The competition in the freelance market sure is a lot thicker than it was twenty years ago!

Like I said, I'm here to give as much free advice as you, and anybody else in this forum may want...I've plied these waters for a long time! And it has taken a lot less than 20 years to compress the freelance markets!

Thanks Paul! (Don't want to stray from Robert's topic but I'll be looking for all the advice I can get.)

The main reason I would purchase one of Robert's books is that there are too few really informative books on the subject of animation.
Robert is an animators animator... he thinks like a hand drawn traditional animator.
But he knows how to apply what he learns to the computer (in A:M even!).
We need more of that stuff!

Thanks for your comments.

On price I was thinking $19.99 , but then a person still has to pay $4 shipping, so i thought why not make it $25 and then it gets free shipping on Amazon, and I get five more bucks.

$25 for 12 projects? 20 projects? 25 projects? I wonder what the value expectations are for the buyer?


Videos would certainly be easier for me to author, but it seems like they would be too easy to pirate vs a book?


Here's some of the Project titles I was thinking of...


Flying saucer (Introduction to basic modeling by lathing)

Your House vs. the Flying Saucer (Rotoscopes and front projection)

When Worlds Bounce (Bouncing ball because it's something everyone should know)

Do the Robot (Model and rigging a simple biped)

Robot! Walk! (The walk cycle)

model alien hand (Learning to do complex topologies)

Dinosaur (further organic modeling)

Dino-hyde (a further look at materials)

The Jump to Hyper-Space (particles)

Fire! Bad! (particles)

Ka-Voom! Make a Mushroom Cloud (more particles)

Stereoscopic rendering. Doing it right. (it's not sci-fi if it's not 3-D)

Damaged Film Look. Beyond mere scratches.

Bluescreening in A:M with just A:M (Did you know A:M can do Bluescreen compositing?)

Glorious Sunset (landscape)

For a how-to technical book for a niche market, Print-on-demand is the way to go--and as for advertising: YOUR ENTIRE MARKET IS RIGHT HERE!!!! (that, however is the caveat....)

A few years ago, when there wasn't a printed version of the technical reference, there was a lot of clamor for one. I talked to Martin about it, and with his permission I edited the HTML reference in Adobe InDesign, formatting it for a printed book. Martin had felt that there was no way to condense it into something printable (thinking it would have to be 600 pages), and NO market for it...

I was able to get it to a little over 200 pages, and offered it on Cafepress for about $25 ($10 above the cost). No one thought that there was as much demand as there was--but in a couple of months it sold over 400 copies!! So that was a nice $4,000 profit and gave me a chance to learn how to use InDesign at the same time+ the community got a printed version of the technical reference and everybody was happy!

[Even Martin--since I gave Steve my InDesign files, which he was able to update with the V13 release and is available on the Hash site (in color)]

So I think that there IS a market amongst Animation:Master users, you just have to have realistic expectations.

eBooks are the way of the future (just look at the iPad). They are easier to produce and distribute with much lower costs and you can cut out the middle man. If your first venture goes well you can always convert it to a physical book later....

Cheers

In the end, most people dont like ebooks, even the digital natives (as I am one => persons born after 1980) are not used to read on the computerscreen...
An ebook and something like the iPad (overhyped as nothing else if you ask me...) doesnt make it much better.

Books are better than ebooks. Maybe not for a technical reference (where it can be very helpful to search for certain words, etc which are not necessarily in the index) but for most other stuff that has to be read from start to end. (like novels, etc.)

*Fuchur*

I like the fact that you can have these POD books spiral bound. I think that works best for tutorial stuff.


I've been thinking my concept over a bit. There's already a boat load of information about CG animation out there on the web and in books so that may not be a need that needs filling.

However, I think A:M materials is something that's relatively unscratched. There's a lot of cool power in them that people aren't using.

There are the Bill Young Materials CDs out there but those are a bit dry and don't go into case study applications.

So maybe the idea of the book would be to teach materials.

Every project would involve making a model, as spline thin as possible, then make it look cool with a material, explaining along the way why the material does what it does.

It would be sort of like "model this"...
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and render this...
Click to view attachment


The theme of the book might still be sci-fi, I think that has the potential for many interesting appearing models.

RobCat, the market is tiny.... miniscule. I'd say you could probably sell a 100 or so. My rigging tutorial went up when the market was strong and rich.... and I barely made enough to pay for my site for a few months.

Im just one story however. the pockets of A:M users could be deeper now then it was when I did my tutorial. but I doubt it.

you might (don't know for sure though) have more luck making the e-book or whatever, and having it up online for free, but have a donations box sort of thing. I dunno, just trying to help with suggestions (albeit, not very good ones ATM)

I know the market is small. My thinking is that...

a) I'm probably going to do the various projects anyway because they are interesting to me
b ) I was probably going to just give it away for free on the forum
c) so why not try to sell it, since there's no upfront $ cost to me?

There was a time (Especially before Gutenberg) when a book itself was a major work of art. The generations coming up are rapidly acclimating themselves to all things digital. I've been a reader all my life and books themselves are imbued with a certain reverence. (Of course I used to skip school and go to the city library and read Heinlein, Asimov, and Van Vogt.)

I have a hunch that a niche will develop in the not too distant future for "boutique" books. Something well made, artfully done, and satisfying to hold in one's hand.

Perhaps a digital version, downloadable, for a minimal, reasonable price, then a POD version to supplement. I, for one, would love to have a hard copy version for my bookshelf. (Or occasionally, book-pile, when I'm using them )

( And I was serious about that autograph thing)

just an off topic note, speaking of Asimov, the Foundation trilogy is in the works for a movie trilogy, unfortunately they probably won't even scratch half the surface of Foundation in the movies, but still, I'd like to see it

I think you've found the sacred cow with that idea.. A down loadable version, then a glossy pod coffee table version that is both a text book and an art book...I'd be in for that one!

Add to that, perhaps a pod spiral bound of the down loadable version (i'd prefer that over a a digital version).

Since you figured you'd do them anyhoo, I say do them! Anything you make is gravy. You may not put the kids through college with them, but you would have fun and get some satisfaction to boot...

I have the added advantage of not having to put any kids through college.

could put me through college, i wouldn't mind

You are a lucky soul! My kid cost me $75 g's of fine arts school..(anyone need an artist?)

Why couldn't you just have adopted me?
I'd be a little cheaper.
It would be my honor to call you 'Dad'.

As much as I love computers there is absolutely nothing like a book you can hold in your hand and read through.
Comic books, Text books, all of the various styles and formats available... still hold excitement, and because of the valuable content, are still revolutionary with each new release after all these years.

I wonder if while in the making of Robert's book, Holmes (Byrant) would be willing to let us publish his tutorials (or at least Volume One) as a test. If they were all put together they'd be a pretty fair sized tome.

Robert,
From my perspective, Materials are an area of interest that would work well detailed in books.
The shear number of options, variables and settings lends itself better to being referred to to on a printed page rather than via video.
Of course, to explore a lot of options there'd have to be a whole lot o' books!

I agree about the whole book thing, and if it's resource material, all the more reason for book form. Not all of us have dual monitors to have the resource on one screen, and AM in the other. And I'm going to a cheap school, only 20 grand

No see..where were you 24 years ago?.....I could have taken you to elementary school...put band aides on your scraped knees...But imagine the fun I'd have missed out on in not being able to terrorize the new boy friends?



Can't tell you how many books (even old college books) I have hanging around simply because I can't bear to toss them.

I'd buy anything that took me through each and every one of A:M's features. Been at this for years and still haven't scratched the surface.

Print vs. ebook? Ebook hands down. If you're doing a book on animation, shouldn't you put it in a format where you can show animations? Where color doesn't cost extra? Where almost all of the money goes into your pocket?

It isn't necessary to offer a free download. There are lots of ways to add passwords etc so you can be sure of getting paid most of the time.

it's just inconvienient to use as you're animating though, switching between windows and not being able to look at the tuts and do the work at the same time