An Introduction to Business Systems Analysis - Republished on Amazon

Since it was first published in 2009, my first book, An Introduction to Business Systems Analysis has sold quite well (though I made very little money from it) - but is now out of print. My original publisher (The Liffey Press) and I have decided that it will no longer be available from the publisher - no new print runs will be done, and I have taken back control of the book.

I have reworked the old version of the book and it is now published directly on Amazon. Even though I got all my old files back from The Liffey Press, it was not as straight-forward as I thought to republish. I got each chapter as a separate file, and had to combine them into a single document using Microsoft Word. I had a lot of difficulty with section breaks and headers, and when I went to publish the Word doc - lots of changes were made in the publishing process (blank pages, wrong page numbers, etc). In the end, I converted the Word document to PDF format and it worked a treat. The book is now available as a print-to-order version - online it looks almost exactly like the old version. I have a proof copy on order to check it out.

With Amazon of course you can also make a book available as an eBook for Kindle. I tried this with my book, but unfortunately it looked dreadful. Many of the tables split up badly - too wide and too long for the Kindle screen. Diagrams also are sometimes missing, or only half are on view. It just simply will not work in the current format - it would have to be completely re-worked for publication on Kindle. I had hoped that the book would be available on Kindle for a low price - but this is not to be. I am therefore reducing the price of the printed version from £25 to £15, and will probably lower it again next year. Amazon gets 40% of the sale price, the author gets 60%. However, the cost of printing is taken out of the author's cut - I expect to get about £2 royalty from every sale. This book is quite cheap to print as it is all in black and white. 

This is my third book that is now published through Amazon. It's nice for an author to think that their books will be available effectively forever after they are out of print. Thank you Amazon!