Self Publishing for PostgreSQL?

I’m not sure if this is top secret info, but I happened across an IRC conversation where [http://www.gunduz.org/ Devrim Gunduz] mentioned that he had recently finished up work on a PostgreSQL book written in Turkish, and that he was going to start looking for a publisher. This reminded me of an old [http://donxml.com/grokthis/archive/2004/05/07/686.aspx DonXml blog post], “Why Shouldn’t Authors Self-Publish?”, which is certainly worth a read. It perticularly interested me since the post directly references [http://blogs.apress.com/ Apress books] directly, a company I have been involved with in [http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=424 a couple] [http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=10016 of projects] and has shown me to currently be the most PostgreSQL friendly of the technical book publishers. The main thrust of the post seems to be that you can make more money if you self publish, with the main counter argument being that your publisher should help you with things like editing and reviewing and generally making a better book. I certainly stand behind that latter point; the trickiest part of writing a book seems to be how to get good feedback loops, and if you can get good editors and reviewers, it certainly helps. One idea might be to just put the [http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html whole thing online], but for technical books this is certainly a scary prospect for most authors (where people will actually want to read your book near the computer and probably want to copy/paste the code). OTOH, the thing that makes publishing on demand seem viable is that most publishers generally prefer authors who can bring in thier own market, so if you can do that then I guess self-publishing is worth looking at. The reason I find this interesting at all is that there seems to be a general consensus that the postgresql community would like to see more books on thier [http://www.postgresql.org favorite database], but the numbers I have seen don’t seem to bear out a large postgresql specific book market. This makes me skeptical that even a friendly publisher is going to be excited to take up books that are niche postgresql specific topics, like perhaps developing in [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/plpgsql.html plpgsql], or [http://www.revsys.com/writings/postgresql-performance.html query and performance tuning]. Both of these topics could probably command a good 200 - 300 pages, which isn’t enough for most book publishers to get excited about. I’m actually skeptical that the postgresql community would support these sufficiently; I [http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/index.php?/archives/32-Intro-to-8.1-Developer-Series.html asked about interest] in any 8.1 specific articles and really didn’t see any signifigant demand, but maybe publishing on demand makes these types of books viable?