Re: Pricing of Documentation

["Brierley, Sean" <Brierley -at- QUODATA -dot- COM>]

Hallo:

I am assuming this pertains to software. IMHO, a completely thorough user
manual ought be included in the price of the software. Whether that book be
PDF only or printed is a marketing decision.

I am curious to know for what kind of documentation you are planning to
charge. Is this ancillary documentation not critical to your product, but
really nice to have?

In regards to pricing, there are several ways to figure out what to charge.
First, you could try to find out how much your customers would be willing to
pay and charge that . . . be it too little or way too much <g>. Then, you
could charge to make PDFs available to the customer via FTP. While much the
same amount of work goes into PDF creation as printed-doc creation, the
printing process is expensive. Do you use color? With this in mind, you
could charge for the cost of printing only for those customers who want
printed and bound books versus those who'll live with the PDF stuff. You
might, instead, factor in the time (hours) that it takes you to write a
book, multiply by the average (or highest) hourly wage and multiply that
total by your desired profit (10%??). Add in the cost of printing and you
could have a very expensive book.

I have never worked for a company that had a separate charge for printed
documentation. Tech pubs has been overhead at every company I've worked for,
including printing costs (which vary wildly depending on quantities, color,
binding type, etc.). At these companies, the cost of tech pubs has been
figured into the overall cost of putting a product together, but in no way
that could be meaningfully itemized. As a tech pubs employee, I have been
able to identify the cost per book for printing each book, the time taken to
produce each book, and the salaries of those involved. However, that trivia
has never been directly applied . . . in my experience.

So, I'm curious to learn what kind of books these are and how much you think
you can get away with charging. Please post some kind of summary at some
point.

Thanks

Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com

>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: Krista Kostuch [mailto:kkostuch -at- TOTALSYSTEM -dot- COM]
>>>Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 10:58 AM
>>>To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
>>>Subject: Pricing of Documentation
>>>
>>>
>>>We are currently trying to come up with some numbers for pricing our
>>>documentation.  Most of our documentation will be
>>>distributed electronically in
>>>PDF format.  We are also planning on customizing our
>>>documentation for our
>>>customers.  With that said, I would appreciate any input on
>>>this matter.  What
>>>do you charge for your documentation?  Do you charge by the
>>>page or by the hour?
>>>What is the average amount of hours spent on technical
>>>documentation per page?
>>>Any numbers on this subject would be helpful.  Or, if you
>>>could point me to a
>>>URL that would be helpful.  Thanks ahead of time.  Your
>>>thoughts on this are
>>>greatly appreciated!!

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=