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Book Royalties

Peter Milliken peter.milliken at gtech.com
Thu Jan 3 23:04:14 EST 2002 
"Dr. David Mertz" <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote in message
news:mailman.1010113205.15149.python-list at python.org...

<snip>

 > The real problem with self-publishing is publicity and distribution.
> It's easy to get an ISBN; and not hard to get your book listed on Amazon
> and Barnes-and-Noble websites.  But to put books on bookstore shelves, a
> self-published author has a big challenge.  The thumb-through-the-shelf
> shoppers are just simply not going to see your self-published book; and
> I don't really believe that websites are going to attract all that many
> potential buyers.  Of course, if you can get three or four times the
> per-book profit, you can sell a third or fourth as many books and get
> the same income.  I don't know how these things balance each other...
> maybe someone like Bruce Eckel--with more books out there--has a better
> knowledge of the pros and cons.

OK, agreed but how often do you purchase a "specialist" title type book like
a computer book by just "thumbing through shelfs"?  Perhaps the "generic"
books like Software Development in 21 Days or whatever, but the more niche
markets like "Thinking in Python" can be advertised quite effectively
through the Python newsgroup (the *only* audience is most likely found in
comp.lang.python - in which case you run the advert in the news group -
there used to be FAQs published regularly in newsgroups - just volunteer to
maintain the Python FAQ and make sure there is a section on books! :-)). In
your case, you would also have to go after that part of your intended
audience through some form of appeal to a newsgroup where you would find
people interested in Text Processing.

Anyway, just thinking out loud there :-) As I said, the publishing industry
is putting itself out of business as far as I am concerned - I will be
investigating getting my local library to purchase a copy of "Python
Programming Patterns" in the near future :-).

Peter
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