Book sales not what I had hoped

I got some preliminary numbers on book sales in the first three months and they weren't nearly as strong as I had hoped. Feedback from customers has been extremely good, but I don't know that the publisher is reaching the right people, or anyone for that matter. That's frustrating.

So it looks like I'm going to have to start marketing myself a bit harder. Maximizing ASP.NET is all about turning beginners into gurus. I recently hired a guy for the project I'm working on and he's one of the many people that came from a script background and I'm not exaggerating to say it changed his life. There have to be tens of thousands of people coming from ASP, PHP, Cold Fusion and even Perl that are trying to get their heads around ASP.NET, and my book was written for them. I know the story because that was me four years ago.

Looks like I need to put myself out there a lot more...

10 Comments

  • I know it's changed the way I think about programming. Writing apps now is so much easier after having read (and re-read) the book. I just hired a guy for my staff. He has little .NET experience. Guess what is required reading...



    d8

  • dont be sad, the book market is generaly down.

    I am also author (ASP.NET 2.0 B2 MS Press) and the sale is...

    So in fact the publishers have no money left for anything (authors fee, marketing ..)



    I have no hope that the good times come back, their is too much free information available in web.

    So for me its a hobby

  • Crappy book sales? Ever check your book prices lately? Maybe cut them in HALF and people will buy. Not targeting just *your* prices, but .NET, programming, and tech books in general. If it's a publisher thing? Get a new publisher.

  • I don't think you understand publishing. Tech books are considered a success if they sell 10,000 copies. In that quantity, the return on investment is not huge. My book is $30 on Amazon. How is that expensive?

  • Yeah, Hannes said it already, but (a) there are way to many .NET books on the market (b) there is already a ton of great information available for free.



    It's easy to get disappointed with sales, but don't be :) Unfortunately you just can't expect to see a lot of sales with technical books.



  • Jeff, good luck to you it was a good book, but you (or the publisher) made one major mistake and I suspect its costing you most of your sales (and will continue to do so)



    The mistake is that you didn't find some way to put "2.0" in your title. Most programmers I know aren't buying 1.1 books anymore and are assuming that all books that just say "ASP.NET" refer to 1.1 (which is true for most books and yours sadly got lumped into that).



    Short of a new edition with an updated title I forsee this being what hurts you for the lifetime of the book.

  • In general, marketing is left up to the author. The publisher puts the books on the market and does a minor sweep of putting the book on the front page of their website and in an email newsletter. However, outside of that, its mostly up to you to push your book in speeches, magazine articles, and blogs. Evidently its working already because I intend to buy the book now ;)

  • Tom: Actually, there is quite a bit of v2 info in the book, but back when I started the project it was pretty much assumed that ALL books would be v2 books by now. At the time it didn't seem like we'd need to desginate that. Lots of good stuff in there though about Membership and Profile, especially on writing your own providers.



    Rob: I don't disagree, but the flip side of this is that we as a community do a poor job of educating people with all of that free stuff. Trying to teach people from a script background how to properly develop with ASP.NET is not a topic you can cover in a few articles.

  • Don't feel bad. From what I've heard, few (if any) "name" authors are making a living from writing .NET books nowadays. Most seem to use books as a marketing tool to promote their training and consulting work.



    The market has been saturated with .NET 1.1 books and if there's something specific you need to know to get over a hurdle, the newsgroups are a spectacular resource.

  • It's hard to make decent money as an author. Just like it's hard to make money as a musician...and actor, etc. It's a saturated market. IMO, the real money is being made by your publisher...the record labels, the movie studios. The little guy has to do major sales or keep his day job. You should have put "2.0" somewhere on the cover and also I would have mentioned Java ship jumpers because I know several people recently who have dumped JSP for a real web framework...ASP.NET! Anyhoo, I enjoyed your book. Be patient.

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