Directions on forums and writing

After I finished my first book, I started to think about what I'd write if I did another one. I wouldn't write anything if it wasn't something I was interested in, so it had to be relevant to my interests. I discussed a book with a couple of publishers that was based around the end-to-end creation of a significant ASP.NET application, namely POP Forums. At the time, v8 wasn't much more than a idea (and still is hardly where it needs to be), so it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Most of the publishers I pitched to felt it sounded like a fairly good idea, provided it was well developed and easy to position as unique. I never really followed up on it though, but it's still something I've been thinking about in the back of my mind.

Truth be told, I'm not sure if I'd write the book for mainstream publishing now. I guess it depends on how well my first book did the latter part of 2005 (the publishing process is insanely slow when it comes to calculating royalties and such). It got off to a slow start, and I don't think it got much better after that. That's a real disappointment, and I partially blame the publisher for doing a really crappy job marketing it.

And while thinking a lot about POP Forums lately (especially the part about how I used to make a grand a month selling the really crappy old ASP version), I started to wonder if there was some way that I could monetize it a little. Remember, my motivation for writing the forum app is to use it in my own projects. I give it away only because I can't really sell it with all of the free stuff out there. But still, it would be nice to get something for that work.

I was looking at the stats from the forums site, which honestly has been more or less static for, I dunno, nearly two years, and people really like poking around the class documentation. They also make a lot of hits to the integration help page. And with the next version doing Membership/Profile, that's going to be even easier.

So thinking about all of these, I think a book on the forums would be a good idea, if self-published on something like LuLu. I don't need to sell 10,000 copies the way I would through a traditional publisher. I'd be happy to do 500 copies in a year. That would be something like a 2-5% conversion rate though from downloads, so who knows if that would be realistic.

I don't know... at this point I'm just kind of thinking out loud.

4 Comments

  • I don't think anybody ever made money from writing technical books - at least not directly. It seems to mainly be a "loss leader" activity for those earning money from consultancy or speaking at conferences where the fact you've had a technical book published can win you the visiibility needed to get such gigs. If you don't fit into that category I really think it's down to how altruistic you are. Certainly when I've thought of writing a book it's never been about making any money - I know far too many really good technical authors who've told me of the long hours with very little financial reward - even if the book IS with a major publisher and visible in most of the High Street stores).

  • Yeah, even the first book was not about the money, but that doesn't mean I don't want it to be read, you know? Certainly the doors that have opened just from having that thing on paper make the whole experience worth it.

  • Shame, I read the reports on you ASP book and it looked interesting. How tough would it be to create an ASP 2.0 and sell it as an ebook on Amazon?



    Frankly, me personally I'm overloaded by info. For $5 I'd buy, take a look if anything is interesting there. For $30 - no way.



    avin@bmntech.com

  • It already does cover 2.0 topics.

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