[OT] Re: Thoughs after discussions at OSCON

On Mon, 2005-08-08 at 21:50 -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Well don't let that fool you though. That could mean they bothered to
> sell 5k+ books. Pratical
> PostgreSQL's first run was only 5k we had to go to second printing the
> first month it was out.
>
> 5k copies sold will NOT make up the money lost in the development of the
> book. You need
> at least 10-15k copies sold for that.

Just a thought on this. Self-publishing is another route to take; if
you print 5000 softcover books for about $10K and then sell them for
$29.99 each, well, do the math :-)

Of course, there's a huge downside - you have to do a ton of work. You
have to provide a camera-ready PDF file, set up a web site to take
orders, do all the marketing and promo, have a place to keep 10 cubic
feet of books, handle order fulfillment (i.e., lugging 10-20 copies a
day down to the post office), and so on.

But it's a thought...

Yours,

Tom