Re: Marketing help wanted
[email protected] ((Randal L. Schwartz)) 19 Jul 2002 08:15:48 -0700
| Newsgroups | perl.trainers |
|---|---|
| Organization | Stonehenge Consulting Services; Portland, Oregon, USA |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
>>>>> "Danny" == Danny Faught <[email protected]> writes: >> Another approach that could work is to write a book. Danny> Yup. That's somewhere on my to-do list. I've got half a dozen book Danny> ideas bouncing around. Please keep in mind that except for runaway bestsellers (like the Camel and Llama), books *never* make enough money to pay back the time you could have spent billing to customers. Books are a credential and a work of passion, not an income source. The 250 page Llama takes 250 *man days* to write. Try computing how many dollars that is at your current billable rate. Now realize that your royalty will be about 1/10th of the typical discounted price of the book (about $2.50 in royalties or so for the Llama). Now figure out how many books you'd have to sell to break even. Ouch. Don't forget to divide that out amongst your co-authors if you have some. And that the money is in an exponential decay after the first year, so if you don't make it the first year, you've lost. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 <[email protected]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/> Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!