>>>>> "Matthew" == Matthew Wickline <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Matthew> Well, once you've got enough $1 chunks from sales (without answering any
Matthew> email questions) to compensate for the time spent actually
Matthew> developing/writting/editing the book, *then* maybe you can stay ahead
Matthew> letting folks buy consulting seconds through book purchases.
Oh, OK, forgot about that. That so much never happens. Well, it
kinda happened on best-sellers like Camel and Llama, but that's not
why anyone (including Tim, I presume) writes a book. We write it for
the collateral goodies, like helping others and fame and marketplace
credentials.
To put it another way, when Larry and I wrote the first Camel, we
never expected to get as much as a monthly car payment out of the
book, even for having put in an average of a man-day per page of final
copy. Luckily, sales far exceeded O'Reilly's expectations, and an
entire industry was born. (All from me posting a mail message that
said "hey, maybe I can help larry write some online documentation",
which was interpreted by an O'Reilly SysAdmin as "hey, I want to write
a book, do you know a publisher?", and thank goodness!)
--
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!
