Amazon says ‘5 Stars’
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
It’s been a while since I looked at how my book has been doing. It arrived in printed format just over a year ago, so it’s a little off the radar now, if you catch my drift. Today, though, I had a look on Amazon.com for something and my book came up as a recommendation, and I clicked through out of curiosity to see if there any new reviews. I was pleased to see that the reviews are still coming in. Not quite as thick and fast as they do on Sitepoint’s page for the book (9 pages of mostly positive, 4-5 star reviews), but it’s still selling, and with the reviews on both sites looking good, hopefully it will continue to. But I have to say that I was particularly pleased with the 5-star rating :-)
A little while ago I received the sales figures for the book covering the March-December period. I won’t say what the figures are, as I’m not sure if it’s something I’m allowed to state publicly, but at the time I wasn’t sure if the figure was average/good/excellent (I was later informed by on person that what I’d sold with this book was more than what they had sold with two different books, so that was encouraging). Because the book is a beginner’s book, it comes with a lower retail sale price than others published by SitePoint and as such I just missed out on making enough in sales to cover the advance but we don’t do this for profit, right?
I do actually enjoy the writing process and have since contributed to other books (Pro CSS Techniques and Web Standards Creativity), but there’s still nothing quite like having one all of your own and be able to say “I did that”. I’d definitely be interested in doing another complete book at some point, although right now it’s nice not to have to worry about deadlines and have to put other stuff (general life things) aside when there’s a chapter due!
