Re: [Caml-list] Book sales

[Oliver Bandel <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 12:54:11AM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> 
> Tim O'Reilly recently published an article about book sales and, in 
> particular, gave a breakdown of units sold per programming language:
> 
>   http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_10.html
> 
> As the author and publisher of a book on OCaml, this naturally caught my eye. 
> So I spent some time dissecting the results and the conclusions were quite 
> interesting:
> 
>   http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/05/ocaml-revolution.html
> 
> Most notably, we are outselling APress in terms of units sold. Also, the OCaml 
> community is desperately short of cheap introductory books.
> 
> I should also note that the publication of Practical OCaml, rather than 
> reducing our sales due to competition, actually increased our sales 
> substantially. This indicates to me that the OCaml market is sufficiently 
> small that there is no risk of competition and anything done to promote the 
> language improves the situation for others in the community.
> 
> Consequently, I would like to encourage any budding authors to write books on 
> OCaml and help to promote the language.
[...]

So your mail is not altruism ;-)


For my taste you too often mention your book here in this list....
it's ok, if you tell it once or twice, but this is not your personal
advertising channel.

Why don't you pay the television for sending advertising spots on your book?!

Ciao,
   Oliver