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Does anyone have any idea what typical sales for technical books are? I have no idea what it means numerically to be a technical best seller, or what the sales of an ordinary book that is not a dud are like. And yes, I've googled. Sales figures appear generally not to be public.

Sales figures depend on a number of factors:

• The prominence of the author - Martin Fowler sells a certain number of copies based on his name alone)
• The marketing abilities of the publisher - not every publisher has as deep a reach into the brick and mortar businesses like the big name companies (O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Sams, etc.)
• The topic - an introductory book on PHP is going to sell more copies than a book targeting uber-advanced PHP developers
• The existing coverage of said topic in the market - if there are 10 books covering the same topic you're going to sell fewer copies than if your book was the only option, obviously
• The popularity/user base size of said topic - a book on Microsoft Word is going to sell more copies than a book on Open Office

I've written a number of books on a specific programming technology (ASP.NET) and have blogged about book sales and numbers and other metrics. Check out The economics of writing a computer trade book (with a comment from Tim O'Reilly of all people), as well as my list of blog entries on technical writing.

Does anyone have any idea what typical sales for technical books are? I have no idea what it means numerically to be a technical best seller, or what the sales of an ordinary book that is not a dud are like. And yes, I've googled. Sales figures appear generally not to be public.

Sales figures depend on a number of factors:

• The prominence of the author - Martin Fowler sells a certain number of copies based on his name alone)
• The marketing abilities of the publisher - not every publisher has as deep a reach into the brick and mortar businesses like the big name companies (O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Sams, etc.)
• The topic - an introductory book on PHP is going to sell more copies than a book targeting uber-advanced PHP developers
• The existing coverage of said topic in the market - if there are 10 books covering the same topic you're going to sell fewer copies than if your book was the only option, obviously
• The popularity/user base size of said topic - a book on Microsoft Word is going to sell more copies than a book on Open Office

I've written a number of books on a specific programming technology (ASP.NET) and have blogged about book sales and numbers and other metrics. Check out The economics of writing a computer trade book (with a comment from Tim O'Reilly of all people), as well as my list of blog entries on technical writing.

You're kidding me, 10-14% is a good royalty rate for an author?! That's disgusting.

Not to mention that the book store sells the book for double what they paid. So if you buy a $50 book at Barnes and Noble (or Amazon or wherever) the publisher made, say, $25, of which the author sees $2.50 or so. For a bit more detail on how authors get paid, check out The economics of writing a computer trade book.

I've authored a half-dozen computer trade books and have only been to one author signing (at a tech conference) and signed two books.

Authors make their money from royalties. I get a percentage of every sale the publisher makes to the distributor.

Example: A book of mine sells at Amazon.com/B&N/Borders for $39.95. That means that my publisher sold the book to Amazon.com et al for roughly $19.95. If I am on, say, 10% royalty, I get , then, $1.95 for that copy sold. Of course, the publisher holds onto a percentage (maybe 20-30%) of every dollar coming in because more likely than not the distributor won't sell all the copies and will want a refund (these are called 'returns').

So 99.999999% of all money I make writing books is from royalties on copies sold, as I imagine is the case for all but the most famous authors (Stephen King, Dan Brown, etc.), who have movies, name recognition, etc., etc.

If you are interested in learning more about the economics of writing a computer trade book, check out a blog entry of mine, aptly titled, The economics of writing a computer trade book...

Additionally, there is a large site with extensive docs, articles, etc. that are available for free. It's called MSDN. There really are a gob of articles there, including many advanced-level ones. Ditto Microsoft's MSDN Magazine. While a print copy costs $$$, all the articles can be viewed for free online.

Actually, if you are changing a property that is common to all selected controls, such as the BackColor, you can select multiple controls, and the Properties window will display just those properties that are common to the selected controls. At least you can do this in VS.NET 2003.

I agree that the code-behind model leaves a lot to be desired. It is a hack, really, and despite the fact that MS has touted it as a clean separation of code and content, it's there solely because they could not get VS.NET to work any other way. With Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0, the code-behind model, while still available, will likely be left behind for the code-beside approach.

You can read more about code-behind's hackiness at this blog entry. There's also a good blog entry on the same topic by Andy Smith.

What happens when someone on your whitelist opens an attachment that automatically sends email from their account, signing it? Now you have a spam that has been legitamately sent from your friend's account.

I created a C/R anti-spam system myself, but gave up on it and turned to Spambayes for two main reasons:

1.) I was losing challenges in others' spam filters
2.) I would still get emails from whitelisted folks when they were infected with an email worm.

If you're interested, I blogged about my switch from C/R to Bayesian filtering here.

What happens when someone on your whitelist opens an attachment that automatically sends email from their account, signing it? Now you have a spam that has been legitamately sent from your friend's account.

I created a C/R anti-spam system myself, but gave up on it and turned to Spambayes for two main reasons:

1.) I was losing challenges in others' spam filters
2.) I would still get emails from whitelisted folks when they were infected with an email worm.

If you're interested, I blogged about my switch from C/R to Bayesian filtering here.

Here's a picture from my street at 11:00 AM from back in late October. Orangish-brownish, although I think this had more to do with the San Diego wildfires burning 10 miles away moreso than weather fronts. ;-)