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1. Ozh says

   October 26, 2010 at 3:49 pm

   How many copies did you sell so far? (if that’s not a secret of course) I’m curious about Apress, I admit I don’t think I knew them before I heard about your book…

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   • steph says

     October 26, 2010 at 4:15 pm

     I won’t know until January or so, when I get my first six-month royalty statement. The publishing industry is antiquated in many ways, and publishers don’t have real-time sales data. (They ship to distributors, who ship books to stores on consignment. Stores can return unsold books for future credit from the publisher, meaning the publisher doesn’t know how many copies have been sold until all the returns come back. Which is why you see things on sale for $6 in bargain bins; those are the books that got returned after sales had petered out and the publisher had declared it out of print. That’s how they clear out their warehouses to avoid paying taxes on unsold stock, and authors don’t get royalties on those bargain copies. To sum up a complicated system that’s broken in many ways.)

     Authors tend to cling to Amazon sales ranks because that’s the ONLY real-time data available, but the way Amazon calculates rankings makes that number virtually useless.

     I don’t know if any of the ebook vendors make real-time, or even only-slightly-delayed, stats available to publishers. If so, mere authors don’t have access to that data. I do know that ebook-only publishers do their statements monthly, but Apress is not one of those.

     Slashdot once polled its readers for opinions on the various tech publishers, for what that’s worth.

     If you’re looking to have something published, I’ll talk about my experience with Apress privately, but I decided at the outset that I wouldn’t air that laundry here.

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