All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Perl book sales

slanning on 2007-09-13T11:06:53

On the POE mailing list, someone guessed that books like "Perl Best Practices" and "Perl Hacks" have probably sold 2000 copies max. Is it true? I wouldn't've guessed they are best-sellers, but that seems really low.... (Are you sure Perl isn't dying? :) :)

I doubt those numbers

autarch on 2007-09-13T14:30:30

The Mason book sold more than that (not a _lot_ more), and it's a very niche book compared to something like PBP. My guess for PBP would be in the low tens of thousands (10k-30k), but probably not hundreds of thousands.

Re:I doubt those numbers

Damian on 2007-09-13T15:08:12

I'm not actually allowed to give sales figures, but autarch's estimate is *much* closer than the "somebody's guess" reported by the OP.

6 Taiwan library Chinese translation copies

mr_bean on 2007-09-13T15:14:00

Here's 6 copies of the Chinese translation in Taiwanese university libraries.

http://nbinet.ncl.edu.tw:2082/search/aConway%2C+Damian/aconway+damian/1%2C1%2C4% 2CB/frameset&FF=aconway+damian+1964&4%2C%2C4

Kansai Perl Mongers are reading it on Thursday evenings in Osaka, Japan.

Programming Language Trends

stu42j on 2007-09-13T14:58:26

I wonder if there is an updated version of this graph?

Perl Testing, Perl Hacks

chromatic on 2007-09-13T17:57:23

Like Damian, I can't give exact numbers. I will say that some 95% of books published in all genres in the world never sell 5000 copies. Both Perl Hacks and Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook have crested that, so they've reached at least a very modest success (that is, not losing money).

Note that neither book has ever had a Slashdot review, and both books have received only a handful of reviews anywhere. If someone reads this and thinks "Hey, I could influence the Perl book market for the positive," please write a review somewhere more public than PerlMonks, use Perl;, or The Perl Review.

(I definitely appreciate the reviews in those places, but I think the audiences there know about the books by now.)

Re:Perl Testing, Perl Hacks

rjbs on 2007-09-14T11:33:52

Where should we post reviews? That is, what 3-4 places would be most helpful for sales?

Whenever I post a review, I've done it to my local Perl Mongers and to my journal. An author recently said, "Hey, could you post that at Amazon? It can help sales."

I'd never given that any thought, but it made sense, so I went and published all my old tech book reviews there. If there were a few other places that you said were a great place to post, I (and probably others) would be happy to do so.

In other words: how can we help sell books?

Re:Perl Testing, Perl Hacks

brian_d_foy on 2007-09-14T14:42:50

My publishing friends say that a (good) review on Amazon boosts sales. I don't have anything to back that up other than marketing people telling me that.

I'm glad to post reviews in TPR too. I'm working on some stuff to add extra, online only content to theperlreview.com too, and I'll be glad to post well-written public reviews once I get that set up. :)

Re:Perl Testing, Perl Hacks

chromatic on 2007-09-14T16:50:20

In my experience, a good Slashdot review is worth more to a technical book than a review just about anywhere else. Good reviews on Amazon or other online bookstores are also useful. Anywhere there are a lot of people who might like the book but who aren't tied tightly into the Perl community is a good target.

I haven't seen a correlation between tags on Amazon and sales, but I haven't seen many tags on tech books there either.

Books aren't good business

brian_d_foy on 2007-09-13T21:07:28

Learning Perl sells well, Intermediate Perl sells about 1/10th or that, and I expect Mastering Perl will sell 1/10th of Intermediate Perl (I should get my first sales report at the end of this month). I would have probably made more money taking an advance for Mastering Perl because I don't think I'll ever earn it out. I'll be happy if it ever gets to 1,000 copies sold. That's not the point though. It's a book I wanted to point people too and that I kept wishing existed. So, I wrote it. Now I can point at it and say, "That's chapter 3 in Mastering Perl".

The best books are the very beginner books, and the books that would come right after that, such as Perl Best Practices or Perl Cookbook, because those appeal to the whole market. Once you break the market into a niche, such as Mason or Poe or Template, you get the same sell through (probably), but only for that narrow slice of the market.

Any serious computer book author has to consider that they'll spend 18 months wokring on a book and never make more than the advance, which might only be a couple thousand dollars if they are lucky. Any serious and competent publisher realizes this too, so they don't do a lot of niche books. That some publishers do has more to do with overall brand and reputation than single title sales. That O'Reilly would even consider publishing a risky (in sales) book such as Mastering Perl is almost charity, and they do a lot of that. They aren't going to go into the poor house though. :)