publishing @ 09 Jul 2005 03:02 pm by bigfish
I was taking a look at the box containing the latest Xandros distribution yesterday. (Xandros is, in my opinion, the easiest Linux to use, and the distro that makes the transition from Windows nearly painless.) I considered how much time they’ve put into positioning Xandros, describing its features and benefits, making it all work.
One of the challenges with book publishing, if you care about your books as much as we do, is that every book is a new product. Each requires its own package, marketing plan, positioning, development, and so on.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply publish one book and market the hell out of it? Well, that’s what many publishers try to do with book series, but we’ve never really mined the series avenue. That doesn’t mean that we won’t start, of course.
In fact, we’re about to launch three books in our “Wicked Cool” series (the series name is thanks to Dave Taylor who wrote Wicked Cool Shell Scripts for us). We’ve got two books in our “Steal This” series — Steal This Computer Book and Steal This File-Sharing Book, and we hope to be publishing a couple more. And we may expand the “Non-Geeks” series as well as Michael Lucas’s brilliant “For the Desperate.”
So there. Take that you product marketeers. Next stop, No Starch Press books in gas stations.
