Sell more books

Paulpdy · January 24th, 2009, 05:39 PM

I have noticed that there is no one (as in Author or Publisher) making sure that posts are answered. I am sure if you would stand behind your books with answers, you would have happy customers who woud buy more of your book. Instead you turn people off and they shy away from your books.

casper35 · January 24th, 2009, 07:25 PM

The explanations in the book are not balanced with other options nor do they explain why the author has used a particular method..
After encountering my first problem, I came to this foru...the number or ratio of questions to answers let me thinking, why did I not check this before buying the book.

So disappointed, I 've went onto another book!

Paulpdy · January 25th, 2009, 01:48 AM

The publisher / author should fix the code as we point out the problems so other won't have the same problems.

Paulpdy · February 5th, 2009, 05:51 AM

12 days and 200.00 with a programmer it works! Looks like the code is good, however it needs some adjustments depending on your server. I give Chapter 1 a thumbs up....... Not the support the writer and publisher give to their own book.

jminatel · February 5th, 2009, 08:52 AM

If there are code errors, have you submitted them through our errata site:
http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTit...Cd-ERRATA.html

so we can ask the author to verify them and share the answers with other readers?

I'm not aware of any other programming publisher with more active forums, authors, and editors posting more answers to reader questions. No, we don't answer them all, we can't force people to answer questions. But, if there's someone doing a better job than us on this front, point me to them so I can learn from them and improve.

Paulpdy · February 5th, 2009, 09:37 AM

jminatel, I am suprised how fast this post was responded too. Look at the post for this book, I see no one who would recommend the book. As correcting your book I just paid a programmer 200.00 to get chapter 1 going.... What do you pay?

jminatel · February 5th, 2009, 05:30 PM

We need to start charging more for our books if a working application for chapter 1 would have been worth $200 to you. ;)

So the errors the programmer helped you with, were they really errors in the application or was it customization/configuration needed to get it working in your specific instance?

To answer your question, technical editing on the books is not a high paying job. I'm not going to quote a rate here in public, but yes, you spent more to get it fixed than we would have spent on code checking on a 30 page chapter.

What we have to depend on because we can't sell books for $200 (or even $100) to justify extremely costly edits is that our tech editors do the work because the love the topic and when readers do find errors, they help each other by sharing them. Do I expect you to share the errors you uncovered with $200 worth of work you paid for? Probably not.