[Coco] Easter Eggs in BASIC, Bill Gates and the CoCo

[Bill Loguidice]

Sadly, no. These monolithic publishing entities have a traditional way of
doing business. There's really no special flexibility for individual books.
They have these things printed up in blocks (say 1,000 or more at a time)
at whatever major overseas print operations they use, which then get
distributed to various warehouses. It's all pretty standard stuff.

If it sells out of its initial print run, at best we'll be able to correct
a few minor errors (nothing that breaks the layout, essentially), and
that's it. It's only in the special cases where a book becomes a legitimate
mainstream best seller that there's ever a chance of a true second edition.
That rarely happens even with the best selling of tech books, particularly
with niche topics like this. The book appears to be selling well (we won't
know for sure for quite a while until the first quarterly statement, and
even that might be too early), but it's all relative.

You have to also remember that the publishing business, particularly for
tech books, is very different these days. In some cases, even selling a few
thousands books would be considered a great success, while in times past,
that would be a flop.

Of all the books I've done, I've had only one go into a second printing,
and that was "Vintage Games," and even that was just a minor error
correction run. That had a lot of things break right for it, though,
including the right types of places picking up on it, including a film
studio (and that's one reason why we've been able to do a sequel of sorts
in "Vintage Game Consoles," which comes out soon). Even though it's one of
the best sellers in its niche, it's still small potatoes in comparison to
older books in the category, like Kent's "Ultimate History of Videogames,"
which itself has changed little since 2001 (in fact, I'm not even sure if
any of its errors have been fixed). Again, very different times in the
publishing industry now.

-Bill

===================================================
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director; Armchair Arcade,
Inc.<http://www.armchairarcade.com>
===================================================
Authored Books<http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Loguidice/e/B001U7W3YS/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_1>and
Film <http://www.armchairarcade.com/film>; About me and other ways to get
in touch <http://about.me/billloguidice>
===================================================


On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>wrote:

> Le 2014-01-07 à 11:03:00, Bill Loguidice a écrit :
>
>
>  Well, it's important to remember that the publisher owns the rights to our
>> work. Until those expire, there's nothing we can personally do with the
>> material. Even though it's stuck in queue hell at the moment, there will
>> be
>> ebook versions available very soon on all major platforms. Although we'd
>> like the ebook pricing to be as low as possible, I suspect it will be
>> similar to the paperback (barring sales), unfortunately, because of the
>> type of publisher it is.
>>
>
> I heard that some printing companies do "print-on-demand". Is it possible
> for your publishing company to use such a printing company for a 2nd
> edition and/or to make incremental reprints of the 1st edition ? It would
> eliminate much of the difference of risk between print & electronic...
>
> (I don't know how this works at all, I only heard about it)
>
>  ______________________________________________________________________
> | Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC
>
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