Thursday, November 13, 2003
Started off the day a little off topic, prompted by one of the people in the class who currently does WebSphere-based Web development, which went into a long but good digression about Web development using ASP.NET. Very interesting stuff. I may not be a professional Web developer any more, but I am still very much interested in the subject. This would be a prelude to what we would get later in the day.
The 8th module in the course looked at creating Windows-based applications, which, despite my interest in Web-based apps, is important for me to know about for my current work.
But the most interesting section for me was the ASP.NET section, which came at day's end. Now I finally know how it all works, and how C# (or VB.NET) fits into the picture. Understanding the architecture is a big plus for me, as it rounds out my understanding of another set of interpreted web server functions. For me, the code was also the most intuitive -- undoubtedly due to my previous experience in the area -- and I am sure I could use what I've learned and apply it should circumstances arise.
New Book Slowly Creeping Up The Charts"The Charts" in this case being Amazon.com's all important "Sales Rank". Not a Top 10 or a Top 100, but more like a Top 1,000,000 or so. When I checked this morning the book was hovering the 4,000s range, and for the most part has been showing steady gains ever since it was released at the very end of September.
When it started out, it was at the very bottom of the barrel -- in the 900,000s or so, next to books on how to be a better school principal and the like. This was when I found a service called JungleScan -- formerly called "AmazonScan" -- which automatically keeps tabs on the sales rank of any given book. You simply feed it the Amazon URL and it automatically checks the sales ranking for you, and even keeps a graph if its performance. If the book in question is seen to rise or fall dramatically, the service begins to do hourly, rather than a daily, check on the sales rank. The snapshot of the page shown here shows the book's more or less steady rise, with an all-too-brief jump above the 1,000 mark which happened a couple of weeks ago, before settling down again to it's steady climb back up.
By default Amazon "twins" any one book it has listed with another book, typically one that somebody else, having bought a copy of your book has also gone on to buy another one. Initially the book twinned with it was Windows XP Killer Tips, a good book to be sure, but not one normally associated with Web development. A couple of weeks ago it more sensibly twinned Core CSS, 2nd Ed with Eric Meyer on CSS -- an excellent book on the same topic. Unfortunately this twinning process doesn't go both ways -- if you click on the link for this Eric Meyer book what you get is Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman instead, which in turn is twinned with another book, and so on. In fact, at the moment, most other semi-recent CSS titles out there are currently to either Eric Meyer's or Jeffrey Zeldman's book. I suspect that this is because both books are considered best sellers in their field, and maybe because they have gone through a few print runs and Amazon can thereby discount them further, and therefore are more likely to sell. Still, I can't wait for the time when hopefully my book gets up there and the twinning goes both ways. My fingers are crossed. ;-)
I am pleased with how the book seems to be doing, despite the fact that Amazon still only lists the description from the first book. At least Powell's Books has got this right. I remember talking to my editor and him saying that getting Amazon to change/update a book's description was an unusually hard thing to do, so anybody not knowing much about this book already would think that it is covering off some rather old material. Thankfully the two new reviews that people have kindly submitted to the book attest to the fact that the book is comprised largely of new material and completely re-organized. Still, I can't help but think it would be in Amazon's best interest (as well as my own, admittedly) to get the book description right!
What's interesting is how well the book is doing in other countries. As I look at the book's page on Amazon.co.uk I notice that its rank is just 1,992(!), and that it carries the book's official description from the publisher (yay!). Compare that to Amazon.ca where it is at 124,949, On Amazon.co.de it is at 678,718, and on Amazon.co.jp it is at 502,588. Barnes & Noble is the only other one that gives sales rankings, and currently the book on their site is listed at 63,156.
Will have to see if I can get ahold of someone at Amazon.com who might be able to update the book's description on their site... In the meantime I will keep tabs on the sales of the book by using JungleScan. Since high -- and steady -- ranking converts to steady book sales, ultimately the better it does, the more I can hopefully expect down the road in terms of royalties -- not to mention incentive to do a Third Edition.
This also reminds me that I am bad, and I must mail out some of my promo copies to some people to whom I have promised a copy and not yet delivered.
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