Tales from the jar side: Kotlin Cookbook at Amazon, by the numbers
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of December 8 - 15, 2019. This week I taught online classes in Spring and Android. My personal copies of my Kotlin Cookbook arrived as well. I also did some writing on my Managing Your Manager book, but not nearly enough.
Shortly before my book Modern Java Recipes was released, the publisher O'Reilly Media stopped selling books through their own site. If you go to the page for any of my O'Reilly books, like this one for Kotlin Cookbook, you'll see the primary goal is to get you to subscribe to their online learning platform, known as O'Reilly Online Learning but which I still refer to as Safari Books Online. If you want to buy a physical book, or even an ebook, there's a button in light grey that will take you to Amazon.com.
As business decisions go, this one still surprises me. It's a book publisher that doesn't sell books to the public? That strikes me as odd, and isn't true of any other technical publisher I know or have worked with (Manning, Pragmatic Programmers, Apress, and a few others). I get the idea of going "all in" on the online platform, and that platform has been very good to me, mostly by allowing me to offer online training classes. I also have several videos there that earn royalties as people watch them. Still, telling people who might want one of my books that they either need to subscribe to Safari or go to Amazon (or "your favorite retailer" if you read the fine print in the figure) is a bold move, to say the least.
Since O'Reilly Media no longer sells books, when people ask me where to get it I suggest Amazon. I do recommend getting a Safari subscription, but that's a much bigger hurdle, especially given that an annual subscription is $400. I don't know how many subscriptions are sold to individuals as opposed to businesses, and I suspect the latter is more the target audience, but I don't really know.
(If your employer does subscribe to Safari for you, please put my videos on autoplay. You don't need to actually watch them. I think I earn royalties based on minutes played, whether you have the sound on or not.)
Since it's likely that most of my Kotlin Cookbook sales will come from Amazon, I have gone to the trouble of setting up my author page over there. Here's a link to my Author Page at Amazon.com. On it you'll see links to all four of my books, along with some biographical info and links to my most recent blog posts.
Writers of mass market books (or, as I like to call them, "real" writers) often talk about how dangerous it is to obsess over the numbers reported by the author portal at Amazon. I don't have that problem, since (with a few notable exceptions) technical books tend to fall in the "long tail", meaning they never really register very high on Amazon's lists. To give you an idea what that means, check this out:
The Kindle version of my book has a rank at the moment of around 528,000, but that's apparently good enough to be #181 in the Java (!) Computer Programming category. By contrast, my Modern Java Recipes book is actually #70 in that same category. According to my author page, the Kotlin Cookbook overall ranking dropped just about 100,000 places yesterday, and those numbers are updated hourly in case you want to spend your life refreshing the page over and over again. I suspect if as many as two copies are sold today, I'll probably jump up 100,000 places again.
Update, as of about 8 pm Sunday: There's been a change. The rank for Kotlin Cookbook has gone up 282K places this afternoon. The data says that from Dec 2 to Dec 8, there were six copies sold, but that's last week so I don't know how that enters into it. Still, nice jump. :) FYI, my current author rank is now 72,242.
Despite that, I think it's a good thing my books are not my sole source of income.
So why do this? It took me over a year to write this book, and required a huge investment in time and energy. Here are some of my reasons, in no particular order:
It's fun to see my name in print.
Writing a book forces me to really learn a language, especially the parts I might not normally encounter.
Being a published author gives me a measure of credibility when I meet developers who don't know me. Since my primary jobs are teaching training courses and speaking at conferences, that happens a lot.
Writing helps me sort out ideas. Explaining a topic to others forces me to come up with understandable examples that clearly communicate what's going on, and that's really useful to both of us.
Speaking of that, the book becomes a record of how to accomplish tasks in the language. When I forget how to do something, the book is a formal copy of my notes. That's another reason I've written so many "recipe" books -- as I learn how to do something, I write it down, and eventually I have enough to make a book.
You never know, one of my books might actually go viral some day. And by that I mean Managing Your Manager, which will also be the first book my non-technical friends can actually read.
I apparently have this burning need to communicate as evidenced by this newsletter, whose length exceeds 1000 words every freakin' week.
I'm not going to update those numbers here very often, unless something remarkable happens, like I sell the screen rights. If Netflix wants to talk, I'm not hard to find.
A few miscellaneous items to round out the week:
In the last newsletter I mentioned the difficulty I anticipated in teaching my Android course this week, which is normally done in Java but probably needs to convert to Kotlin. I talked about it with the students, and in the end I did the class In Java but with occasional Kotlin examples. The students seemed happy enough with that, or at least not actively unhappy. I'll have to rethink that issue again before the next time the course is offered.
I'm really looking forward to the season finale of Watchmen tonight. I hope they stick the landing, and all evidence suggests they will, but either way it's been great so far.
My wife and I went to see Knives Out, which was also very good. I have to say, though, that while Daniel Craig's Texas accent worked really well for me, I never for a moment forgot he was James Bond.
I love the Short Treks on CBS All Access. They're arguably better than the Discovery series itself. I find them hard to watch, though, for a reason that isn't their fault. With every political event that happens these days I feel like we as a society are taking one more step away from the beautiful world of the show, and that breaks my heart. The future I dreamed of as a child fades farther into the distance with each passing day, and the world becomes a much darker and crueler place.
Ugh. Sorry about that. This was a rough week, especially for my UK friends, and that evil turtle Mitch McConnell has guaranteed it won't get any better any time soon. My own little corner of the world is doing well, but I can't help but see all the suffering around me, which feels so much more tragic during the holidays.
I'm tempted to spend a few paragraphs talking about the fear that governs so many people's behavior these days, but I'll hold that for another time. Just know that if you're struggling, I get that. I hear you and I support you, and I will do my best to help. For the record, one of my favorite charities at the moment is RIP Medical Debt.
This week:
Spring and Spring Boot, online at Safari
Basic Android, online at Safari
Some writing on Managing Your Manager
My copies of the Kotlin Cookbook arrived :)
Next week:
Managing Your Manager, online at Safari
Functional Java, online at Safari
More writing