Thank You Readers, Vendors: 20,000 Books Sold

Thanks to all the readers and many industry vendors who bought copies of my books as giveaways, my publisher Focal Press has recently sold over 20,000 copies of all the books in my series since the first one was published four years ago.

While some may think that writing books is a great way to make a lot of money, it's not. For me, the incentive was to try and get as much information on our industry out to as many people as possible and make it easy for others in the industry to get published. Many thanks to all of the authors who made the "Hands On Guide Series" possible including Steve Mack, Joe Follansbee, Lionel Felix, Damien Stolarz, Stefan Richter, Jan Ozer, and Jason Fincanon.

I've learned a lot about an industry that four years ago, I knew nothing about. If we think the online video industry is crazy, just try working in the publishing space. For me, it's also been very interesting to see how the dissemination of information has changed over the past four years. Today, writing a book about this industry seems like a waste of time since you could just blog about it in real time. Things change so fast and by the time you write a book, get it printed and published, six months has already gone by. Blogs are clearly making an impact in the publishing space replacing print and except for technical books, many business books have since being replaced by blogs about the subject. Even for me, I have no new books in the works and don't plan to as the reach, exposure and syndication I get from the blog far surpasses anything I can do in print. On a small scale, I have seen first hand the shift that has taking place from print to online.

As a thank you to everyone who has made the books a success, I'll be giving away all of my personal remaining inventory for free. Simply leave a comment in this post telling me which book you want (see the list to choose from here) and I'll pick a bunch of folks at random and mail out copies until they are gone.