Someone may write a technical book for a niche community. The book may help others, build a portfolio etc. It doesn't need to earn lots of sales to be satisfying or useful.
Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
81–90 of 143 posts
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me Plate Up seems probably as similar to Overcooked as Mafia is to GTA (maybe even less similar, actually). Yeah both are sort of about a similar thing with a similar third-person view but after that similarities end. If you don't care about a genre all games in it are the same to you. Definitely no need to be discouraged if a game you want to make already exists, but "same game with different polish" is not the c…
I've played Overcooked 1 and 2 with my girlfriend, just played the Plate Up demo with her, and I think you're right. Mario and Sonic games prob look the same to ol' gramps up there, too. Overcooked has specific arcade levels each with their own infuriating gimmick. You either can beat it or you cant. Plate Up, despite having similar mechanics (place food onto stove to cook it), is quite different. You have to take or…
Plateup at the top level is a simple cooking and upgrading your kitchen game.
It can also quickly turn into a Factorio-type game once you start automating the cooking of the food. Which sounds boring, if all you’re doing is serving, but it then turns into a game almost similar to Guitar Hero once you get into the overtime rounds because you’re having to put into muscle memory all of your actions with higher intensity in the later rounds.
Then there’s the insanity of automating cooking /and/ serving.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#83I forget if there’s a term for this, but I once read (and subsequently discovered) that a large portion of disagreements are simply because people are working with different definitions for things. This seems like an example of that: depending on how you define “book” these claims are accurate or not.
Yes, I've also struggled to pause many disagreements just to clarify terms, ironically because the other person didn't get what I was doing since there is no common word for this sort of disagreement. If anyone has a good one, please chime in.
Sounds like a version of what I've heard called "talking past eachother".
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Semantic mismatch? Miscontextualization?
I like the suggestions, I do think it need to be a bit shorter to be viral. Riffing on this, how does "we've misdefined this" sound?
Why not just “let’s define ours terms so we don’t talk passed each other? What do you mean by X?”
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" There's a good book on this called "Damned Lies and Statistics" that I recommend to people.[1,2] [1]: https://archive.org/details/damnedliesstatis00best [2]: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520274709/damned-lies-and-s...
There's also a much earlier "How to Lie with Statistics" (published in 1954). I read it in high school (45 years ago) https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff-ebook...
I read it like 2 years ago and was very impressed how relevant it was. 10/10 required reading.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#86I really don't like "fact-checking" articles like this which don't contain many useful facts, only pedantry. The first comment (by Kristen McLean from NPD BookScan) is much more interesting than the article itself: >>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more >>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies >>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies >>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-1…
The author's first point was that anything with a unique ISBN is treated as a different book.
> From a sales tracking perspective, books are published in multiple formats, each with different ISBNs. I wrote one novel, but from a title count POV I actually published 4 books: hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook. Other books have even more formats (mass market version, movie tie-in editions, etc.) and because they all have different ISBNs, they all have different sales figures.
I would like to see stats that collapse across different versions of (largely) the same text (including new versions or editions of text books, and re-releases that include some special commentary, etc.)
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#87I forget if there’s a term for this, but I once read (and subsequently discovered) that a large portion of disagreements are simply because people are working with different definitions for things. This seems like an example of that: depending on how you define “book” these claims are accurate or not.
Yes, I've also struggled to pause many disagreements just to clarify terms, ironically because the other person didn't get what I was doing since there is no common word for this sort of disagreement. If anyone has a good one, please chime in.
I think it's called semantic disagreement. I have a background in philosophy, and I suspect a lot of disagreements are the result of disagreements over the meanings of a word, and the fact that we are using words differently is so very easily missed when we do disagree.
For example, we can argue endlessly over whether esports are 'sport', but it's really quite simple. You tell me what you mean by 'sport', and then I'll tell you whether or not esports are a sport.
In some cases, it might be a little weirder. For example, because of the discovery of the nature of visible light, 'light' now has more than one meaning attached, and these meanings are incompatible. If it's dark in a room, we might say "there is no light", but on the other hand it could be bathed in EM waves outside the visible spectrum (such as the cosmic background radiation), in which case it's full of 'light'. Light has these two meanings: one to do with whether I can see or not, and the other to do with EM waves. Context can help determine which meaning is being used.
As we grow and learn and communicate, we pick up how words are used by other people, and we try to match our usage to the way everyone else uses these word. But sometimes we don't pick up quite the same meanings even though there's significant overlap (semantic extension). There lies confusion and a great deal of pointless disagreement. I think it's mostly pointless (from a philosophical perspective) to debate about what a word should mean. If there's disagreement, stipulate how you're going to use words, or invent new ones for the conversation, and move on.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the suggestions, I do think it need to be a bit shorter to be viral. Riffing on this, how does "we've misdefined this" sound?
Why not just “let’s define ours terms so we don’t talk passed each other? What do you mean by X?”
#letsdefineourtermssowedonttalkpassedeachother?whatdoyoumeanbyx? is sorta hard to type out, a shorthand term may lend itself to a common understanding of the situation. Like "a picture of yourself" got coined as a selfie, it seems obvious now through constant use, but there was a time when the phenomenon existed and we had a lexical gap in describing it.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#89My car broken, so I had to take a long intercity bus trip, for the first time in 15 years. After a short stop in a station, the driver ignited the bus again, but he forgot to turn the internal lights system on - so I couldn't read. I waited a few minutes, but he didn't turn it on, so I had to get up to ask him in the cabin. Coming back, that's when I realized mine was the one and only light on: none of the other 100 passengers had it, so they couldn't possibly be reading, unless electronically. 15 years before, I did remember, it would be at least 3 lights on most of the times, tops 5, but being the only one made me feel lonely.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I can't think of any dev I've worked with who didn't at least have some reference books handy. Though to be fair, it's been 10 years or so since I've worked in-person with people on a daily basis, so maybe my impression is just way out of date. I still buy the occasional programming book, but nothing like I used to now that we have all the online resources.
I think O'Reilly has really tried to adapt to the online revolution. I don't know how well it's worked.
Thinking over my last few programming book purchases, they're really more or less textbooks. I get them for the structure they provide to in-depth learning, which usually doesn't work so well with online materials.