Any more books in the pipeline?

[Grenou]

As you can see, the Gary Bouton book on Xara Xtreme has been much loved!
I pre-ordered it from Amazon when I found out there was a book coming :-)

Are there any more books in the pipeline?

Grenou

[gwpriester]

The problem with books like this is they take about a year to research, write, edit, and get into the market, and by the time they book comes out, it is close to if not already out of date.

If you're Gary Bouton and you have had some best-selling Photoshop books, and CorelDRAW and a few other applications, you can make a few bucks. But it is a tremendous amount of work for what turns out more often than not to be your meager advance on royalties, and that's about it.

[mact]

<<The problem with books like this is they take about a year to research, write, edit, and get into the market, and by the time they book comes out, it is close to if not already out of date.
>>

This could explain the Corel Draw tutorials out of Cave Creek, Arizona are now all DVD productions<G>

Still, From my observations over the last near-30 years, most such tomes are simply updated versions of the last edition. Which is not to deny the work and organization required to kick out a new version.

[gwpriester]

Foster Coburn who does the Cave Creek productions is a long time CorelDRAW author who started his own company a billion ages ago.

But web based material and/or video tutorials are quicker, you do not have to go through the multiple editing levels, and thus more current.

[Grenou]

Hehe, it's hard reading DVDs in bed! I can't stick stickers on the important bits.
Anyway, hubby might complain :-)

Grenou

[Gare]

Hi Grenou—

As Gary P. replied, the issue of timeliness is one the editorial board at a publisher considers when a new revision of software comes out. That's not exactly the reason why McGraw-Hill decided against letting my write a version 6, 7, and so on Official Guide for Xara, making the book what they call a "series" instead of a "one of".

The Xara Xtreme 5 Official Guide didn't get picked up again because it didn't sell enough units to impress the Editorial Board. I knew it was a risk when I proposed the book to the editors, and I shopped the Official Guide to Xara for a good ten years, getting "thanks but no thanks" from no less than 6 publishers until one of McGraw-Hill's executive editors agreed to take a chance on a full colour book about a program not distributed by Adobe Systems.

Here's the deal: Hollywood and book publishers like "the sure thing"—a book that is guaranteed to help balance balance sheets before it's even written. And in a limited way of thinking, if a publisher goes after a title about the #1 selling software brand, they believe they won't lose money, just like Hollywood believes that if you do a remake of a popular movie, it's guaranteed to clean up in the box office.

This book didn't sell poorly. It just didn't surpass a fairly arbitrary expectation by the publisher to clean up at the booksellers'.

++++++++++++++++++

The short answer (thanks for not touching that dial) is: no, there is practically no chance that McGraw-Hill will ask Gary Bouton to write an updated version of this book.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And oh, Other Gary? The main reason why Roger Stewart at McGraw-Hill took a chance on the Official Guide to Xara was because he saw what I did with the CorelDRAW Official Guide after Steve Bain declined to write another edition. Corel wanted the title out there, it continues to be a good business deal for me, and the perk was that it let me get the editors over at M-H see The World's Best-Kept Secret in Drawing Programs, they were blown away by examples I flipped them of Valerie's work, and yours, and Ron's, and Alan Burns', and mine.

It was an experience, and one of the poorer-selling books I've taken on, but I have absolutely no regrets and quite literally it was a labor of love. I write books, I thought our community could use a guide, the Photoshop series pays the rent, QED I was up for doing something more intimate and less commercially solid for a change.

There's always self-publishing, and eBooks as alternate routes for creating future books on Xara, however, the opportunity to work in video, and with the Xara Xone 1.) I think provides a nice, continuing distro route for teaching and 2.) Xara's documentation has historically been very good, and I absolutely didn't want to write an alternative Owner's Manual when I got the green light to write the Guide.

The book is primarily how to create neat artwork, and secondarily how to find a pen tool, you know?

My gut tells me that people don't want to "learn Xara" nearly as much as they want to be able to turn out a piece of artwork using Xara as the best, fastest vehicle... that satisfies a level of self-expression within them.

My Best,

Gary

[Grenou]

-snip-

My gut tells me that people don't want to "learn Xara" nearly as much as they want to be able to turn out a piece of artwork using Xara as the best, fastest vehicle... that satisfies a level of self-expression within them.

My Best,

Gary

I can't answer for other Xara users, but as is often the case, not just with Xara, users prefer clicking to reading.

I have, as you can see, read your book from cover to cover (it arrived from Amazon with the small tear in it, I didn't do that, but as the words hadn't changed, I didn't worry about it :-) )
I wanted to thank you for writing it, it and you are brilliant :-)

Grenou

[Gare]

That's very kind of you, Grenou, thank you. When I first began writing for publishers in 1991, we didn't really have the internet—just Compuserve, and I'd get perhaps a physical letter twice a year from readers.

It's nice to have this forum to exchange ideas, and I'd like to redirect this to an area on The Xara Xone where I set up a comments thread for the book here.

My Best,

Gary