Wrox: Yes, we do have the mojo back thank you very much

O'Reilly publishing does some fantastic data mining work on the bookscan sales data for the computer book market. And Tim O'Reilly does a nice job summarizing it occasionally for public viewing. Thanks Tim.

His most recent analysis of Q1 2006 shows Wiley (the Wrox parent company), O'Reilly, and APress (among a few others) outperforming the market growth. And within that he showed some really impressive growth numbers for Wrox.

Now while I'm pleased to see this, the numbers for Wrox tell the picture a little better than it might be for a full year. These numbers show a perfect confluence of hits from VS2005 being new and Ajax, and VS 2005 book sales will not remain torid like this forever.

But, I do take issue with someone he quoted in his article talking about the improvement in the APRess reputation saying about Wrox "Wrox won't ever get that rep back, if it ever had it."

That's where I'm optimistic. Sales will go up and down with software releases and technology bubbles and busts. But customers and reviewers are consistently praising Wrox's renewed quality. Like this:

A customer on Professional Ajax: "The best AJAX book so far."

A customer on Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management: "I can't recommend this book enough.... I wish I had this book 2 years ago when I started looking at the Membership and Role API's in .NET 2.0. "

A reviewer on CSS Instant Results, one of the first books in our new Instant Results series: "This book promises, and it delivers... In a nutshell, this is a book I wish had existed when I was first learning CSS."

And finally, while I could go on and on with quotes, here's this from the end of a VBUG review of several Professional .NET 2.0 Generics, one of several ASP.NET 2.0/.NET 2.0/VS 2005 books they had nice things to say about: "It is good to know that Wrox books are back and in good hands with Wiley."

We just recently passed the 100th new book or new edition we've published since we bought those 35 Wrox titles 3 years ago. We publish several more every month.

Is any of them perfect? Nope. Perfection is the enemy of getting things done.

Are some of them the best book on the topic? Many of our customers think so.

Could they all be better? Of course. Every editor and author works on every book to make it better than the previous one.

Will every customer like every book? No, of course not, but I'm still personally disappointed every time I see errors or reasonable complaints about my books.

Why is our quality improving? To quote Steve Ballmer "developers, developers, developers." Or to interpret that quote: Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, Stefan Schackow, Nicholas Zakas, Dave Sussman, Chris Hart, Chris Ullman, Tod Golding, Joe Duffy, and so on. Every one of these top selling books is built around a fantastic developer or developer team writing the book. And better tech editors too. I'm getting great feedback from authors and can fairly easily tell from forum posts which tech editors are the best and which aren't.

So, I'm happy to see that Apress's rep is improving and O'Reilly's rep is strong, as always. But Wrox? We're on the right track too. Competition is good for the customer, so we'll just keep getting better.

Comments

[Cristian Darie]

Jim, just wanted to let you know that I liked the optimistic message, and the neutral reaction to Tim's posts.