Perl publishing and attracting new developers

[Joel Bernstein]

On 18 September 2013 15:50, gvim <gvimrc at gmail.com> wrote:

> None, but what does that have to do with the question/concern I raised?


Again, I seriously wonder if you're trolling, but since this seems a
difficult concept: where do you think books come from? Without people
proposing them, they don't get written. If you want more books, have you
considered writing one? Someone has to. I'll expand on this below.

As far as I can tell from talking to authors and publishers, the amount of
work a book requires (and do note that e.g. Packt have released books which
had skimped on the required work and as such read like bad first drafts
rather than finished titles) is not adequately compensated by the author's
cut of the sales that even a popular Perl title manages. This is the major
reason why publishers aren't queueing up to produce more books.
Additionally many of the key titles were written years ago and haven't
required updating. So the chances of a Perl book selling well are small. At
the very least you need an author prepared to make no money and give up
significant time to produce the content, and a publisher prepared to devote
editing/typesetting/etc time to producing a book that will generate little
to no profit. Basically it's a small market that requires anybody who wants
to enter it to give up a profit motive or any reasonable price on their
free time.

Is that what you were asking?

/joel