TomWaltz wrote:
it's pricey for casual reading
Lately, it has been suggested that mine is a "pricey" book.
That is a correct observation. My book is pricey for casual readers but an incredible brgain for anyone making money from Archicad images.
I have studio bookshelves filled with fifty and sixty dollar books written for bozos that look great but never progress to real world solutions. [For example: the sophisticated (but primarily monochrome) "Digital Lighting and Rendering"] Sort of like the Archicad demonstration where the guy builds a little house and it all renders fast and you think it will be great. Then you try to assemble a 600 unit apartment complex with all the furniture and refractive glass.
So when it came time to write my own book [not a book purchased/subsidized for you by Graphisoft like last time where they made the illustrations too small as an economy move and ruined it] it was going to have something suitable for working Archicad users to apply in solving real problems with real complexities and address user confusions. I wanted it to be like the cigarette receptacle at the ChristChurch Train Station:
No Rubbish!
That was a challenge because like for all of you, LightWorks arrived on MY desk without much warning or documentation. Even Graphisoft's own illustrations displayed incompetence (black soffits).
The solutions in the book are all from my second album - the one written quickly while on tour rather than my FIRST album, the one with the songs I wrote since I was a teenager and finally got the recording contract. That was pressure.
The other thing I wanted to avoid was waste. It costs $30. to send a book from Canada to New Zealand. But that book can weigh a kilo. SO, I wanted to make a book heavy enough to justify that usurious shipping cost. That meant correctly sized illustrations and
CONTENT.
And I needed to make some money since it meant stopping everything else for six months to figure out LightWorks and write about it. And funding the printing.
CONTENT.
The other pricing factor is the market. Any publisher looks at a project promising sales of less than 10,000 books and laughs because they can't earn costs. My first more-or-less-given-away-by-Graphisoft book has yet to sell 3000 copies, so anyone who writes for Archicad has a small market indeed. The price reflects this small market.
My decision was to deliver a comprehensive, no-nonsense book with real solutions for real illustrators. something with answers to questions like continuous directional lighting that Gareth Organ Maker needs to know. Too bad his boss is so cheap because with the cost of hardly one hour of billable time, this book pays back quickly. Makes you wonder if Gareth's boss is an idiot: he DOES do the hiring.
The other decision was that I would look after my audience - the Archicad 10 supplement being a prime example.
So that ends up being a full book for $90. not half or 1/4 of a book for sixty dollars with no ongoing support. Or a pamphlet that is full of superficiality and error. Or a wildly overpriced DVD, say.
I get fan letters about this book.
Plain cover = Fantastic content.
Even if you use only OpenGL, there's two tricks in the book for you - one for translucent glazing that you should try.
Dwight Atkinson
Noemi Balogh
