Our goal at Onyx Neon has always been to publish great books that real people ought to (and want to) read.
We're fortunate to have identified a couple of trends whose times have come, in Modern Perl: the book and recently in Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects. Yet one of the risks of identifying and publishing about a trend early is that sometimes you have to wait for the broader market to catch up to the early adopters.
Sometimes that means the best marketing strategy (in the case of Modern Perl: the book) is to give away electronic versions of the book (though if you want to purchase it from a brick and mortar store or from an electronic bookstore available on your device, be our guest). Other times, we rely on you, the people who've read it and know one or five or ten other people who'd benefit from reading it.
Maybe you're like me, in that you learn better with something tactile you can hold and touch and remember exactly where on the page you read that one little fact you need right now.
Either way, we know that you—our most devoted readers—are our best source of ideas (what do you want to read about?), our best source of feedback (what did we do right? what should we do better?), and our best evangelists. You've been great about telling others about us.
We'd like to expand that, in two ways.
First, while we can't lower our prices on electronic versions any further (free is free!), we can offer a discount for bulk orders. Any group that can put together an order for at least five books (any of our books!) will get an automatic 35% discount from the cover price. (Modern Perl for $23, Liftoff for $19, and so on).
Second, we'll give a better discount to any group that wants to take a box of books to a conference, seminar, or wherever. We've done this in the US (at Scale 9x in 2011) and in Europe, and it's worked well. The idea at Scale was to show how Perl 5 is vibrant and active and exciting—and to generate a little revenue for the Los Angeles Perl monger groups. (They made a little profit on each book; totally fine with us.)
If you're interested in either program, mail us at orders@onyxneon.com and we'll figure out what works best for both you and us.
