With all the current buzz over Blackstone (the next version of ColdFusio MX), I decided to shoot an email over to my editor at O'Reilly to gauge their interest in having me write the 3rd edition of my book Programming ColdFusion MX.

Well, I heard back from him today, and it looks like they are going to pass on a new edition. I'd like to say that I was crushed by their decision, but honestly, I'm a little relieved. It was hard work turning out two books over the past few years, each as the sole author while maintaining a full-time job, National Guard service, and a marriage (maybe a bit of a social life too). The first edition of my book ended up selling about 9,000 copies after the majority of the returns were in. Given that an author pulls in 10% of what the publisher sells the book to retailers for, this translated to apprx $2 a copy. Do the math and $18k looks like a nice bit of pocket change - until you also realize that the taxes on that come to apprx 40%. Then take the 1500+ hours I put into the first edition and you can see it didn't amount to much more than minimum wage! I'm fine with that, though, as I didn't write the first edition to make money. I wrote it because I used ColdFusion every day, and I loved sharing my enthusiasm for web application development with CF.

When O'Reilly asked me to write the 2nd edition for CF MX, I was a little hesitant because of the amount of time it took to do the first edition (almost 2 years). I relented and managed to squeeze it out after the 6.1 release after investing about 1000 hours (yes, I'm rounding a bit). It was a fairly major rewrite as CFMX was a huge improvement over CF 5. Lots of new features and revisions added about 250 pages to the book, bringing it in at around 1100 pages.

That brings me to today. Programming ColdFusion MX, 2nd. edition is the second best selling ColdFusion MX book (at the register as it goes), behind Ben's CFMX WACK. Given that it's only sold around 5,000 copies or so in the past year, that's pretty sad, and I can see why O'Reilly isn't interested in doing a third edition. It isn't that the book isn't good (it's gotten many positive reviews), and I realize that the market for technical books is saturated and not in the best of shape, I guess I'm just a little sad (not bitter) that the ColdFusion community is losing the backing of O'Reilly given their reputation in the technical community. I always felt that having an O'Reilly book for a particular technology (even if I weren't the author) put some weight behind it.

So, it's on this note that I'd like to thank all of you who have purchased and read my book. I've recieved many kind emails over the years and have enjoyed corresponding with each and every one of you. I'd also like to take this opportunity to urge all ColdFusion developers to support the other authors of ColdFusion books out there. If we really want ColdFusion adoption to continue to spread, there has to be good material available for the developers who want to learn it.