Yesterday’s contest announcement raised a question from quite a few people: “Why don’t old blog posts about the books count for this contest?”

Is it because I want bigger royalty checks? Is it that I want to be more “famous”?

Nope. I couldn’t care less about the royalty checks. And I don’t need to be more famous than I already am.

I just want to write more books.

To do this, I need to sell more copies of the two I already have out.

See, book buyers (Amazon, B&N, Borders, etc) look at the sales numbers for previous titles by an author when deciding how many copies of a new book to buy. This makes perfect sense, of course, but it means that in order for me to write a new book, I need to sell more of the two I already have.

Designing the Obvious has been selling well (it’s been on the Amazon bestseller list a number of times), but Designing the Moment is still very new and hasn’t yet sold enough copies for my publisher to pitch another new Hoekman book.

To sell more copies of the current books, I need to generate new buzz, hence the rule about old blog posts. I need new blog posts.

So why is it that I’m so desperate to get things moving?

Right now, I’m attempting to work out deals for 3 different books, all of which have the potential to become must-have resources for web professionals for years to come. I’m that confident about all 3 of them.

But I can’t get another solo book published until I sell more copies of the current two.

So, if you’ve read either (or both) of the first two books, and you’d like to read more from me, please …. go tell someone about Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment right now. The sooner we get the sales numbers we need, the sooner I can get started on the next book. And the next. And the next.

Thanks for understanding.

Posted by Robert on July 10th, 2008