Next Year Already!

Alas, book sales are dropping off and it looks like we're pretty much out of steam for the first edition of Poor Leo's Computer Almanac. Que will have sold 35,000 books in five months which I'm told is very respectable. Thanks so much to those of you who bought copies! On the strength of this year's sales, the publisher is planning a first printing of 50,000 for next year's edition. I hope to sell even more. I can tell you that it's going to be much better with a lot more content. Laura and I are working our buns off on it already. She's doing the "this date in history" stuff and I'm collating existing web content and writing a bunch of new material. I'm using Movable Type, this blog software, to create an online database that she and I can use to collaborate on the book. (She's in the South Bay and I'm in the North Bay so we can't work face-to-face.) In fact, I've just imported nearly 3,000 web articles from Call for Help and The Screen Savers into the Poor Leo blog. I'll use Movable Type to edit, categorize, and assign articles to each day of the year. MT's calendar interface will make it easy to access one day at a time. Laura will add her daily bits to each day. And then I can export it to a big text file and use Perl to process it for the publishers. We're scheduled to finish the book by the end of July to get it into bookstores by September. The new title is tentatively, "Leo Laporte's 2003 TechTV Almanac." Meanwhile, if you'd like me to autograph the 2002 edition, send your copy to me with a postage paid self-addressed mailer to: Leo Laporte TechTV 650 Townsend St San Francisco, CA 94103 I'll sign your copy and pop it right back in the mail. I've done this for several dozen folks so far and it seems to work pretty well. I can't be responsible for copies lost in the mail, but as long as you're willing to take that chance and pay the return postage, I'm glad to put my John Hancock on it.