Thanks to Tom Waltz who has been a long term supporter of my work (to the extent that he's brought me in twice to his firm to give my seminar)
It is somewhat irksome to be told that your book is too expensive. Especially when the person has never seen the quality of my product or reviewed the depth of the study that went into it.
The US$115.00 price includes international shipping, a value of nearly $30. including packaging. Oddly enough, most overseas buyers opt for the faster courier option adding $60. to that amount. Still seems like a bargain to them.
My book is full color, laid out dense with information and 208 pages in length. Unlike so many cheaper books dominated by oversized illustrations and plenty of designer's "white space,"[ie: "nothingness"] this book is full of lessons derived from real life illustration work, not college kidstuff. There's no doubt that if you use LightWorks in your daily routine that this book will pay itself back in no time.
The business challenge is Archicad's tiny user base. If you were to consider making an Archicad book, how many sales would you expect to make? How would you assess the business risk? How would you pay yourself to write a book on a technology new to Archicad? Unlike, say, my first book that merely recounted experiences, this book was written as I learned how to employ the new rendering engine. It was written for professional people with real problems to solve and needed to deliver solutions for professionals. Don't buy this book on a whim.
And of course, it was my duty to make this book. If not me, who else? When Greg Conyngham suggested that I write the "LightWorks in Archicad" book, it was just after we had seen Graphisoft's pitiiful LightWorks documentation during the Beta testing. Somebody had to do someting or LightWorks was going to be a disaster [not that it almost is, considering the lack of feature implementation]. Since Greg owns CADGarage, he sees many hi-quality books. We agreed that $90 was an appropriate price for a book that Archicad users could truly benefit from, considering that Graphisoft's documents show LightWorks making black soffits - an amateur's mistake. This was mid-summer 2004. From then until completing the book in September of 2005, everything i did in Archicad was to develop and research how to use the LightWorks engine for professional results.
So, if you are considering writing an Archicad book, look out. You can expect to write for for a fraction of the audience any other author expects and unfair criticism of your price because "Graphisoft should have made better documentation for free."
And they should have made better documents AND they should have made a better implementation of LightWorks! But they didn't. Once you have my book or attend my seminar, you will have the setups you need to be effective in LightWorks AND, based on the typical skills i see posted on this forum, readers will have a much better understanding of how to render illustrations. It's a bargain.
I still have few books left, so if you want to learn more about LightWorks and Photorendering Tricks, don't miss this book.
Dwight Atkinson