Slowing Down as the Summer Ends

Well, the summer doesn't officially end for almost a month, but it feels as if it is ending this weekend. My daughter heads back to college tomorrow and school is starting back up for some local kids. Camera guidebooks are not selling too well at the moment, at least not the ones I'm involved with. I'm hoping it's just a late-summer lull as people finish their last week of vacation and get ready for the Labor Day weekend.

I have gotten several things done lately; my new, professionally-designed web site is up and running nicely; it's still at whiteknightpress.com, but now it has a much cleaner look. My new book, Photographer's Guide to the Panasonic Lumix LX3, is available there in paperback through links to Amazon.com and camerabooks.com, and the PDF version is also available through my site. The paperback and PDF versions of  Photographer's Guide to the Leica D-Lux 4 are also available through the site.  The experience of selling the PDF versions has worked out fairly well. This past week I had two or three customers who e-mailed me about having problems downloading the PDF after they had paid for it, but those were quickly resolved. The downloading system, using fastspring.com, has worked very well overall, and fastspring's technical support has been very responsive and helpful.


I have found it interesting to see the locations of the buyers of the PDF versions of the books. Quite a few have been international buyers.  Here are some of the locations for the recent purchasers of the PDFs: besides various U.S. states, I have had buyers from Spain, the United Kingdom, Singapore, the Netherlands, Russia, Israel, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Oman, Cyprus, France, Sweden, and Portugal. Sales of the print versions of the books have been tapering off lately, which I suppose is not surprising given that the new version of the Panasonic camera, the Lumix DMC-LX5, has recently started shipping, at least in Canada and the United Kingdom. I have placed an order for one myself, and hope the U.S. shipments will start soon. I do have a tentative plan to write a new book about the LX5, and possibly a new book about the Leica version of that camera, assuming that Leica eventually does produce one, which presumably would be called the Leica D-Lux 5.

Well, that's the update for now. I have also been working on books with David Busch, and the latest one, on the Sony A550 and A500 DSLR models, has recently started selling on Amazon.com and elsewhere. I'll try to do more frequent updates to this blog as things continue to develop.