THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Hey, Tango,

Good luck to you guys with the new edition.  I can’t imagine that you’ll be making anything close to what it’s worth ... but I’ve already bought one, so I can’t be much more use financially.

I see you got a new five-star review at amazon.com, that can only help ... 

Phil

Thanks Phil.  We’ve actually gotten far more rave reviews on Amazon from our shipping (42) than from our book (1)!

As for profits, I’m sure we won’t make anything close to what we already made (which itself is around minimum wage).  As well, while we get to sniff our profits immediately with the self-publishing route, we won’t see profits from the regular publisher for a year.  Book publishing is a terrible business.  Maybe I’ll write a how-to for anyone still crazy enough to aspire to this.

We haven’t seen any dropoff in the last few months (which must mean that word-of-mouth is good), but it’s just time for us to get out of the distribution and quarterly-taxes-reporting business, and let someone else try to market it for the masses.

Heh, I’m in that group that rated the shipping but not THE BOOK itself. Eventually I’ll get around to posting that I think it contains a more sophisticated analysis than Baseball Between the Numbers, but that the level of sophistication does nothing to take away from THE BOOK’s readability. It’s an impressive achievement and I certainly offer my congratulations.

Thanks for the kind words.  I have to get around to updating the reviews page on this site. 

Reviews on Amazon is now at 2, with a very nice one by Eric Van:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B000EW872M

We’ve gotten a good flurry of orders, so thanks to everyone for their support.

I encourage all bloggers who have read it to write about THE BOOK, be it good or bad.

bump

awsytn, just noticed that you took the time to post a review on Amazon.  Thank you!

Bump again.

Hi,

I want to ask is it possible for you to publish the digital edition? (like pdf file type) Thanks.

That would be up to the publisher, but I seriously doubt it.

Glad to support the site, you guys do a great job and are right up there with Harball Times in my favorite baseball sites.

Cool, thanks!  It’s much appreciated.

The Bloglines reader doesn’t reproduce strikeout characters, and so it looks like you have 47393530 new books left.  I was about to say, you guys are going to be RICH!  But then I came here and saw the correct number.

Hey, while I’m here, I might as well beg.  If any of you three wants to write up one of the book’s studies for “By the Numbers,” we’d be interested. We’re desperately short of material.  You can even include a little promo for the new version if you like.

Actually, I may post a request on my blog for writers from other sabermetrics sites.  We may get an issue of BTN out next week, but even after that, we’ll be a couple of months behind.

Phil, I just noticed your last entry.  Must have missed it over the holidays.  My issue is that waiting months for publication isn’t very appealing.  The value of a book is it’s tangible and all-encompassing, which is why I was able to accept waiting years to present the results of the research.

Anyway, you could consider a paradigm shift, as a well-organized online journal is preferable.

Hi, Tango,

Agreed that when you have access to good online forums with good readers, instant online publication is better in many ways.

One thing about an online journal is that it might still take a little while to publish, especially if we still do editing and peer review.  I wonder if a hybrid, where we go online quickly, get feedback, and revise into a more formal, now-peer-reviewed online journal might not work.  But that assumes authors would be willing to revise and reformat.

What did you have in mind by a well-organized online journal?

Phil

If I had my druthers, I’d merge BeyondTheBoxScore, HardballTimes, BaseballProspectus, ByTheNumbers, and create a “sabermetrics” division.  Plenty of smart resourceful guys in the bunch who could be involved in a great sabermetrics ship. 

In essence, take By The Numbers, and expand it by going online, and attracting the great online talent out there. 

Index all the online articles (similar to the tags on my blog, or the tags you find on all the blogger blogs), and provide abstracts or summaries to each article.  Become a really good library.

It would be great if such a “sabermetric digest” of research articles could be published, including (a) new research (peer reviewed), (b) republishing of some already published or classic but hard to obtain stuff (including some old usenet material) (and amended, updated by original author if they so choose), and an (c) index of research by topic/author/date.

I would add, however, that there is a very strong tendency for people to cite (if they cite at all) only stuff they find on-line, and so interesting and great chapters in books often get ignored or slighted (and often the books are out of print). It would be good at the very least to get those chapters into an online category (c) as listed above.

Book now shipping from publisher. 

Book in transit to Amazon, and will start shipping from there any day now.