I just noticed on Lulu.com that today (or was it yesterday night?) my new book, Delphi 2007 Handbook , passed a relevant sale mark, 1,000 copies. When I wrote and self-published it, I was considering myself happy to sell 500 copies and considering a success to reach 1,000 copies in the book lifetime. The book did it in 7 months, becoming one of Lulu's bestsellers (currently holding position 31, the 3rd among computer books). Sales over the last couple of weeks have been slow, but they keep going and that's fine.

Beside self-congratulating and thanking those of you who bought the book, the reason of this post was to provide you with an overview of current and future book writing plans, considering there is still life and money in being an author, and an author of Delphi books. I have two books almost ready to roll out (they are going through a final revision):

• The printed and revised version of Essential Pascal, a book on the core language features that's been available for free in electronic version on my web site for a few years.
• A book introducing web 2.0 online communities from a not-so-technical point of view. I wrote this as part of a consulting assignment, will make it available to anyone interested.

This is the work almost done. Now for (near) future plans. I have plenty of ideas for new Delphi books, currently planned with no specific order:

• Tiburon Handbook, a book focused on the new version of Delphi and particularly Unicode. The plan is to have two books, a smaller volume covering what's new since Delphi 2007 and a larger tome embedding the 2007 Handbook in a single volume.
• A book on the VCL architecture, delving into many secrets of the "best framework for Win32 programming"
• A book on writing VCL components, mostly extracted from past works of mine
• A book on advanced Delphi OOP material
• A book on Delphi web development (client and server side)

Needless to say it will take me a couple of years to complete this plan, so some of the titles are likely to be dropped (well, unless I found extra economic incentives to focus on books and drop other development and consulting activities). I'm open to feedback, regarding which book to focus on first and what to cover.

And thanks again to all of you who bought the 2007 Handbook.

PS. I had to tweak my Atom feed from XHTML to HTML for the Google Reader to work as it became more strict in its XHTML conformance tests, as you can see in this thread.