As I mentioned a few days ago in another blog post, I'm writing the last few pages and editing my book on Delphi 2007 for Win32. The book will be titled "Delphi 2007 Handbook" and (unless I find a better last minute deal) will be available on Lulu.com, a print-on-demand system. The book is quite different from the Mastering books I wrote in the past. It is not an all-encompassing tome like the Mastering, providing an overall introduction to Delphi. The new book, instead, covers only features added to the product since Delphi 7, and focuses in particular on Delphi 2006 and 2007. The overlap with Mastering Delphi 7 is non-existent. That with Mastering Delphi 2005 minimal.

Being a Delphi 2007 book, it will cover Win32 development, with no material on .NET. As usual there are tons of examples with full source code. This is the table of contents:

• 1: The Delphi 2007 IDE
• 2: Code Templates and Refactoring
• 3: Projects Management and MSBuild
• 4: The Debugger
• 5: The Delphi Language (Recent Updates)
• 6: Core RTL Changes
• 7: Changes in the VCL
  
• 8: Memory Management (and Robust Applications)
• 9: Windows Vista and the Delphi 2007 VCL
• 10: Database Support and DBX4
• 11: InstallAware and Other Tools
• 12: Upgrading Projects to Delphi 2007
• Appendixes

Not all chapters have the same size and importance, but this list should give you an idea of the content. Page count should be around 250 page. I'm being helped by an editor (for a small fee) and a couple of tech reviewers (for free).

This is the first book I self publish and the first I publish on Lulu. Until this morning I though of getting a regular ISBN to take advantage of a formal distribution, including Amazon and the like. Today I read the agreement in more details and found out that this will eat up a large chuck of royalties. I was thinking of pricing the book at 36.50 in US dollars (about 27 Euros). Now this was based an a complex calculation starting with how much money I'd like to make on each copy sold. Using distribution services, half of the money goes to the distributor and (keeping the same price) my royalty becomes less than one third of the total. So I'll have to sell three times as much to make the same. At the opposite, if I want to keep my original royalty I'll have to price the book over 60 US dollars, a little too much for a 250-pages book in my opinion.

So it might as well end up that the book will be available only on Lulu. This will imply limited marketing also from many friends, as they cannot claim their Amazon referral fees by linking the books on their sites. But, again, this will me way more money from me for a much smaller price for readers. I think I'm ready to take the risk... but suggestions are welcome.

PS. You might say you don't care how much money I make, but ultimately, the more I make the more books I'll write in the future. If I make too little, I won't publish the other (more advanced) books I'm partially working on.