Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

Back in 2001, my first book was published by McGraw-Hill. The PHP 4 Developer's Guide became an overnight mediocrity in a market that was being saturated with books for a development language that finally had legs. Every quarter I receive a royalty statement from the publisher indicating the amount of money I would have received for that quarter if they hadn't advanced me more than the book ever sold.

Yesterday I got my statement (click for full view):

As you can see, zero copies were sold in the United States, but somehow $165.90 in royalty sales was generated. Additionally the Serbian language version sold 46 copies in Croatia and generated $40.78. Finally the Polish language version sold 38 copies, generating $48.39. I've never actually figured out the algorithm for determining how much money I should get or how zero copies sold generates money (it happens all the time), but in the end I get a big fat check for $0.00 and a good chuckle.

However, I love finding out which languages the book was published in. Here is the list of the ones I've found so far:

• Simplified Chinese: PHP 4應用程式設計
• Hungarian: WEBVILÁG - PHP 4 FEJLESZTŐK KÉZIKÖNYVE I. KÖTET
• German: PHP 4 Praxisbuch
• French: Guide du Développeur PHP 4
• Russian: PHP 4. Руководство разработчика
• Polish: PHP4. Kompendium programisty
• Serbian: PHP4 Vodič za programere
• Portuguese: PHP 4 Guia do Programador