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Hey, can anybody say how much I can sell my car for if I promote it on Craigslist?
No, I'm not going to tell you what make or model, how old it is, what options it has, or even whether it runs ... just tell me how much I can expect to get for it.
Hopefully that little analogy will illustrate the problem somewhat. Aside from the extreme difficulty of predicting sales of any book -- even the experts can't get it right when they're the ones in charge of all the marketing -- it's impossible to predict the sales of a book one knows nothing about but the price. If you're selling the definitive book on AJAX programming, you'll probably sell a lot more than if you're selling the definitive book on the social behavior of an obscure species of wasp.
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