Talk:What Color Is Your Parachute?

Capitalization Issue
Shouldn't the "Is" be capitalized in the title? It is a verb, after all. -Agur bar Jacé (talk) 14:54, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Maybe there should be a paragraph that actually describes what the book is about??? Just a thought!!!!!!

This is a stump, needs more content
This is a stump, needs more content. Summary paragraph or two; alternative books, etc. --Lance W. Haverkamp (talk) 17:10, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Number of copies printed versus sold
If 9 million copies are in print, how have 10 million been sold? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.63.212.87 (talk • contribs)

Racism?
What's with the color bit if not race? This should be explored 78.149.215.221 (talk) 10:19, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

A popular author in a different time
Bolles embraced the gig economy and temporary work as it roared to life in the 70s. (As did corporate America.) People started to believe in magic in the 1970s, or God, or being a conservative or something because the ugly things that they were seeing demanded some kind of answer. This was really an era that has never been analyzed deeply enough outside of energy shocks. The public started losing good paying careers and pensions and ended up living in their cars or sleeping on the street in ever greater numbers. What color were poor people's parachutes? Nobody really cared but "the poor should have found out if they were willing to do the leg work."

Today poor people aren't even being blamed for being lazy anymore. The "pull yourself by your own parachute types" of the past era are now openly militant towards the under-employable. No offense to Bolles but he was part of a destructive rise in social brutality borne from Christian revivalism. A dramatic description for sure, but look around today before and gasp at the fundamentalist indifference to massive US homeless populations some of whom are "fully" employed.

We need a better estimate for the number of copies sold ... it's probably 25M
The article says over 10M sold and gives a reference from 2010.

Here's another from 2009: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.biz/media/pdfs/TenSpeedPress.pdf

Or 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/jobs/what-color-is-your-parachute-is-still-going-strong.html

Or today, in 2020: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/605298/what-color-is-your-parachute-2020-by-richard-n-bolles/

It's like it got stuck in a time warp some time before 2009, and no more copies were sold, which is obviously nonsense.

I read an estimate that 850,000 copies are sold each year, which would make it an addition 9.35M copies sold. That would take it to around 19M copies sold in 2020, clearly "over 10M." A lot over.

The author estimated in 2009 that he has sales of around 10,000 / month or 120,000 / year:

http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/books

"What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers” has sold over 10,000,000 print copies.  More than ten thousand people buy the book each month."

If he is correct, and it kept selling at that rate (which is likely, or more) it's sold more than 10M + (11x120,000) = 10 + 15.84M = 25.84M.

Lauchlanmack (talk) 09:39, 21 April 2020 (UTC)