Jonathan Oxer
[Blog]
>> Real World / Second Life talk at Hitwise
Thu, Mar 20th 1:07am 2008 >> Linux
I was just putting together another bunch of Arduino hardware hacking kits tonight for a tutorial I'm running tomorrow at Hitwise, and remembered that I'd taken a photo of the first batch of kits being put together for LCA2008. It's kinda cool seeing so many Arduinos together in one place:
I've been getting even more requests for private tutorials and consulting gigs than usual recently, so now that Quickstart Guide to Google AdWords is out I'm thinking for maybe offering a 1/2 day or 1 day course on AdWords. Could be run either in-house or by bringing together people from different companies at a training facility with a bunch of computers, and it could be a lot of fun. If you're interested in that idea please drop me a line.
I was just putting together another bunch of Arduino hardware hacking kits tonight for a tutorial I'm running tomorrow at Hitwise, and remembered that I'd taken a photo of the first batch of kits being put together for LCA2008. It's kinda cool seeing so many Arduinos together in one place:
I've been getting even more requests for private tutorials and consulting gigs than usual recently, so now that Quickstart Guide to Google AdWords is out I'm thinking for maybe offering a 1/2 day or 1 day course on AdWords. Could be run either in-house or by bringing together people from different companies at a training facility with a bunch of computers, and it could be a lot of fun. If you're interested in that idea please drop me a line.
>> Writing a book, part 4: assisted self-publishing
Tue, Mar 11th 9:28pm 2008 >> Writing
In early 2007 I got to the point of needing another batch of How To Build A Website And Stay Sane printed: because I'd self-published it, I was doing all the printing myself and getting it bound in batches so I'd have stock to ship off to bookshops and sell directly to retail customers. That meant I had to pay out thousands of dollars personally every time a batch needed printing / binding, which I then slowly made back (with a small margin) as the batch was sold.
That sucked financially, and at the time that I needed more copies in early 2007 I simply didn't have thousands of dollars handy to cover the up-front costs of another batch. So I went looking for alternative production methods.
What I found were a bunch of "vanity publishers" that will publish your book for a fixed fee, no questions asked. They take care of assigning you an ISBN, designing the cover and internal layout, listing your title with Books In Print, and printing copies as required to supply to retailers. The up-front costs vary dramatically but a typical package might be about $600 for which you also get a few copies of the book yourself, and you can order copies of your own book at a discount.
That was closer to what I wanted, but still not quite there. I didn't want to pay a big fee up-front to have them do all the design work etc. I just wanted someone to do print-on-demand (called "POD" in the industry) so I wouldn't have to print copies of the book in batches and be out of pocket.
Something else I wanted was someone to act as a US-based distributor. A major issue I overlooked in my post about DIY self-publishing is that places like Amazon.com and B&N simply won't carry books that don't have a US distributor, so if you self-publish in Australia it's pretty much impossible to ever have your book listed on Amazon. As a result the first edition of Stay Sane could only be ordered online directly from me, and that's a problem I also wanted to fix.
I don't want to sound like a sales pitch for them, but in the end the best place I found for my particular requirements was a mob called Lulu. They're kinda like a vanity publisher, but with a very smooth and highly automated process that allows them to offer their service with no up-front fee because it pushes responsibility for book design onto the customer. Rather than having a package for say $600 that includes design, layout, an ISBN, distribution, and 10 "free" copies, they instead separate everything out into optional extras. You can sign up for $0, create a "project" (book), upload a PDF of the internal pages (following specific guidelines such as embedded fonts), design the cover using either your own artwork or theirs, set the retail price, and make the book available for order. At that point it's still cost $0. You can then buy copies of your own book at a discounted price direct from the Lulu site and allow members of the public to do the same at retail price, and royalties are periodically credited to you.
If you want more features, such as an ISBN so that it can be listed in Books In Print and made available via Amazon, you just pay an extra fee to Lulu and it's all taken care of. The general Lulu approach is to provide a self-service infrastructure that takes care of all the sucky, annoying bits about self-publishing so you don't have to care about them. It's like having a menu of publishing tasks and just picking the ones you want.
That was all fine and well, but I couldn't just transfer my existing ISBN to Lulu and go on as before. To have them listed as the publisher / distributor the book had to be re-published with one of their ISBNs, so I took that as an excuse to do a major update and release the Lulu version as the Second Edition. I ticked every option I could find and paid for a distribution package, and after a little while the book appeared on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and all the other usual online retailers.
One downside is that the printing options available are fairly limited. Obviously Lulu need their system to work hands-off from their point of view, so it's very much a "select the option and click 'next'" process as you work through the publishing wizard and there's no room for major creativity. In the first edition of Stay Sane I did all the internal printing myself with a colour die-sub printer, so it was full-colour throughout and printed on very smooth heavyweight low-acid satin-finish paper. There was no way I could get the same print quality through Lulu, at least not at a sane price, so the Second Edition looks far more down-market than the First Edition did. Because I didn't have to do everything myself though I could make the retail price lower so it worked out OK in the end.
The other downside is that the combination of print-on-demand + international shipping is really slow, and the shipping costs are high. From the time an order is placed in Australia it can be 2 weeks or so before the book arrives if you order it direct from Lulu. Luckily some retailers like Amazon.com pre-order a few copies so although it takes a long time for them to replenish their stock, as long as they have stock on hand they can get your book shipped out within hours instead of weeks.
With those little annoyances in mind, overall I'm pretty impressed by the whole Lulu approach. It's meant that I can simply stop caring about a lot of the things that used to be annoying about self-publishing. If you have a book written already and sitting in your computer it's literally only about an hour of work to have your book available online for sale with an ISBN assigned. Knowing personally how much pain it is to achieve that end result manually, I'm very impressed that Lulu have managed to automate the process to such an incredible degree. As you can tell I've turned into quite a fan!
A little while ago I started writing a brief AdWords guide for the benefit of some of my clients. It's the sort of thing that's created internally by businesses all the time: it's pretty common for tech businesses to produce white papers, technology briefs, product documentation, etc, etc. Typically they're written by an anonymous staff member and printed up on a laser printer, then comb-bound or wire-bound in batches. In slightly more up-market projects it'll be printed and perfect-bound (butted and glued, like a typical novel) with a glossy cover. But with my previous good experience with Lulu I decided that this time rather than going down the typical DIY path I'd just create a new Lulu project, upload the PDF, and end up with a proper book at the end. In fact it was *less* work to create the guide as a "real" book with an ISBN through Lulu than if I'd had it printed and bound locally! And now rather than being just another piece of corporate writing, I have another book that I can add to the list.
Unless I had very specific requirements I certainly wouldn't go the whole-hog DIY self-publishing approach again when there are places like Lulu that can take so much of the pain away.
Next installment: writing tools
In early 2007 I got to the point of needing another batch of How To Build A Website And Stay Sane printed: because I'd self-published it, I was doing all the printing myself and getting it bound in batches so I'd have stock to ship off to bookshops and sell directly to retail customers. That meant I had to pay out thousands of dollars personally every time a batch needed printing / binding, which I then slowly made back (with a small margin) as the batch was sold.
That sucked financially, and at the time that I needed more copies in early 2007 I simply didn't have thousands of dollars handy to cover the up-front costs of another batch. So I went looking for alternative production methods.
What I found were a bunch of "vanity publishers" that will publish your book for a fixed fee, no questions asked. They take care of assigning you an ISBN, designing the cover and internal layout, listing your title with Books In Print, and printing copies as required to supply to retailers. The up-front costs vary dramatically but a typical package might be about $600 for which you also get a few copies of the book yourself, and you can order copies of your own book at a discount.
That was closer to what I wanted, but still not quite there. I didn't want to pay a big fee up-front to have them do all the design work etc. I just wanted someone to do print-on-demand (called "POD" in the industry) so I wouldn't have to print copies of the book in batches and be out of pocket.
Something else I wanted was someone to act as a US-based distributor. A major issue I overlooked in my post about DIY self-publishing is that places like Amazon.com and B&N simply won't carry books that don't have a US distributor, so if you self-publish in Australia it's pretty much impossible to ever have your book listed on Amazon. As a result the first edition of Stay Sane could only be ordered online directly from me, and that's a problem I also wanted to fix.
I don't want to sound like a sales pitch for them, but in the end the best place I found for my particular requirements was a mob called Lulu. They're kinda like a vanity publisher, but with a very smooth and highly automated process that allows them to offer their service with no up-front fee because it pushes responsibility for book design onto the customer. Rather than having a package for say $600 that includes design, layout, an ISBN, distribution, and 10 "free" copies, they instead separate everything out into optional extras. You can sign up for $0, create a "project" (book), upload a PDF of the internal pages (following specific guidelines such as embedded fonts), design the cover using either your own artwork or theirs, set the retail price, and make the book available for order. At that point it's still cost $0. You can then buy copies of your own book at a discounted price direct from the Lulu site and allow members of the public to do the same at retail price, and royalties are periodically credited to you.
If you want more features, such as an ISBN so that it can be listed in Books In Print and made available via Amazon, you just pay an extra fee to Lulu and it's all taken care of. The general Lulu approach is to provide a self-service infrastructure that takes care of all the sucky, annoying bits about self-publishing so you don't have to care about them. It's like having a menu of publishing tasks and just picking the ones you want.
That was all fine and well, but I couldn't just transfer my existing ISBN to Lulu and go on as before. To have them listed as the publisher / distributor the book had to be re-published with one of their ISBNs, so I took that as an excuse to do a major update and release the Lulu version as the Second Edition. I ticked every option I could find and paid for a distribution package, and after a little while the book appeared on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and all the other usual online retailers.
One downside is that the printing options available are fairly limited. Obviously Lulu need their system to work hands-off from their point of view, so it's very much a "select the option and click 'next'" process as you work through the publishing wizard and there's no room for major creativity. In the first edition of Stay Sane I did all the internal printing myself with a colour die-sub printer, so it was full-colour throughout and printed on very smooth heavyweight low-acid satin-finish paper. There was no way I could get the same print quality through Lulu, at least not at a sane price, so the Second Edition looks far more down-market than the First Edition did. Because I didn't have to do everything myself though I could make the retail price lower so it worked out OK in the end.
The other downside is that the combination of print-on-demand + international shipping is really slow, and the shipping costs are high. From the time an order is placed in Australia it can be 2 weeks or so before the book arrives if you order it direct from Lulu. Luckily some retailers like Amazon.com pre-order a few copies so although it takes a long time for them to replenish their stock, as long as they have stock on hand they can get your book shipped out within hours instead of weeks.
With those little annoyances in mind, overall I'm pretty impressed by the whole Lulu approach. It's meant that I can simply stop caring about a lot of the things that used to be annoying about self-publishing. If you have a book written already and sitting in your computer it's literally only about an hour of work to have your book available online for sale with an ISBN assigned. Knowing personally how much pain it is to achieve that end result manually, I'm very impressed that Lulu have managed to automate the process to such an incredible degree. As you can tell I've turned into quite a fan!
A little while ago I started writing a brief AdWords guide for the benefit of some of my clients. It's the sort of thing that's created internally by businesses all the time: it's pretty common for tech businesses to produce white papers, technology briefs, product documentation, etc, etc. Typically they're written by an anonymous staff member and printed up on a laser printer, then comb-bound or wire-bound in batches. In slightly more up-market projects it'll be printed and perfect-bound (butted and glued, like a typical novel) with a glossy cover. But with my previous good experience with Lulu I decided that this time rather than going down the typical DIY path I'd just create a new Lulu project, upload the PDF, and end up with a proper book at the end. In fact it was *less* work to create the guide as a "real" book with an ISBN through Lulu than if I'd had it printed and bound locally! And now rather than being just another piece of corporate writing, I have another book that I can add to the list.
Unless I had very specific requirements I certainly wouldn't go the whole-hog DIY self-publishing approach again when there are places like Lulu that can take so much of the pain away.
Next installment: writing tools
>> Writing a book, part 3: trade publishing
Fri, Mar 7th 2:15pm 2008 >> Writing
All writers want to have their work published by a large commercial publishing house, of course, if only because it means they don't have to go through all the pain of DIY self-publishing! I suspect that many writers who have only had their work trade-published don't appreciate just how much work goes into the publishing process, but it's quite significant. I was lucky enough to work with tech publisher O'Reilly on my second book, Ubuntu Hacks.
For me there were three major advantages to being trade-published.
The first is that almost all the work other than the actual writing was done for me. My editor defined the project timetable and made sure everything stayed on track, and brought in technical and copy editors at the appropriate times. I didn't have to worry about the ISBN, or internal page layout, or cover design, or submitting to Books In Print. I just had to write. But how well this works for you is dependent on how good (= organised) your editor is. I've worked with a quite a few different editors on various projects and they've varied from average to awesome. The worst ones don't communicate well and it's necessary to keep pushing them to find out what needs to happen next, while the best ones stay in constant contact and give you good visibility into the process so there are no surprises and you always feel that you know what is expected of you. Brian Jepson (the editor for Ubuntu Hacks) falls fully into the "awesome" category.
The second advantage is that I got a bit of money up front rather than having to fork out thousands of dollars of my own cash just to get started. A typical author contract is based around royalties as a percentage of the cover price, which could be (for example) in the region of 10%. My royalties for Ubuntu Hacks were 4.1% (if I recall correctly) of cover price because it was split proportionally with the other authors. Yes, you need to sell a *lot* of copies to actually make decent money out of writing a book! The contract will also stipulate an "advance", which is pre-payment for royalties not yet earned. The amount of the advance is based on the publisher's estimation of how well the book is likely to sell, and effectively has to be earned back ("paid out") by actual sales before you will receive any other payments. In effect it's as if your publisher has given you a loan on the basis of books they think will be sold, and they then repay themselves from the actual sales until the debt is cleared. According to my contract with O'Reilly the sales figures are calculated quarterly with royalty payments made quarterly in arrears, which meant it was a full 6 months after publication before the first sales started offsetting the advance I had been paid. And you don't even get paid full royalties for all sales because the publisher assumes there will be a certain percentage of books returned unsold from retailers, so each royalty statement includes withholdings as a percentage of royalties. Those withholdings values are later corrected against actual returns for the period and then any difference in your favour is paid in a subsequent royalty cycle, so for some copies of the book sold it can be a *really* long time before you see a single cent for them! And if the publisher overestimates the popularity of your book the advance may never be earned out, in which case it will be the only money you ever see from them.
The third huge advantage of being trade-published was promotion, which is probably the hardest part of the whole job of creating a successful book. A title listed by a major publisher will automatically be ordered by a large number of retailers, giving you shelf-space exposure that is almost impossible to get as a self-publisher. Ubuntu Hacks sold very respectably and moved around 10,000 copies within a surprisingly short time. There is absolutely no way those numbers could ever have been achieved by me as a self-publisher even if the book had been exactly the same. The pulling power of a name like O'Reilly is enormous. The result was that my advance was earned out by sales within the first quarter or so, which was fantastic. Not enough to make me rich, but still nice.
The writing tools you use when working with a trade publisher may be quite different to what you would use personally. Collaboration on large text documents is a big pain: features such as change tracking and comments can be really awkward but are necessary if you want to share text around between yourself, editors, and other writers. I worked as a tech reviewer on Linux Desktop Hacks, and for that project each hack was saved as a separate Word document with change tracking activated. Files were punted around all over the place by email: not fun at all. The view of the document also becomes really confusing with lots of text in different colours all over the place, only some of which is actually the text of the book.
For Ubuntu Hacks we used a really cool O'Reilly tool called Aardvark, which is a wiki-based environment with a formally imposed structure to match the section/chapter/hack format of the book. Everything stayed in one place and tracking changes was easy because that's what Wikis are really good at. I tended to work with local text files as the starting point for each hack and did all the writing in Vim, then pasted blocks of text into Aardvark as I went so it could be checked over by the various levels of editorial review. Aardvark abstracts the process of writing from the process of applying formatting and page layout, which is exactly how it should be. It's painfully slow but overall I really liked working with it.
Aardvark helps O'Reilly create the Rough Cuts electronic preview versions of titles as they are still being written: their internal pre-press process allows them dump the raw content from Aardvark in a structured way and pour it into standard templates, with a neatly formatted book coming out the other end. At periodic intervals during the writing phase the editor would send out an email saying "we're doing a Rough Cuts take at 3pm on Friday" or similar, and at that point they'd click the big button and make it happen. Whatever state the text happened to be in at that moment in time was exactly how it ended up in the Rough Cut PDF, including all my FIXME messages and notes. Really slick.
The huge difference with trade publishing is that once you've finished writing, you're done. All you have to do is sit back with a cold drink and relax, and in a few weeks a box arrives containing a dozen or so copies of your book to show off to family and friends. You get to say "it looks just like a real book!" when showing it to your friends, and to feel like an imposter when people introduce you as an author, and to feel like a rockstar when people ask you to sign their copy. It's all quite surreal for a while. But you get over it.
Next installment: the assisted self-publishing process.
All writers want to have their work published by a large commercial publishing house, of course, if only because it means they don't have to go through all the pain of DIY self-publishing! I suspect that many writers who have only had their work trade-published don't appreciate just how much work goes into the publishing process, but it's quite significant. I was lucky enough to work with tech publisher O'Reilly on my second book, Ubuntu Hacks.
For me there were three major advantages to being trade-published.
The first is that almost all the work other than the actual writing was done for me. My editor defined the project timetable and made sure everything stayed on track, and brought in technical and copy editors at the appropriate times. I didn't have to worry about the ISBN, or internal page layout, or cover design, or submitting to Books In Print. I just had to write. But how well this works for you is dependent on how good (= organised) your editor is. I've worked with a quite a few different editors on various projects and they've varied from average to awesome. The worst ones don't communicate well and it's necessary to keep pushing them to find out what needs to happen next, while the best ones stay in constant contact and give you good visibility into the process so there are no surprises and you always feel that you know what is expected of you. Brian Jepson (the editor for Ubuntu Hacks) falls fully into the "awesome" category.
The second advantage is that I got a bit of money up front rather than having to fork out thousands of dollars of my own cash just to get started. A typical author contract is based around royalties as a percentage of the cover price, which could be (for example) in the region of 10%. My royalties for Ubuntu Hacks were 4.1% (if I recall correctly) of cover price because it was split proportionally with the other authors. Yes, you need to sell a *lot* of copies to actually make decent money out of writing a book! The contract will also stipulate an "advance", which is pre-payment for royalties not yet earned. The amount of the advance is based on the publisher's estimation of how well the book is likely to sell, and effectively has to be earned back ("paid out") by actual sales before you will receive any other payments. In effect it's as if your publisher has given you a loan on the basis of books they think will be sold, and they then repay themselves from the actual sales until the debt is cleared. According to my contract with O'Reilly the sales figures are calculated quarterly with royalty payments made quarterly in arrears, which meant it was a full 6 months after publication before the first sales started offsetting the advance I had been paid. And you don't even get paid full royalties for all sales because the publisher assumes there will be a certain percentage of books returned unsold from retailers, so each royalty statement includes withholdings as a percentage of royalties. Those withholdings values are later corrected against actual returns for the period and then any difference in your favour is paid in a subsequent royalty cycle, so for some copies of the book sold it can be a *really* long time before you see a single cent for them! And if the publisher overestimates the popularity of your book the advance may never be earned out, in which case it will be the only money you ever see from them.
The third huge advantage of being trade-published was promotion, which is probably the hardest part of the whole job of creating a successful book. A title listed by a major publisher will automatically be ordered by a large number of retailers, giving you shelf-space exposure that is almost impossible to get as a self-publisher. Ubuntu Hacks sold very respectably and moved around 10,000 copies within a surprisingly short time. There is absolutely no way those numbers could ever have been achieved by me as a self-publisher even if the book had been exactly the same. The pulling power of a name like O'Reilly is enormous. The result was that my advance was earned out by sales within the first quarter or so, which was fantastic. Not enough to make me rich, but still nice.
The writing tools you use when working with a trade publisher may be quite different to what you would use personally. Collaboration on large text documents is a big pain: features such as change tracking and comments can be really awkward but are necessary if you want to share text around between yourself, editors, and other writers. I worked as a tech reviewer on Linux Desktop Hacks, and for that project each hack was saved as a separate Word document with change tracking activated. Files were punted around all over the place by email: not fun at all. The view of the document also becomes really confusing with lots of text in different colours all over the place, only some of which is actually the text of the book.
For Ubuntu Hacks we used a really cool O'Reilly tool called Aardvark, which is a wiki-based environment with a formally imposed structure to match the section/chapter/hack format of the book. Everything stayed in one place and tracking changes was easy because that's what Wikis are really good at. I tended to work with local text files as the starting point for each hack and did all the writing in Vim, then pasted blocks of text into Aardvark as I went so it could be checked over by the various levels of editorial review. Aardvark abstracts the process of writing from the process of applying formatting and page layout, which is exactly how it should be. It's painfully slow but overall I really liked working with it.
Aardvark helps O'Reilly create the Rough Cuts electronic preview versions of titles as they are still being written: their internal pre-press process allows them dump the raw content from Aardvark in a structured way and pour it into standard templates, with a neatly formatted book coming out the other end. At periodic intervals during the writing phase the editor would send out an email saying "we're doing a Rough Cuts take at 3pm on Friday" or similar, and at that point they'd click the big button and make it happen. Whatever state the text happened to be in at that moment in time was exactly how it ended up in the Rough Cut PDF, including all my FIXME messages and notes. Really slick.
The huge difference with trade publishing is that once you've finished writing, you're done. All you have to do is sit back with a cold drink and relax, and in a few weeks a box arrives containing a dozen or so copies of your book to show off to family and friends. You get to say "it looks just like a real book!" when showing it to your friends, and to feel like an imposter when people introduce you as an author, and to feel like a rockstar when people ask you to sign their copy. It's all quite surreal for a while. But you get over it.
Next installment: the assisted self-publishing process.
>> Writing a book, part 2: DIY self publishing
Thu, Mar 6th 11:40pm 2008 >> Writing
DIY self-publishing is where you do everything yourself, which is what I did for the first edition of How To Build A Website And Stay Sane. And when I say everything, I mean *everything*. The actual writing is just the start of it. I'm not going to go into the process and techniques of writing: that's a huge topic in itself, so I'll gloss over what is probably the single biggest task and assume that when you sit down at your computer the words just flow out.
What follows is typically three stages or types of editing: structural editing, technical editing, and copy editing.
Structural editing takes a macroscopic view of the text and ensures that the overall sequence provides a logical flow, and that necessary content is included and unnecessary content excluded. It can involve moving large chunks of text around until everything fits where it should.
Technical editing (or technical review) generally involves having subject experts look over your work to pick up any mistakes and make suggestions about alternative approaches.
Copy editing takes a microscopic view of the text to check every sentence for correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
When the writing approached completion I printed hard copies, put them in folders, and distributed them to about 12 people to review. As it turned out the only feedback I received was a couple of off-the-cuff comments - I suspect that being landed with a heavy folder full of text was a bit daunting, and unless people are paid to do it they won't bother. In the end I did all the writing, structural editing, fact checking, and copy editing myself, going over the text so many times I thought my eyes would bleed. I still missed quite a few problems: it's almost impossible to edit your own work because when you are reading text that you wrote yourself your brain will tend to interpret the words as you intended to write them, not as you actually wrote them!
After that you have to do the internal page layout. I wrote How To Build A Website And Stay Sane entirely in OpenOffice.org over the space of a couple of years, taking screenshots as I went and trimming them with GIMP. In fact it took me so long to write that during the course of writing I took screenshots with 4 different browsers and several different window managers on two different Linux distributions, and when I got to the end I had to go back and retake them all so they were consistent! I did the book's internal layout directly in OpenOffice.org as well, using its very cool style management system extensively so that I could apply changes globally rather than applying text-level formatting.
One mistake I made was to start the formatting too soon and do the writing in a visual mode, with the document formatted as I thought it would finally appear. That gave a sense that I was writing a real book, but the problem was that the formatting dictated the text in some cases. I modified some chapters that ran over a page break by only a few words so they would fit the page size more neatly, for example, when I should have ignored formatting while writing. In fact later after the formatting was altered those chapters would have fit neatly anyway, so ultimately the text was compromised for formatting that wasn't used. Bad move.
At this point I needed an ISBN for the book so it could be entered into the central Books In Print database, so I registered with Thorpe-Bowker as a publisher and applied for the minimum block of ISBNs.
With the ISBN issued and the barcode generated I paid a designer a few hundred dollars to do the cover design, and had a few hundred copies of the cover printed by a local printing house on matt laminated cardstock. I spent about $3500 on a very nice die-sublimation printer with a duplexer, bought some expensive 100gsm high-brightness paper, and printed 100 copies of the internal pages. I then took the pages and the covers to a large printing house where they were bound and trimmed. At that point I had boxes full of the actual physical book, so the final step was getting the bibliographic data into Books In Print so that a month or two later it would be visible in bookstore databases. I also sent copies to the state and national libraries as required of all publishers.
You'd think that's the end, but it's just the beginning. Next the book needed to be promoted, payment terms negotiated with bookstores (who expect at least a 40% discount off retail), invoices generated, and orders processed, packed and shipped. I'm exhausted just remembering it.
Next installment: the trade publishing process.
DIY self-publishing is where you do everything yourself, which is what I did for the first edition of How To Build A Website And Stay Sane. And when I say everything, I mean *everything*. The actual writing is just the start of it. I'm not going to go into the process and techniques of writing: that's a huge topic in itself, so I'll gloss over what is probably the single biggest task and assume that when you sit down at your computer the words just flow out.
What follows is typically three stages or types of editing: structural editing, technical editing, and copy editing.
Structural editing takes a macroscopic view of the text and ensures that the overall sequence provides a logical flow, and that necessary content is included and unnecessary content excluded. It can involve moving large chunks of text around until everything fits where it should.
Technical editing (or technical review) generally involves having subject experts look over your work to pick up any mistakes and make suggestions about alternative approaches.
Copy editing takes a microscopic view of the text to check every sentence for correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
When the writing approached completion I printed hard copies, put them in folders, and distributed them to about 12 people to review. As it turned out the only feedback I received was a couple of off-the-cuff comments - I suspect that being landed with a heavy folder full of text was a bit daunting, and unless people are paid to do it they won't bother. In the end I did all the writing, structural editing, fact checking, and copy editing myself, going over the text so many times I thought my eyes would bleed. I still missed quite a few problems: it's almost impossible to edit your own work because when you are reading text that you wrote yourself your brain will tend to interpret the words as you intended to write them, not as you actually wrote them!
After that you have to do the internal page layout. I wrote How To Build A Website And Stay Sane entirely in OpenOffice.org over the space of a couple of years, taking screenshots as I went and trimming them with GIMP. In fact it took me so long to write that during the course of writing I took screenshots with 4 different browsers and several different window managers on two different Linux distributions, and when I got to the end I had to go back and retake them all so they were consistent! I did the book's internal layout directly in OpenOffice.org as well, using its very cool style management system extensively so that I could apply changes globally rather than applying text-level formatting.
One mistake I made was to start the formatting too soon and do the writing in a visual mode, with the document formatted as I thought it would finally appear. That gave a sense that I was writing a real book, but the problem was that the formatting dictated the text in some cases. I modified some chapters that ran over a page break by only a few words so they would fit the page size more neatly, for example, when I should have ignored formatting while writing. In fact later after the formatting was altered those chapters would have fit neatly anyway, so ultimately the text was compromised for formatting that wasn't used. Bad move.
At this point I needed an ISBN for the book so it could be entered into the central Books In Print database, so I registered with Thorpe-Bowker as a publisher and applied for the minimum block of ISBNs.
With the ISBN issued and the barcode generated I paid a designer a few hundred dollars to do the cover design, and had a few hundred copies of the cover printed by a local printing house on matt laminated cardstock. I spent about $3500 on a very nice die-sublimation printer with a duplexer, bought some expensive 100gsm high-brightness paper, and printed 100 copies of the internal pages. I then took the pages and the covers to a large printing house where they were bound and trimmed. At that point I had boxes full of the actual physical book, so the final step was getting the bibliographic data into Books In Print so that a month or two later it would be visible in bookstore databases. I also sent copies to the state and national libraries as required of all publishers.
You'd think that's the end, but it's just the beginning. Next the book needed to be promoted, payment terms negotiated with bookstores (who expect at least a 40% discount off retail), invoices generated, and orders processed, packed and shipped. I'm exhausted just remembering it.
Next installment: the trade publishing process.
>> Media insanity
Tue, Mar 4th 4:20pm 2008 >> Tech Toys
Asher warned me that the story he was writing for SMH would make my phone ring off the hook. I laughed about that a bit because I did the RFID implant almost 2 years ago, and nobody seemed to care at the time. Since then I've talked about it at conferences all over the world and tech geeks seem to think it's interesting, but nobody else cared.
Then the SMH story came out and at 6am today my phone started ringing. And ringing. And ringing. So far today I've had 3 film crews through my house (embarrassing, in its current state!), done 6 radio interviews, and 5 more are scheduled. The story will be all over the place tonight and then tomorrow it'll be on Sunrise, with a live cross from the studio to my house so I can demo some of the hardware hacks I've done.
I had to rope in one of the guys from work to be my PA for the day just to give me a chance to talk to people one at a time. It's crazy!
I'm very curious to see what spin the various outlets put on the story. Previous experience has been that you never know what you'll get when you deal with the media. You can do an interview that you think goes very well on a certain message, and then when it comes out the final story includes nothing but a couple of off-the-cuff remarks that seemed irrelevant at the time and takes the topic in a whole different direction.
I'm almost too scared to turn on the TV tonight.
Asher warned me that the story he was writing for SMH would make my phone ring off the hook. I laughed about that a bit because I did the RFID implant almost 2 years ago, and nobody seemed to care at the time. Since then I've talked about it at conferences all over the world and tech geeks seem to think it's interesting, but nobody else cared.
Then the SMH story came out and at 6am today my phone started ringing. And ringing. And ringing. So far today I've had 3 film crews through my house (embarrassing, in its current state!), done 6 radio interviews, and 5 more are scheduled. The story will be all over the place tonight and then tomorrow it'll be on Sunrise, with a live cross from the studio to my house so I can demo some of the hardware hacks I've done.
I had to rope in one of the guys from work to be my PA for the day just to give me a chance to talk to people one at a time. It's crazy!
I'm very curious to see what spin the various outlets put on the story. Previous experience has been that you never know what you'll get when you deal with the media. You can do an interview that you think goes very well on a certain message, and then when it comes out the final story includes nothing but a couple of off-the-cuff remarks that seemed irrelevant at the time and takes the topic in a whole different direction.
I'm almost too scared to turn on the TV tonight.
>> Rackspace redeemed?
Mon, Mar 3rd 9:42am 2008 >> Linux
Last week I was pretty harsh in a post about some issues I've had with Rackspace technical support. Maybe I should become a restaurant critic or something so my mean streak can be somewhat justified.
Anyway, there were three possible outcomes that I expected as a result of that post. In increasing order of goodness and decreasing order of likelihood:
1. I receive a "cease and desist" from Rackspace's legal department requiring the blog post be removed; our dedicated server disconnected on the spot; and a bill sent out for the remaining contract period.
2. They cancel the account and wash their hands of the whole issue.
3. They contact me and try to figure out what went wrong with the arrangement, what they could do to improve their service in future, and what I as a customer specifically need in this instance so they can fulfil that need.
I gave #1 about a 40% probability, #2 about a 60% probability, and didn't think #3 had a snowball's chance in hell.
To their enormous credit, Rackspace proved me totally wrong.
In what must have been one of the most aggravating phone calls he has ever had to make, my Rackspace account manager called me personally on the weekend, apologised for the various miscommunications that had led to the situation, and tried to clarify what it was that I needed so they could do a better job of providing me the specific service that would suit my requirements.
And the kicker is that not once did he even mention removing my original blog post, amending it, or posting a positive follow-up. The overall impression I got was that the call *wasn't* just a PR damage control exercise: it was a genuine attempt to figure out what had gone wrong with me as a customer, and fix it if they could.
Colour me impressed. Hopefully there'll be a good ending to the story after all.
UPDATE: In this post I said that my Rackspace account manager made an aggravating phone call to me. What I was trying (badly) to say was that making that call must have been aggravating to him, not to me. I was very happy that he made the call, but he must have had to bite down on the urge to tell me to go play in traffic.
Last week I was pretty harsh in a post about some issues I've had with Rackspace technical support. Maybe I should become a restaurant critic or something so my mean streak can be somewhat justified.
Anyway, there were three possible outcomes that I expected as a result of that post. In increasing order of goodness and decreasing order of likelihood:
1. I receive a "cease and desist" from Rackspace's legal department requiring the blog post be removed; our dedicated server disconnected on the spot; and a bill sent out for the remaining contract period.
2. They cancel the account and wash their hands of the whole issue.
3. They contact me and try to figure out what went wrong with the arrangement, what they could do to improve their service in future, and what I as a customer specifically need in this instance so they can fulfil that need.
I gave #1 about a 40% probability, #2 about a 60% probability, and didn't think #3 had a snowball's chance in hell.
To their enormous credit, Rackspace proved me totally wrong.
In what must have been one of the most aggravating phone calls he has ever had to make, my Rackspace account manager called me personally on the weekend, apologised for the various miscommunications that had led to the situation, and tried to clarify what it was that I needed so they could do a better job of providing me the specific service that would suit my requirements.
And the kicker is that not once did he even mention removing my original blog post, amending it, or posting a positive follow-up. The overall impression I got was that the call *wasn't* just a PR damage control exercise: it was a genuine attempt to figure out what had gone wrong with me as a customer, and fix it if they could.
Colour me impressed. Hopefully there'll be a good ending to the story after all.
UPDATE: In this post I said that my Rackspace account manager made an aggravating phone call to me. What I was trying (badly) to say was that making that call must have been aggravating to him, not to me. I was very happy that he made the call, but he must have had to bite down on the urge to tell me to go play in traffic.
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