Slashdot Mirror
The Best and Worst Tech-Book Publishers?
An anonymous reader writes "I am an author working on a technical book about an open-source software package. I am looking for a publisher, and I would like to hear experiences from any Slashdot authors. Who are the best publishers to work with and why are they great? Who are the worst publishers in the tech book business, and what nightmare/horror stories can you tell us about them? Any publishing company in particular you recommend avoiding? Any gems of advice (rights reversion, etc.) you can provide for first-time tech book authors?"
Any gems of advice (rights reversion, etc.) you can provide for first-time tech book authors?
Get back to work on the BOOK - quit fooling around on Slashdot. ;)
I went through the process of writing a nearly 500-page book on newly minted standard, which went as far as being typeset. Then a another major publisher got a book out a month ahead of me, the market tanked, and they dropped the project.
As bad as that seems, I learned a lot in the process and it would definitely go faster a second time around. Didn't help that I was suffering at that time from an undiagnosed disease (Addison's) that left me fatigued.
But yeah, it bothers me that they would take it that far and elect not to push the jolly red candy-like button on the printing press.
Jeez, don't you think it a little disingenuous to write a for profit book based upon the efforts of a bunch of programmers working for free?
This is my sig.
My god, there's going to be a lot of venting on this thread... how about we make it a lot shorter and ask if any publishers *aren't* a nightmare to deal with?
Note for people about to post -- check your contract. Both of mine explicitly stated you must not say anything nasty about the publisher. You want to go AC on this thread.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Did you evaluate the possibility of selling a PDF copy from your website yourself? I am not author but based on my experience with the lonely planet guides as well as a couple of books from the "pragmatic programmers" I started liking the ease of using the e-books. That said it is also important that your book is discoverable by it's target audience. Getting it published from the likes of O'Reilly would make it easy for many people who are looking for open-source related books (thats where I would first search), but if you think that your book has enough unique stuff and that you can make it easily discoverable over the search engines, nothing like publishing it in the form of an e-book (from your own website)!
Worst
TAB
They were HORRIBLE. Imagine a detailed technical description, but only vague references as to what they the technical descriptions applied to. That was TAB.
Hey, I have a printer here! And while we're at it, I've got a bridge to sell you ;)
O'Reilly is only meh as far as treating authors. They play favorites, they pay the lowest royalty rate (10%), and they shove so many books out the door that yours may get lost. They pay the same rate for digital sales, which really stinks because their overhead is a lot lower. OTOH they are very good at actually selling books, they keep trying new forms of distribution, the O'Reilly brand is tops, and they pay royalties quarterly, which is a nice thing. Better than the typical annual or bi-annual.
No Starch is very excellent. Good editors, good royalty rates (10-14%), and you get good personal attention.
Both will allow you to write your manuscript in other than Microsoft Word. Many publishers are wedded to Word, which is beyond idiotic. It's a terrible tool for manuscripts, and for people like me who boycott corrupt evil globalcorps it's a deal-breaker.
The Dummies book are very tightly controlled and they pay cheap.
You'll deal first with an acquisitions editor. All publishers have a lot of information on their Websites on how to pitch them. For god's sake read it and do what it says; there is a goldmind of information there and you'll look like a moron if you don't take advantage of it.
Be sure you have what it takes to write a whole book-- it is more work than you ever dreamed. If you want to write a good book, that is. Have several conversations with your potential editor to determine if you can work together. An editor will make or break you.
Penguin Classics. They're forever bitching about plot, characters and crap like that. Plus, they won't publish anything about tech invented after 1920.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.. I'm published with Apress. They have good people who mostly seem to work independently from home as well as more "admin" type folk who reside at Springer, the parent publisher. Apress's workflow is honed for a high number of books with little room for creativity. For example, you probably won't get much of a say in the cover of your book. You will also have little say in the workflow which is almost entirely Word based (though they can be semi-flexible in some cases, such as with Scott Chacon's new Pro Git book).
With Apress, for a book on reasonably popular topics from a new author, the advance is in the $5-8k range. The biggest downside of going with them is the inflexibility of the workflow and the opaqueness of the management - getting responses via e-mail can be tough on things like royalty issues, etc. Trying to get them to agree to stuff like open sourcing the e-book or a cover that's not in the style of the rest of a series is like pulling teeth. Royalties start at about 10% and work their way up to 20% once you've sold 20,000(?) copies (unlikely). I believe it's 15% for over 10,000 copies. They take a significant "reserve" each quarter and you do not get any of this back until at least 18 months later (6 quarters, basically). On a book with an RRP of about $40, Apress get about $18 net so your royalties are based on that, not the RRP. So let's say you sell 5,000 copies (not a bad number unless you're on a very mainstream topic).. you're looking at $9000 royalties - don't expect to see all of this for a couple of years though due to the reserves.
Separate to that, I hear very good things about the Pragmatic Programmers / Pragmatic Bookshelf although I haven't worked with them myself. Supposedly they have a very good, hacker-friendly workflow and offer 50% royalties.
Though it's not specifically a *tech* book (more a science thing), I helped co-author a chapter for a book published by Cambridge.
I hadn't worked with them before, though my co-authors had. I had lots of questions about the contract (re-use of published material, what our responsibilities were, and so on). The publisher was very helpful in figuring them out, and explaining to me what each thing meant (and accepted a couple of changes for future contract versions). The book itself is of high quality, in cover, printing, typesetting, figures, etc., and the turnaround time for reviewing and editing was good.
I'm quite happy with them.
...depending on your moral stance; the company (which unfortunately owns a host of major computer book publishers, most notably Academic Press, Digital Press and Morgan Kaufmann) has had a small host of scandals, mostly concerning exorbitant journal fees and 'sponsored' pharmaceutical journals (they were the publisher behind the Merck Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine scandal, if you recall that). MK and AP publish some of the finest books in the industry, which makes this that much harder a moral stand to take, but it's worth evaluating how you feel about the publisher before you consider going down that route.
Umm shouldn't you have a publisher before you author the book ?
As an author I have only worked with O'Reilly, so I have no basis for comparison from that perspective. They were great to work with and I highly recommend them.
As a reader who owns hundreds of technical books, most of them are from O'Reilly and very nearly all of the ones I really love are from O'Reilly. That's why I wanted to work with them in the first place, I think they are the best.
my $0.02,
JP Vossen -- co-author, O'Reilly's bash Cookbook
PS--Ironically the captcha for this post is "authors"
I had an awesome experience with O'Reilly for my book iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual. (Working with David Pogue was obviously super cool.) My editor, Pete Meyers was great: helpful, responsive, and professional. The publishing deal was good, especially considering it was my first book. O'Reilly also has excellent resources once the book is out, including a web site for authors that has promotion tools and up-to-date information on book sales. It's hard to imagine a publisher reasonably doing more than O'Reilly does.
Boom Shanka
Good:
"Thomson Course Technology" are extremely good. They have the highst editorial standard I've seen. Books like "Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists" by Sebastien St-Laurent are extremely well done and IMHO the best in the field.
O'Reilly is good ole' reliable but he does tend to fatten his books out to ridiculous sizes. Why say in one paragraph what you can say in ten pages? It makes them slow going for learners, but that aside we should congratulate him for raising the bar for all publishers.
Bad:
Wordware and Charles River have put out some shockers over the years. These seem to have included many books written by the "give a kid some money to go away and write a book for us." These are rambling monologs to nowhere in particular. I remember one they did on character animation where the author where he didn't discuss the most commonly used formats because they were "too hard" (why else would I buy his book!?) and another which told the reader to buy some particular company's SDK (sure, but what if you don't want to?) Some of their other books have just been copied straight from a technical specs with minimal explanation. Occasionally they do a good one though: Frank Luna's books on shaders and 3d programming are good.
We should also flame Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Wiley and publishers of textbooks. We see far too many textbooks with typos, errors, problems without solutions ("sold separately"), overpriced US editions and the way they rip off students by bring out new editions with superficial changes. The same with their academic books which seem to have very poor editorial control. For all the money these publishers make they should do a better job, to say nothing of their overpriced academic journals.
WROX has to be one of the if not the worst (at least that I've come across.) I couldn't imagine something more poorly done.
Elsevier has no morality whatsoever. They publish fake magazines, with fake studies in them, especially targeted to make doctors think they are real and therefore describe pills that kill their patients, or at least make them suffer while going broke, just so the pharma industry can make money.
But the also published "The Art Of Game Design" which is a really great book (except for the very "old world" chapters about money making).
So it as usual is no black/white thing, as this is close to Hitler, who also did the exceptional good thing (*gasp*). ;)
As usual this is all a question of trust. So here is my little addition to your graph of trust. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
s/highst editorial standard/highest editorial standard/g
I've written computer books for 20 years, and you'll be shafted on your first book deal no matter what you do. So, if you want a career out of this, choose a publisher that can push titles out the door: O'Reilly or Dummies. For a first time author, establishing a reliable reputation is more important than your royalty rate. You need to show you can produce a marketable product on time, and be able to work professionally with editors, copyeditors, proofreaders and everybody else who will try to muck up your copy.
Also, pick an agent in the tech field, like Fresh Books, Waterside, or StudioB. Sure, they'll scoop 15% off your take, but by weeding the crap out of your contract, they'll get you a better deal in the long run. They also know which publishers are best suited for your book, saving you a lot of time. And time is key in computer books: You must deliver on deadline, or you're toast. The tech field changes too rapidly for tech books to have much shelf life.
Once you have a decent first book under your belt, then try to pump up your royalty rate.
Make sure your contract clearly defines what it means for your book to be out-of-print (remember, this is the digital era, you might need special verbiage in there to cover that) at which time all copyrights revert to you.
Easy to work with, Good payers, even take FDL licensed material. Couldn't fault them really. Published O'Reilly author
If you've got an idea for a book you want to write, what's the recommended method? Apply to an array of publishers at once, or work your way down the line in order of preference?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Tell them I sent you.
XML causes global warming.
www.sams.com
Addison Wesley is a the best publisher if one if looking for rigor. It is sometimes hard to read, but relatively error free, both implicate and explicate. I tend to favor these books when i am learning new concepts. They published the practice of programing, a game changing book from my point of view.
One should not rule out MS press on some of the basic techniques of programing, expecially those books coming from the macintosh side. I have not seen any books of late, but they have some classics on software development.
A challenger to o'reilly, and a higher quality mass production outlet, IMHO, is the pragmatic programmer. Where O'reilly is HTMl, pragmatic programer is best practices and Ruby.The former is a critical issue. One complaint I have about O'reilly is that they are limited in their scope. They don't really lay the ground work for a person to become a good programmer, only a passable one. Of course, when O'reilly began, it was not the fashion in the popular computer press to talk about best practices on the macro scale. That has changed. The Prgamatic programmer considers the whole process. For someone looking for accessible, complete, and overall correct coverage this is not a bad place to start.
The publishers I avoid. Anyhing for dummies or any variation. I know it is toungue in cheek, but if one thinks one is a dummy, success is not forthcoming. Any other silly variations. Sams Publishing. I have never bout a book from them that is helpfu. No Starch press has been of limited value to me, but then I don;t do all that much of what they write about. If I did I might have a different opinion, but my QT book is not no-starch, but prentice hall.
What I will say is this. I tend to know what I want for the stuff I already do. When I interested in learning something, new, I take a look at all the books. Just because a publisher does on thing well, doesn't mean they do everything well.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If U ask mee, U should selfpubliish. I write twelf books and they no pulbished them. This whey I get 100$ of what I sale. At currant rate I be millionair by 2040. Maybe my math bad.
Pretty funny coming from a first post!
I've had several technical books published. The process has left me so dissatisfied I'm unlikely to work with a so-called traditional publisher ever again -- certainly not with a standard contract. See The Value of a Publisher for some thoughts representing what you give up to work with such a contract.
I believe that any publisher that refuses to pay you 25% royalties on the wholesale price is not worth your time.
how to invest, a novice's guide
The most appauling documentation I've ever found was in the Cliff's Notes stack in Wonderbooks and Barnes'n'Noble, by some 3rd-party author known as Donald Knuth. He writes the same book over and over with only minor spelling tense and minute theory corrections, and doesn't accept any other questions to give greater brevity except if those questions were from himself. It's as if he only talks to himself. The man is neither mad or genius, and his short stories don't even match the natural law "VENOMOUS. STAY AWAY" black and yellow heraldry as the other books. It's as though the venom is meant to get in your head rather than your blood. And the guy is a crook, charging 80 iDollars for the bloody thing. And where did he learn to typset; everyone can afford a typewriter by now, and just facsimile the end-product to the customer to save money on a book Bender and middle-man.
Send that man back to an assylum, where maybe his opposition might spontaneous smack some sense and cure the mentaly ill just by the mere obviousness of their new stimulus.
No Starch Press has been known to do ok with their authors.
My story of when I was involved with an Apress book here.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
There are few well written subject matters on the Web. Any expert worth much puts their text on hard paper books. That way they can get paid.
The web is mostly for entertainment. Quality learning is in books and that's not changing through empty wishes. Hopey changey. Silliness.
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
Unless you have an established reputation in your field - one that is worth real cash (hint: most exist only in the mind of the author and/or are not worth a cent), or you are an already published author you won't be in a position to pick or choose which publisher gets to risk thousands in the shrinkingly small possibility that your work might just, possibly break even, or (even more unlikely) make a few bucks.
As it is, there's this recession thing going on at the moment. What that means for you is that publishers are less willing to risk their money on unknowns - and since you have to ask which publishers are good / bad, it doesn't sound as if you've done this before. It also means they have a backlog of new authors waiting for their stuff to get into print. It also means fewer people are spending money on books. Put all this together and even if you can find someone willing to put your work into print, it won't happen this year - maybe not even next. You might just see you name on the cover in 2011 and you might just see an earnings cheque somethime the next year. However, the money you eventually make won't cover the cost of your time - even at minimum wage rates.
Better to use your book as a loss-leader and give it away (thereby helping to ensure that future authors have an even tougher time trying to get their works into bookshops - no-one said it was fair, just or right :-), and try to make your money on consultancy based around your book and the knowledge you have in that field.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
o'reilly == best
sams == worst
I published a book with Sams. Never again. There were two main problems. The first was that they published my material in two books and to start with only paid me for the first (until I pointed out that they had 'forgotten' to pay me). The second problem is that they have a publication process totally based on MS Word. That's very common in publishing. However, in my case the result was that quite a bit of the content got screwed up. The shell commands for example had back-ticks turned into single quotes. Gah. So I won't use Sams or any of the other impressions of Macmillan Computer Publishing again (this is not the same publisher as Macmillian, confusingly). Another thing that would give me pause is the number of completed pages per day they expect. I don't believe an individual author could come within a factor of 3 of that and maintain any level of quality.
Now for the good news. Next time around I would engage with any publisher who has a workflow that either produces camera-ready copy (e.g. with LaTeX for example) or uses something like DocBook -- essentially, any workflow that limits the opportunity for people who don't understand those funny symbols to accidentally mess them up (in my case I don't know if the people or Word messed up my shell code). I'd talk to O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley first, though there are other publishers who are equally accomodating.
OTOH I suggest you take your existing computer science bookshelf, give each book a score out of say 5, and sort them by score. That should give you a shortlist of publishers to talk to.
I find the typesetting and just the layout itself make the Apress books quite good to read. The actual content is also pretty damn good too - they seem to have a good range of more in-depth topics compared to something like Wrox (I can't stand their "programmer to programmer" books). I also find their books are targetted at the right level, i.e. when I buy their php patterns book it doesnt have a whole 100 pages on "this is a for loop and here is assignment".
jaymz
Magazine columns typically pay 20 to 25 cents a word typically (i.e. a 1500 word article earns you $300), books pay a _whole_ lot less. Plus if you can get a monthly column(s) and whatnot you'll get a lot more exposure than a single book. There are also quite a few online sites like techrepublic that still pay reasonable rates. Also the advantage of a 1500 word column being done in a few hours vs. a book taking a few weeks/months. Personally I'd rather just give my book away for free and get the publicity and resulting work that actually pays pretty good (I earn an extra 30k per year or so largely based on the free stuff I do that results in a whole lot more paying gigs).
So, O'Reilly is fine, but MS is not? Don't you know what a closed infrastructure the book-sales market is? At least you have FOSS options for text editing, when was the last time I got a free (non-religion) book?
Idiot. Hate on something realistic.
I wrote IronPython in Action for Manning Publications. Working with a publisher greatly improved the book, but it is still a long and arduous process. I wrote up my experience with Manning (good points and bad points): http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/technical-writing.shtml
But but but...I was told the internet would make everyone a professional writer and that publishers wouldn't be needed anymore. Are you trying to tell me that they actually do add something to the equation?
This guy's the limit!
Get back to work on the BOOK - quit fooling around on Slashdot. ;)
Actually, I'd disagree here. The volume I post on Slashdot - and the practice you get in responding to criticism from grammar trolls (they're called 'copyeditors' in the publishing world) - was one of the things that helped convince me that I would be able to write my first book in the time the contract allowed.
The advice I'd give to anyone in this field is give up if you can't take criticism. Before your book is published, you will probably have to defend something on every page (sometimes more than one thing) against criticism from the technical reviewers, the copyeditors, and the production editor, and so on. More often than not, their criticisms will be valid - they've been producing books for a lot longer than you.
Oh, and make sure you talk about exactly what your editor expects before you start. I used LaTeX on both of my books with a lot of custom semantic markup, because I can write much faster like that. If you want to do the same, then make sure that they are happy with a camera-ready PDF and make sure that you understand how much extra work that involves. Don't back down on this. You won't produce your best work unless you're using tools you're comfortable with, but make sure that you understand that they are also putting their name on the finished product, so it has to conform to whatever style requirements they have.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Haven't used them, but I didn't a mention in the few responses I checked. Open Source books, reasonably priced. Check out: http://authors.packtpub.com/
I published my novel with Lulu, as well as distributing it online for free, and I'm very happy with the result; in the fullness of time people have willingly sent me tips and bought enough copies to give me about the same amount of money I could have expected on an advance from an unknown author's first paperback, and I didn't write it to pay the rent in any case.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
did you rtfm?
I know i'll avoid your book, just because you asked slashdot.
man author
I've written two books and a fair bit of paid articles. Get an agent. Go to http://studiob.com./
They're going to negotiate a better contract, they're going to interface with the publisher, they're going to take care of everything but the writing. I don't worry if I get paid because they've got a person there that hounds publishers. They'll work on your proposal to make sure it works with the publisher. Got a problem with the publisher? Tell your agent, they take care of it. Yea, they take a percentage off the top, it's money well spent.
Sean
For reasons I don't need to go into, I have read a whole pile of technical books over the last few years and have noted how well different publishers produce their books. I don't know how the authors are treated, but the best quality tends to come from MIT press, Addison Wesley, Cambridge, and Morgan Kaufmann (though they've been slipping recently).
O'Reilly comes in in a second tier along with Prentice Hall and New Riders. I would note that O'Reilly's quality control has not been as good recently, and I've found numerous problems in the editing.
The lower middle tier has Apress, who publish books on timely subjects, but whose books tend to feel like they've been pushed out the door just to meet some timeline and which are often very poorly edited and checked, and groups like "Friends of Ed" whose books tend to cover interesting topics, but are technically trash with frequent errors in code and again very poor editing.
Springer is an interesting data point. Their good books are very good indeed, among the best, but they also produce some of the worst crap in print - with poor (and frequently incorrect) content, little or no editing and almost non-existent quality control. Worse yet, much of their stuff is so overpriced it is silly ($120 for a 200 page book with 10 pages of real content). I think much of this is produced because libraries have subscriptions for the junk and buy it no matter how bad it is.
There are some other publishers in the field that seem to be moving up. Thompson Course Technology used to publish only the worst tier of textbooks (poorly written full color crapfests on microsoft office that fell apart after a semester's use and cost $100+) but they're now moving up into a nicer neighborhood with a couple of good releases in the last year or so and may be someone to consider.
If I read the question correctly, you've already written a fair amount of the book already, yes? If so, stop writing. Find the publisher first, then work with them on producing the book.
There is no such thing as a generic book, especially in technology instruction. Peachpit, Apress, O'Reilly, etc. all publish very different sorts of books, with different styles and audiences. Adapting from one to another is more work than writing it "to fit" from the beginning.
I'm currently working on Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide for Peachpit, which has a strict style based on step-by-step instructions and very little narrative writing. If I were writing a generic book, it would be all narrative, and I'd never have gotten this contract. (The Peachpit folks have been wonderful, by the way.)
Tom Geller
Syngress Publishing aka Elsevier is HORRIBLE. They have no functional editors that can catch double words, mistakes in table of contents, or arrange for actual tech reviews. On top of all that they have this unspoken policy where the most popular author of the book gets his name front and center on the cover with large font regardless of how much work they put into the book (i.e. Dan Kaminsky on their IDA pro book, he didn't really do much on that)
I have published four books with O'Reilly, and I have had brief encounters with other publishers. As a book consumer interested in cloud computing, Java, scripting languages, I look to Manning, Prag, and O'Reilly most of the time, and I'm also impressed with books from AW. Here are my experiences, maybe they might help:
When I wrote Jakarta Commons Cookbook, I had no agent, I worked directly with a great editor, Brett McLaughlin. Brett has since moved on from animal books and is now focused on books in the Heads First series. I would have never finished my book was it not for Brett's attention and guidance. If you are new to the book writing process, you will want to find an editor who knows your technology and who believes in the idea behind your book. I had maybe 5 reviewers, the book sold something in the range of 6-7k. While the publisher didn't view this as a success, I was satisfied with the sales and exposure, and I enjoyed the writing process. This book was written in Word, to properly insert XREF (cross references between sections and chapters) I had to load the entire book into Word and then run some hefty macros. I was constantly freezing the machine and Word was much more a nuisance that a helpful tool.
The second book I wrote as "Maven: A Developer's Notebook". To say it didn't go so well would be a dramatic understatement. I was less that satisfied with the book writing process, there were too many reviewers. Part of the problem with this book was that the book covered Maven 1 which was already on its way out. Maven 2 was released the same week that this book on Maven 1 was released. Sales were not very good; in fact, less than six months after printing, a number of people (myself included) were recommending that people avoid purchasing this book. I didn't actively seek out this second book, that should have been the first warning sign, I was recruited by my editor to help smooth out the writing. This book was written in Word using the O'Reilly macros, we had endless problems with Word. I had an agent for this book from Studio B, and the only time I spoke with my agent was during the contract negotiations. Studio B is "ok", but I don't think you need an agent to write a book, maybe someone can convince me otherwise?
The third book I helped to write was also something that my editor suggested. Jim Elliott was updating Harnessing Hibernate, and they wanted someone to write some chapters on Spring integration. This was my first exposure to using XMLMind and editing DocBook directly. Jim is one of the brightest authors I have ever worked with, and his colleague Ryan Fowler and I quickly started to use the DocBook XML from the first edition to update the book for a Second Edition printing. The writing process was a bit prolonged because two of us had some big distracting "life events" during the writing process. I'm proud of the end-product, and writing the book in DocBook was an eye opening experience. I would suggest that you get into the "craft" of book writing, code the book in DocBook using something like XMLMind, learn how to create and index, learn what it takes to create a book with all of the necessary markup. Writing a book is an entirely different beast from throwing some words into a Word Processor, and there's something to be said for understanding the entire process from start to finish.
The fourth book is an almost entirely different beast. Because of my experience with Jakarta Commons Cookbook and Maven: A Developer's Notebook I didn't want to be involved with a book that wasn't open source from the very beginning. The fourth book I'm involved with is Maven: The Definitive Guide, it is a comprehensive reference for Maven. This book is available for free from http://books.sonatype.com/ and you can also purchase a printed copy from O'Reilly. The book is an open source project on GitHub, the book is covered under a creative commons license, and we've attracted a
------ Tim O'Brien
I am not an author(yet), but IMHO, Addison Wesley definitely would rank the best tech book publisher. Key points: 1. Authoritative on the Computer Science topics 2. Majority of the texts are error-free(mostly - 99%)
My first book (Ship It! http://pragprog.com/titles/prj/ship-it ) was with the prags and it was a great experience. The book is now in 6 foreign languages editions and I keep getting quarterly checks. The editorial process was incredibly difficult, but that's because they push you to be the best you can.
And the 50% royalty rate is really what you get. I can tell you exactly how many books have been bought and returned, PDFs vs paper books, etc. I've not heard of anyone being able to match the level of information they provide authors.
The build system is also insanely cool. You can render the book on your local box, so you can see how it looks as you go. That's really motivating.
I just published a book on Lulu.com (for a variety of reasons, none negative towards the prags), and it was nearly painless. If you do publish on Lulu, be sure to start with their Word template and that eliminates a ton of the pain. But Career 2.0 ( http://www.lulu.com/content/5925115 ), my latest, has so many more typos, etc in it that Ship It!... it was easier to write, but the editing quality suffered a bit.
Regardless of who you publish with, you'll sell if you market it. Otherwise it won't. You write articles (InfoQ, DZone, etc), you set up a blog, you go to user's groups... you're the main PR arm for your book. You'll get out of it what you put into it.
Agile Artisans
Here are my (biased I'm sure) thoughts on selecting a publisher. (I founded No Starch Press.)
First of all, remember that a publisher is not a printer. If all you want is to see your book in print or to "get your book out there," you don't necessarily need a publisher to do that. You can use any of several print-on-demand printers; buy a run of books from an offset printer; sell your book as a PDF; post it as HTML; or other. And there's nothing wrong with doing that at all -- your choice depends on your goals.
Publishing is, or should be, a service business. A publisher should work with you to develop, craft, and market your book. They should help you to make the writing clear and understandable. They should be your harshest critics (because if they're not, the reviewers will be). They should involve you in the process and you should get to know their staff. You should feel free to ask them questions and they should provide you with clear and direct answers. Unfortunately, publishers are becoming more like printers everyday. We're resisting that trend.
If you're not getting editorial services from a publisher you might think of using a printer instead and trying distribution though Amazon directly or through your website if you've got a popular one. After all, if you're not getting service from a service business, what are you getting?
At No Starch Press, we read and edit everything. That's what our editors do in addition to bringing in new authors. Throughout our publishing process our emphasis is on producing quality books, not more books. We release a title when we think that we've done our part to make that book the best that it can be and if we think that the book isn't ready we delay it. That's true of all of our titles whether they're our Manga Guides or our hacking, sys admin, or programming titles. That doesn't mean that every book we publish is a winner but we've worked hard on every book to make it great.
When contacting publishers, ask the hard questions before signing a publishing agreement. How does your publisher market and sell books? How will they sell your book? Who will work on it? How will the editing process work? How involved will you be as author and how much can you be involved? What if you have concerns about the editorial work? How will you be paid? How does the agreement work?
We're a pretty editorially-driven publisher. But by the same token, thanks to our distribution relationship with O'Reilly and our agreements with various international partners, we've got great reach into the world marketplace. We've had books translated into over 20 different languages and we sell our books around the world.
One thing that makes No Starch Press unique though is that we are very picky. We don't publish a lot of books because our goal is not to have 10% of our list carry the rest; I'd rather see 90% of our list carry the remaining 10%.
OK, enough said. Time for a blog post.
Bill Pollock, Founder
No Starch Press
As with practically any endeavour, getting one's work published works on the following scale:
Maximum Control, High Complexity (- - - - - - - -) Minimum Control, High Simplicity.
Do you want input on all facets of publishing and selling your book? Presuming you've already
got the text completed, most cities have a printer or three who'll publish the book for you.
You'll need the completed text, formatted and laid out, jacket art, an idea of whether you want
it cloth bound, permabound, simple paperback, etc., about a thousand dollars or so, and
place to put all of your books. Contact R. R. Bowker for an ISBN, and don't mess around with
any of those sites which promise to give you one - they do NOTHING to help you sell your
book, and provide NO reduction in complexity of publishing.
Do you want someone to even find your book, and don't mind letting someone else handle
the printing details? Go with a vanity press. I've heard good things about Lulu, Xlibris, and
iUniverse, but STAY AWAY from any vanity press which has been involved in suits regarding
failure to pay royalties. Again, you'll need the capital to fund printing, and vanity presses do
virtually no marketing for your book, but at least someone can go to Amazon and order it, if
they know it exists.
Do you want people in the tech trades to be made aware of your book? At this level, you're
shopping your completed manuscript to a tech publisher, because they'll tell people your
book exists, and put your book in bookstores. To be placed in a major retail bookstore
(B&N, Borders, BAM) or college bookstore, you not only need an ISBN, but MUST have
a distributor (namely Ingram or Baker & Taylor). Especially since the banking credit crunch,
most bookstores will not handle books on consignment - they want return option books, and
book distributors handle that for them.
As far as specific publishers, if you've got a computer-topic book, there are only really four to
approach: Wiley, O'Reilly, McGraw-Hill, Pearson. Most of the computer book imprints you
see in bookstores are published by one of these four publishers. Please try to avoid having
your book formatted and published as part of the "Dummies" imprint, as the "Teach Yourself Visually"
series (both lines by Wiley) provides more information in an easier format to the newbie, and
many customers express dissatisfaction in buying a cartoon book with little real useful content.
My experience publishing a book with O'Reilly was just about perfect. The editors were smart, well-informed and deep enough to catch even binary encoding typos in protocol descriptions, and even though my coauthor and I had looked for critique by just everyone we could talk into it, the mandatory peer review process gave us a great chance to hear what people who had no vested interest in protecting our feelings had to say about the book in its nearly finished form. We made significant changes for the better from the editors' edits and suggestions and peer review questions and criticism. I would recommend O'Reilly to anyone with a technical book.
One thing to be aware of, O'Reilly prefers to start from scratch rather than getting a completed manuscript. They have very strict submission guidelines (down to specific styles in the document) that feed into their automated typesetting process. It's worth the effort to do it their way, because it eliminates plenty of opportunities for error and confusion.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
I am fairly well known in the computer security space. I was approached by an acquisitions editor from Addison Wesley after a talk at a major security conference to write book. I did it with a co-author and we both were extremely disappointed by their involvement.
1- You are responsible for finding your own technical editors
2- They did very little to market the book.
3- No advance
4- Poor communication
5- Diagrams! While publishers have art departments you have to express to them what to draw. Essentially we ended up creating all the art ourselves in Visio and they recreated the diagrams using their clipart for a server, computer, etc. Painful!
I would not work with them again. Have also worked with Syngress. They are way worse than AW. I swear they don't even know the meaning of the word "editor."
I have published myself couple of books and made all the money for myself. you sent 3 copies with fee to Copyright office(you get their address from the US website). I wrote them to meet the needs of my students,making them crawl, walk and run with me, not to show them how I did something and something from heaven just lands on the page. Good teachers don't write and good writers don't teach. Be careful to discuss your ideas to any sales rep. from publishers. They steal your idea and make money. So, I never talk to them. My books are sold only through reference and they are still used by my students. I am writing 3 more, one even with patent pending methodology. For every one good publishers, there 99% to suck your ideas and make money for themselves. So, publish it after getting edited from retired high school or college English professors (make sure they are as good as they claim), publish it as down loadable PDF book Ask for feed back and monetarily reward good suggestions and redo the book. you will all the money and more than you can get from the publisher. Of course pirate from other parts of the world will down load and print distribute and make tons of money. That is capitalism and they will it no matter what...
Purchased an E-book from Manning publications and they embedded my email address in every page.
Had I known they were going to do that, I never would have bought it.
Not that I intended to share the "book" either electronically or in print form, but my email address is private, not theirs to display.
They could have embedded "Personalized for xxx" or done something else than blare my personal email address on every page.
Will never purchase from them again.
What is up with Wrox:
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-PHP-Apache-MySQL-Development/dp/0470391146
Beginning PHP 6, Apache, MySQL 6 Web Development (Paperback)
According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP), there is no release date set for PHP6 yet. How could they write a book about in Jan 2009?
drasko
I've written a couple of books with Packt and they are good for new authors. They pay higher royalties (avg 25%) for ebook sales, the standard royalty percentage for print copies is 15%, and it takes about 6 months to go through the whole process of writing, rewrites, and publication. Disadvantages: You don't usually get to pick your cover (They have a standard format and use photographs, so have your own photo ideas, camera ready if your heart is set on a concept), The writing can be hectic if you have a job and family on top of it, and the advances are lower than some of the other guys. Advantage: They use Word primarily, but you can give them files in OpenOffice if you want. Bonus: They are a nice, supportive, cooperative bunch of people to work with. I'd write for them again if I had another good technical book idea ready to go.
There's a lot more to publishing than picking a publisher. Just to set expectations, most books sell fewer than a couple thousand copies. Most of the profits in book publishing come from the top 5% of all books. So no matter how big you think your royalty rate ought to be, a bigger percentage of a small revenue number is still a small number. Unless you are an extremely talented author and fortunate to hit the market at the right time with the right topic, you aren't going to make a good living as an author. Most authors should expect writing to be an expensive hobby because what you earn per hour of effort will be close to minimum wage -- or less. Of course, there are benefits, such as reputation, but not as much as you might think.
Something else to keep in mind is techies don't buy many books. A prominent tech author once divided the number of tech books sold per year by the number of tech professionals, and the number of books purchased per year rounded to zero. If you're thinking of becoming an author, you probably buy more books than average, so don't assume every techie is like you. Many have not bought a book since they graduated.
Finally, authors get the minimum amount of help from publishers necessary to get the book out. If you write well, you will be assigned junior editors who know the English language but next to nothing about tech. They will sometimes change what you write in ways that make it incorrect. So the editing process is two steps forward, one step back, and one step in a random direction. If you do not write well, the editing process will be much longer than you expect because you are effectively working for the publisher at that point and the editors cannot really fix what is broken.
This entire discussion, and no mention of Syngress? Syngress is an awesome little shop that has published hundreds of technology books. A lot of their books are security related, but also cover certifications and even fiction-tech.
My favorite publisher of all-time is Que. They come in a variety of flavors... including the "Complete Idiot's Guide to (insert topic here)", "Special Edition using (topic)", and "Platinum Edition using (topic)". I've at least found that the "Complete Idiot's Guides" go much further in-depth than one might think (at least more-so than IDG's "For Dummies" series which seem to often be good for nothing-more-than writing "Hello World" applications). I've always been impressed with the level of quality, depthness, and even humor contained in all the Que-published titles. O'Reilly actually earns second-place behind Que in my book, while being utterly invaluable for the fact that they (O'Reilly) publish on topics that nobody else does.
I'm one of the authors of a book that's been published in several editions by the Professional and Technical Reference division of Prentice Hall. This is part of the giant Pearson empire, which also includes Addison-Wesley and, I believe, Wiley. The industry consolidation doesn't seem to matter too much at this point, since most of it affects the back end (printing, distribution, etc.) more than the relationship between the label and the authors. So I think it's still worth researching the specific brand name you want to publish with rather than just assuming that one brand is as good as another within a given publishing empire.
We've worked with several editors (product managers, really - they do no editing) at PHPTR over the years, some better than others, but most of them helpful and competent. Support staff such as production editors and copy editors have been uniformly excellent. Overall, I'd say our experience has been very good.
Our manuscripts go to the publisher camera-ready, including the cover. This isn't the normal workflow for them, but they've done a very good job of accommodating us. I recommend this approach for anyone without a pathological fear of typesetting since it keeps you in control and skirts all kinds of format-related conflicts.
Potential technical book writers should be aware that the market has been contracting by double digits every year since the turn of the century. See Tim O'Reilly's blog postings about the technical book market for some great detail on this issue. It used to be a reasonable living, but now it just isn't. And our book is relatively successful. If a sizable part of your motivation for publishing is the prospect of royalty income, I would suggest approaching technical book writing with considerable skepticism. It's a great form of self-promotion, but you have to use the book as a basis for other streams of income.
Finally, unless you yourself are planning to put out crap, I would not even consider going with a shlock publisher like SAMS or Sybex. Just take a tour of your local technical bookstore and write down the name of every imprint you see on a wide-margined, 1,000-page tome about a relatively simple subject, especially if it has the words "unleashed", "revealed", or "secrets" in the title. There are plenty of publishers out there with great, legitimate lineups; there's no need to lie down with dogs.
but P2P is not bad either.