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.
People have to eat.
Shockingly, I've seen books devoted to PHP, Apache, and C - books which cost money to buy. But get this - those things are free!
And a few ingenious companies actually built commercial products around them, too!
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.
A lot of people are profiting from providing exactly the type of added value that a book (or training, or support, or packaging/distributing etc) provides on top of free software. Just ask Red Hat and a gazillion other for-profit companies built around open source. The bunch of programmers you mention presumably have their reasons for donating their work for free but that doesn't impose an obligation on anybody else to follow suit.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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)!
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.
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
Uhm...have you ever READ many man pages or much documentation done by programmers? It isn't that hard to improve upon and add value to, and a well written work explaining how to use something provided for free could be well worth the money even to a rational marketeer. Also by your logic we shouldn't pay English teachers or for dictionaries as what they provide is also free. Or math teachers for that matter, even more so in some ways.
Just because part of the subject matter has a certain cost associated with it doesn't mean all related matirials will have the same cost.
I used to have warm, fuzzy feelings about O'Reilly and my shelf full of O'Reilly books. That was before they started spamming me. I'm a college professor, and they sent me spam trying to get me to adopt one of their physics books for my courses. This was at a .edu email address that I had never given to them -- in fact, I had no preexisting business relationship with O'Reilly at all, except for buying their books on amazon and in bricks-and-mortar bookstores (and not with that email address, either).
I don't do business with spammers.
Find free books.
Maybe I wasn't sufficiently clear: My intention was to point out that any work based too closely on the existing (free) efforts would fail. Any work that addresses a different niche, or is a notable improvement, has room to succeed, which is why the genre of tech books is fairly successful.
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.
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.
Shockingly, I've seen books devoted to PHP, Apache, and C - books which cost money to buy. But get this - those things are free!
To add to that, I've seen books about sex for sale, and sex is occasionally free.
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.
[citation needed]
Your mom.
You might "have a publisher" if you are a really well known author. Most authors aren't going to be able to go to a publisher and say, "Hey, I've got a really great idea for a book. Will you publish it for me?" They won't even hear the beginning of the second sentence.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I like just about everything gratis, but I will say this: A good book is worth every penny.
I have a lot of really tremendous books that you could only pry from my cold dead hands.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Pretty funny coming from a first post!
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.
GPL: "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price"
So in other words, free as in speech, not free as in beer.
No.
Giving away advice, articles, etc., is one thing, and I do it all the time. (Some of this is covered by my salary. But nowhere near all of it.)
But when I spend 10 months full-time, writing a 500-page book that developers are going to use to learn or improve skills that will help them make more money, I see absolutely nothing wrong with me getting a share.
As for the original question, my advice is, "Apress and O'Reilly will treat you fairly and professionally. Wrox and Addison-Wesley will do their best to steal you blind."
(NB: I've never actually written for O'Reilly, but I've written several for each of the other three. My colleagues who've written for O'Reilly, however, seem pretty happy about having done so, and their contracts look very reasonable.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
My story of when I was involved with an Apress book here.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
No no, his mother has already received numerous citations for the not free kind of sex.
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
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.
To add to that, I've seen books about sex for sale, and sex is occasionally free.
as in beer or as in speech?
The O'Reilly books generally read like the author actually liked what they were writing about. The Wrox book read like shovelware.
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
Thank you. We really do try to do right by our authors. We also read and edit everything that comes in, which is why we're usually not the first ones out with a book on any topic unless we somehow invented the market.
I've always considered the relationship between author and publisher to be a partnership. Sometimes that partnership sours, as in any business arrangement, but many times our authors have become my good friends.
Bill Pollock, Founder
No Starch Press
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
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 --]
Tim O'Reilly here. I was alarmed by this comment, as I don't like to think that my marketing department sends out spam, so I forwarded this message on to the team. Here's the reply I got: "this person has posted this before. We've searched for his email with no luck. I responded to his comment previously on slashdot and asked for him to send me a copy of the email so we could research. He never replied. Instead of letting us fix it, he would rather be a troll."
I suspect, now that I look more carefully, that there's more than to it than trolling. I notice the link, "Find free books," the claim that we tried to send him a physics book, something we haven't yet published, and I suspect that it is the poster who is a spammer.
bcrowell - if this is a legitimate complaint, please send us a copy of the email you received from us, or your own email address, and we'll see if you've ever been on our list, and if so, make sure you aren't any more.
If not, this guy needs moderating down...
Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 http://www.oreilly.com