I fretted over the credibility issue a-lot before trying the self-publishing experiment. Since I had already published three books through major publishers I felt that I had the credibility to pull it off. I find that I am constantly mentioning that "I have published books through major publishers" whenever I mention my self-published book.
The answer is kind of simple: you have to convince them that the sales will be large.
Of course, this is not necessarily easy.
One mistake lots of people make is that they put a-lot of effort into creating a book proposal or other collateral. That is not necessary, and I think it is actually counter-productive: it makes it look like you are trying to convince them.
For my first book (the one that sold really well), my "proposal" was a one-line email to a senior acquisition editor at Prentice Hall. She replied saying she was interested, and then we had an international phone call (I was in Singapore at the time) and made a deal after five minutes of discussion. That's all it took because I had some credibility: I was the author of a popular column on Java (in Dr. Dobbs Journal) and was CTO of Digital Focus, a Java company that had established some footprint in that market. The proposed book was about Java, and would be the first book on "enterprise Java". They knew that the market for Java books was strong and growing, so it was a no brainer for them.
Things have changed considerably today because tech books in general don't sell very well: IT people are now accustomed to getting all of their information for free on the Internet. So publishers are now very skeptical about tech book proposals. It costs them at least $100K to prepare a book for publication and so they don't want to make that investment unless they are sure that the book will sell well. As a result one sees lots of books on pop topics that are expected to sell well. One sees few books on thoughtful topics because the market for that is smaller: only a small part of the market wants to think or read unconventional things. A tech book that would have sole 10,000 copies 20 years ago will only sell 1000 today because people look online first to see what they can get for free. Publishing has become like fast food and the lowest common denominator material sells a larger volume.
If your book is already written and you have been selling it, then you have data on the sales volume. That's all they care about: sales. However, if you are already selling it you have to ask yourself why you want an independent publisher to publish it: they will merely take a large percent of the revenue and give little in return - unless they think that the volume will be very large in which case they might invest a little in marketing. Generally speaking, for most books, "marketing" consists of putting in in their catalog for book stores, and that's it. A very few percent of books get real marketing: those that are the superstars, just like the few Olympic athletes who win gold medals get lots of endorsement deals but all the rest get few if any.
One publisher that is somewhat more adventurous than others for tech books is Elsevier. They have an interest in web-based publishing as well as print.
I have also self-published a book: my most recent book, Value-Driven IT (http://ValueDrivenIT.com). Prior to that I had published three books through traditional publishers (Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley). I will note that the term "self-publish" is a little ambiguous, since anyone who gets an ISBN number and publishes a book with that number is a publisher, by definition.
I also "gave away" the content, by putting it on a wiki, and also making hard- and soft-cover versions available from Amazon.
Unlike many who self-publish, I went through all of the steps that I would have had to go through had I published the traditional way. These included extensive review by subject matter experts, extensive editorial feedback and revision, professional layout (including an index, legal permission for graphics used, etc.), forewords by industry luminaries, and pre-publication commentary (known as "advance praise") by industry experts.
Some of the things I learned from the self-publishing experience are:
Amazon puts one's book near the bottom of the list when you search for it: they put their "partner's" books at the top (the publishers who pay them, it seems). Thus, if one searches for my book on Amazon, by the book's exact title, one finds all kinds of irrelevant things first, and then my book shows up on about page five of the search results - if lucky.
The above is true for many things. The marketing of books and other content are essentially a pay-to-play environment. Getting noticed because something is good is difficult unless someone who is very well known latches onto it and talks about it.
Publishers don't add a-lot of value over self-publishing, unless they think that your book is going to be a hit. (My first book was a big hit.)
Also, books that are "cross-over" books - i.e., interdisciplinary - are very hard to market, whether one uses an established publisher or self-publishes. This is because people generally read IT books when they want to learn about something that they heard about, and if something doesn't fit into an established niche, then one will not have heard about it. My most recent two books (High-Assurance Design and Value-Driven IT) are both cross-over books and therefore are hard to market.
There is also a misconception that people who write technical books do it for money, and that their motivation is book sales. My first book was a big hit (sold about 30,000 copies: that is a-lot for a technical book). However, if I calculate the money I made on an hourly basis given the amount of time it took to write the book, I earned at the rate of about $30/hour. Not very good, especially considering that I earn about five times that in the other work that I do. The reasons for writing a book (for me) have always been that (1) a book establishes one as a recognized thought leader in the industry, it (2) helps one to organize one's thoughts about something, and (3) it serves as a "calling card" when one does consulting (which I do). Royalties are not a very good reason for writing a technical book.
Well put. Many comments here point out (correctly, in my opinion) that the purpose of college is not to prepare one for a job. Rather, it is to provide a foundation of knowledge so that one can go on to become one of the thought leaders of society and also so that one can then learn high level trade skills and have foundational skills such as expository writing, mathematics, and so on. If one wants to learn how to do a particular job, one studies a specialty or learns on the job.
Academic areas of study are not jobs. For example, consider the field of study "ornithology". Yet, an "ornithologist" is not a job, even if that is the job title. A person who has studied ornithology can go on to have some of the following kinds of job: (1) work as a ranger in the field at a nature park; (2) become a professor or lab researcher; (3) work as an author editing bird books; and so on. These various jobs are all very different. All require fundamental knowledge of ornithology, but each entails very different practices on a daily basis.
College is not supposed to provide the daily skills needed for a job or trade.
Finally, I would claim that those who jump right into learning the daily practices of software engineering and who skip the computer science are not well prepared. They lack foundational knowledge that would enable them to adapt as new kinds of tools and languages come along. CS contains important knowledge that is vital to being a good software engineer. One can learn this in college or be self-taught, but the foundational knowledge is important. Yet CS by itself is not sufficient to be a practicing software engineer.
Insightful clarifications. Thanks. But first-to-file appears to still favor large companies. It is true that small startups are investing their resources in developing their products and services. Only large companies have the resources to file every "invention" as soon as it is "invented".
Those interested in social engineering might also want to read chapter 5 of my book High-Assurance Design (website at http://www.assuredbydesign.com/haa/). It contains a complete taxonomy of social engineering techniques and compares them to commonly known "con schemes" (e.g., "pigeon drop", "Spanish prisoner", "pump-and-dump"....) Chapter 5 happens to be available as a complementary download here: http://www.assuredbydesign.com/haa/chs/Berg_ch05.pdf
I am sorry for misinterpreting your intention. I actually thought about it after I posted my response. I realized too late that you were only saying that the "pay for email" solution was un-implementable. And I agree with you completely about the sound bite culture that we live in. I am not quite as sure though that a solution cannot always be reduced to its essential ideas and expressed concisely: I don't know. Perhaps.
The implication then, is that reflection on what should be is a waste of time.
Good thing that Gandhi did not feel that it would be a waste of time to even contemplate ways to evict the British.
The US political system is very messed up. Any concept for how to truly fix it is inconceivably difficult to implement. Therefore, according to your thinking, let's not even think about it, since it is a waste of time. Let's only think about what is easy to do.
You are right, that implementing this would require embedding a financial transaction protocol within the TCP infrastructure. Still, that could be used for other purposes and might be quite useful.
"[Musk] investigated the science behind rocket launching and concluded that there was no real reason why it was so expensive. He believed the space industry was dominated by inefficient government bodies. By starting afresh, and going back to basics, Musk believed getting into space could be done quickly and cheaply. He was right...SpaceX is getting into orbit for a fraction of the cost of the space shuttle programme...[SpaceX] wants to drive the costs down and improve reliability and make space travel something that is open to everyone. Only private business, Musk thinks, can do that. 'The fundamental barriers are improving reliability and reducing cost, and the government is not that good at either. Would you prefer to fly Virgin Atlantic or Soviet-era Aeroflot?' "
These big contractors will never come up with an efficient solution. It is against their interests. They will design some very capital intensive approach. Then they will bid on the contracts to build it.
It will take a startup company to come up with a innovative and viable approach.
The "war on drugs" is a failure. And besides, it violates our civil rights. If someone wants to use drugs, who is the Federal government to tell them that they can't???
It is one thing to provide education and have treatment programs. It is another thing to outlaw personal behavior.
And it is counter-productive. All it has done is created a huge illegal industry. If drugs of all kinds were legal, that industry would be in the daylight, and it could be regulated and taxed, and the proceeds directly used to fund education and treatment programs. (We will never win the war in Afghanistan because we will not allow them to grow poppies, despite the fact that demand comes from the US and Europe.) And drugs could still be illegal for sale to _minors_ - and the companies would comply with that, because they would be legitimate businesses that would not want to lose their license to do business.
And the "war on terror": what terror? One attack on our soil in ten years, costing us 3000 people. Horrible as that is, we lose ten times that many every year in car accidents. Yet we are spending hundreds of billions annually on security in response to 9/11 and are still in a war, and giving up our civil liberties in the process. Our response is way, way, way overboard.
Back to the question at hand: Security "compliance" does not work. What works is (1) getting management to make security a requirement, by making them liable: that will then cause developers to learn about security; and (2) creating languages and tools that help to make systems secure by design.
What about people who would like to teach, and who would be good teachers - even with no training - but who cannot teach because they don't have the time and resources to take two years off from work to get the certificate in teaching?
We are losing out on such people, and there are lots of them. In fact, I would propose that if someone who is an expert in some field wants to teach, they are probably a natural teacher. Otherwise, they would not want to teach.
I maintain that teaching is something that many people can do naturally, without training. We are missing out. We have created an insurmountable barrier that prevents subject matter experts from becoming teachers at the pre-college level.
Ironically, colleges don't impose this restriction. One could take any college professor, and that professor would not be allowed to teach high school students, because colleges don't have this absurd teaching certificate requirement. I claim that the certificate is nothing more than a barrier to keep the ranks of teachers closed. If the school's management is doing its job and verifying that all of their teachers are effective, then the certificate is redundant.
Yes, you are right. But we have to consider the overall effect. What has happened is that teaching has become a kind of guild or closed profession. It think it would be better to let all subject matter experts in. If they can't teach, that will be discovered by an alert school management. If the school's management cannot discover that a teacher cannot teach, then that is another problem entirely.
Actually, if the post is asserting that teachers should be trained more as teachers before they can become teachers, then that is the wrong conclusion.
The main problem is that people who are qualified in subjects are not allowed to become teachers, unless they take two years out from their life and get a teaching degree. This is _why_ we have non-scientists teaching biology, as the posting claims.
The Teacher's Union has a stranglehold on the profession. Lots of people (such as myself) who would like to spend a few years teaching and who are very qualified in subjects are prevented from spending a few years in that role. Do we have qualified teachers as a result of the current policy? Apparently not. Time to try something else.
I am not talking about something physically breaking. I am talking about something not working right when you need it to. Software glitches, such as a device freezing and needing to be restarted, or losing all of your data.
Software will not become more reliable until businesses start to value reliability, and they will not until the risk of liability becomes large and widespread.
As more and more of our lives depend on software, 99% reliability is no longer enough. A time will come when there will be a backlash against unreliable programmed devices, and litigation will be a part of this. At that time, organizations will have to entirely revise the way that they build their software, adopting methods and technologies that enhance reliability. At the present time, reliability is an after-thought. This is not sustainable. If every device in one's environment has 99% reliability and one uses 1000 devices every day, then something will always be failing.
I just read the original article, and it is not claiming quantum teleportation.
It is claiming that electromagnetic resonances are set up around polymers in water solution, and if the water contains the right building blocks (monomers), then the resonances can reconstruct copies of the original polymers. This apparently occurs even if there are physical barriers separating the polymers from the monomer solution.
The article relies on quantum mechanics only to the extent that certain quantum mechanical models of water molecule behavior (coherence domains) are used, since "classical" models that rely on energy levels are not sufficient. There is no claim of teleportation that I could see.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is true.
I fretted over the credibility issue a-lot before trying the self-publishing experiment. Since I had already published three books through major publishers I felt that I had the credibility to pull it off. I find that I am constantly mentioning that "I have published books through major publishers" whenever I mention my self-published book.
The answer is kind of simple: you have to convince them that the sales will be large.
Of course, this is not necessarily easy.
One mistake lots of people make is that they put a-lot of effort into creating a book proposal or other collateral. That is not necessary, and I think it is actually counter-productive: it makes it look like you are trying to convince them.
For my first book (the one that sold really well), my "proposal" was a one-line email to a senior acquisition editor at Prentice Hall. She replied saying she was interested, and then we had an international phone call (I was in Singapore at the time) and made a deal after five minutes of discussion. That's all it took because I had some credibility: I was the author of a popular column on Java (in Dr. Dobbs Journal) and was CTO of Digital Focus, a Java company that had established some footprint in that market. The proposed book was about Java, and would be the first book on "enterprise Java". They knew that the market for Java books was strong and growing, so it was a no brainer for them.
Things have changed considerably today because tech books in general don't sell very well: IT people are now accustomed to getting all of their information for free on the Internet. So publishers are now very skeptical about tech book proposals. It costs them at least $100K to prepare a book for publication and so they don't want to make that investment unless they are sure that the book will sell well. As a result one sees lots of books on pop topics that are expected to sell well. One sees few books on thoughtful topics because the market for that is smaller: only a small part of the market wants to think or read unconventional things. A tech book that would have sole 10,000 copies 20 years ago will only sell 1000 today because people look online first to see what they can get for free. Publishing has become like fast food and the lowest common denominator material sells a larger volume.
If your book is already written and you have been selling it, then you have data on the sales volume. That's all they care about: sales. However, if you are already selling it you have to ask yourself why you want an independent publisher to publish it: they will merely take a large percent of the revenue and give little in return - unless they think that the volume will be very large in which case they might invest a little in marketing. Generally speaking, for most books, "marketing" consists of putting in in their catalog for book stores, and that's it. A very few percent of books get real marketing: those that are the superstars, just like the few Olympic athletes who win gold medals get lots of endorsement deals but all the rest get few if any.
One publisher that is somewhat more adventurous than others for tech books is Elsevier. They have an interest in web-based publishing as well as print.
I have also self-published a book: my most recent book, Value-Driven IT (http://ValueDrivenIT.com). Prior to that I had published three books through traditional publishers (Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley). I will note that the term "self-publish" is a little ambiguous, since anyone who gets an ISBN number and publishes a book with that number is a publisher, by definition.
I also "gave away" the content, by putting it on a wiki, and also making hard- and soft-cover versions available from Amazon.
Unlike many who self-publish, I went through all of the steps that I would have had to go through had I published the traditional way. These included extensive review by subject matter experts, extensive editorial feedback and revision, professional layout (including an index, legal permission for graphics used, etc.), forewords by industry luminaries, and pre-publication commentary (known as "advance praise") by industry experts.
Some of the things I learned from the self-publishing experience are:
Also, books that are "cross-over" books - i.e., interdisciplinary - are very hard to market, whether one uses an established publisher or self-publishes. This is because people generally read IT books when they want to learn about something that they heard about, and if something doesn't fit into an established niche, then one will not have heard about it. My most recent two books (High-Assurance Design and Value-Driven IT) are both cross-over books and therefore are hard to market.
There is also a misconception that people who write technical books do it for money, and that their motivation is book sales. My first book was a big hit (sold about 30,000 copies: that is a-lot for a technical book). However, if I calculate the money I made on an hourly basis given the amount of time it took to write the book, I earned at the rate of about $30/hour. Not very good, especially considering that I earn about five times that in the other work that I do. The reasons for writing a book (for me) have always been that (1) a book establishes one as a recognized thought leader in the industry, it (2) helps one to organize one's thoughts about something, and (3) it serves as a "calling card" when one does consulting (which I do). Royalties are not a very good reason for writing a technical book.
Well put. Many comments here point out (correctly, in my opinion) that the purpose of college is not to prepare one for a job. Rather, it is to provide a foundation of knowledge so that one can go on to become one of the thought leaders of society and also so that one can then learn high level trade skills and have foundational skills such as expository writing, mathematics, and so on. If one wants to learn how to do a particular job, one studies a specialty or learns on the job.
Academic areas of study are not jobs. For example, consider the field of study "ornithology". Yet, an "ornithologist" is not a job, even if that is the job title. A person who has studied ornithology can go on to have some of the following kinds of job: (1) work as a ranger in the field at a nature park; (2) become a professor or lab researcher; (3) work as an author editing bird books; and so on. These various jobs are all very different. All require fundamental knowledge of ornithology, but each entails very different practices on a daily basis.
College is not supposed to provide the daily skills needed for a job or trade.
Finally, I would claim that those who jump right into learning the daily practices of software engineering and who skip the computer science are not well prepared. They lack foundational knowledge that would enable them to adapt as new kinds of tools and languages come along. CS contains important knowledge that is vital to being a good software engineer. One can learn this in college or be self-taught, but the foundational knowledge is important. Yet CS by itself is not sufficient to be a practicing software engineer.
I thought you meant my book, Value-Driven IT.
The book was not promoted very well by Addison-Wesley, so not many people know about it. If you're smart you'll be your own judge.
Insightful clarifications. Thanks. But first-to-file appears to still favor large companies. It is true that small startups are investing their resources in developing their products and services. Only large companies have the resources to file every "invention" as soon as it is "invented".
Those interested in social engineering might also want to read chapter 5 of my book High-Assurance Design (website at http://www.assuredbydesign.com/haa/). It contains a complete taxonomy of social engineering techniques and compares them to commonly known "con schemes" (e.g., "pigeon drop", "Spanish prisoner", "pump-and-dump"....) Chapter 5 happens to be available as a complementary download here: http://www.assuredbydesign.com/haa/chs/Berg_ch05.pdf
I am sorry for misinterpreting your intention. I actually thought about it after I posted my response. I realized too late that you were only saying that the "pay for email" solution was un-implementable. And I agree with you completely about the sound bite culture that we live in. I am not quite as sure though that a solution cannot always be reduced to its essential ideas and expressed concisely: I don't know. Perhaps.
The implication then, is that reflection on what should be is a waste of time.
Good thing that Gandhi did not feel that it would be a waste of time to even contemplate ways to evict the British.
The US political system is very messed up. Any concept for how to truly fix it is inconceivably difficult to implement. Therefore, according to your thinking, let's not even think about it, since it is a waste of time. Let's only think about what is easy to do.
You are right, that implementing this would require embedding a financial transaction protocol within the TCP infrastructure. Still, that could be used for other purposes and might be quite useful.
I did not say that it was my idea. And you are right: implementing it - getting ISPs and users to accept this - is the hard part!
Charge one penny per sent message. That is all we need to do to stop spam. So simple.
If anyone wants security, there is S/MIME, widely available and widely supported.
Yes, it is indeed complex. But I will point out that it took small startups to figure out how to create low cost launch vehicles. The big contractors just don't have that mindset. See this article about Elon Musk: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/01/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-mars
From that article:
Yes. The sweet spot is the most that Congress will possibly fund.
I am curious. Can you explain? Thanks!!
These big contractors will never come up with an efficient solution. It is against their interests. They will design some very capital intensive approach. Then they will bid on the contracts to build it.
It will take a startup company to come up with a innovative and viable approach.
Agree.
The "war on drugs" is a failure. And besides, it violates our civil rights. If someone wants to use drugs, who is the Federal government to tell them that they can't???
It is one thing to provide education and have treatment programs. It is another thing to outlaw personal behavior.
And it is counter-productive. All it has done is created a huge illegal industry. If drugs of all kinds were legal, that industry would be in the daylight, and it could be regulated and taxed, and the proceeds directly used to fund education and treatment programs. (We will never win the war in Afghanistan because we will not allow them to grow poppies, despite the fact that demand comes from the US and Europe.) And drugs could still be illegal for sale to _minors_ - and the companies would comply with that, because they would be legitimate businesses that would not want to lose their license to do business.
And the "war on terror": what terror? One attack on our soil in ten years, costing us 3000 people. Horrible as that is, we lose ten times that many every year in car accidents. Yet we are spending hundreds of billions annually on security in response to 9/11 and are still in a war, and giving up our civil liberties in the process. Our response is way, way, way overboard.
Back to the question at hand: Security "compliance" does not work. What works is (1) getting management to make security a requirement, by making them liable: that will then cause developers to learn about security; and (2) creating languages and tools that help to make systems secure by design.
What about people who would like to teach, and who would be good teachers - even with no training - but who cannot teach because they don't have the time and resources to take two years off from work to get the certificate in teaching?
We are losing out on such people, and there are lots of them. In fact, I would propose that if someone who is an expert in some field wants to teach, they are probably a natural teacher. Otherwise, they would not want to teach.
I maintain that teaching is something that many people can do naturally, without training. We are missing out. We have created an insurmountable barrier that prevents subject matter experts from becoming teachers at the pre-college level.
Ironically, colleges don't impose this restriction. One could take any college professor, and that professor would not be allowed to teach high school students, because colleges don't have this absurd teaching certificate requirement. I claim that the certificate is nothing more than a barrier to keep the ranks of teachers closed. If the school's management is doing its job and verifying that all of their teachers are effective, then the certificate is redundant.
Yes, you are right. But we have to consider the overall effect. What has happened is that teaching has become a kind of guild or closed profession. It think it would be better to let all subject matter experts in. If they can't teach, that will be discovered by an alert school management. If the school's management cannot discover that a teacher cannot teach, then that is another problem entirely.
Actually, if the post is asserting that teachers should be trained more as teachers before they can become teachers, then that is the wrong conclusion.
The main problem is that people who are qualified in subjects are not allowed to become teachers, unless they take two years out from their life and get a teaching degree. This is _why_ we have non-scientists teaching biology, as the posting claims.
The Teacher's Union has a stranglehold on the profession. Lots of people (such as myself) who would like to spend a few years teaching and who are very qualified in subjects are prevented from spending a few years in that role. Do we have qualified teachers as a result of the current policy? Apparently not. Time to try something else.
I am not talking about something physically breaking. I am talking about something not working right when you need it to. Software glitches, such as a device freezing and needing to be restarted, or losing all of your data.
Yes, this is the real issue.
Software will not become more reliable until businesses start to value reliability, and they will not until the risk of liability becomes large and widespread.
As more and more of our lives depend on software, 99% reliability is no longer enough. A time will come when there will be a backlash against unreliable programmed devices, and litigation will be a part of this. At that time, organizations will have to entirely revise the way that they build their software, adopting methods and technologies that enhance reliability. At the present time, reliability is an after-thought. This is not sustainable. If every device in one's environment has 99% reliability and one uses 1000 devices every day, then something will always be failing.
Indeed. This might be an entirely new mechanism for transcription.... If this bears up under scrutiny, this might deserve a Nobel Prize.
I just read the original article, and it is not claiming quantum teleportation.
It is claiming that electromagnetic resonances are set up around polymers in water solution, and if the water contains the right building blocks (monomers), then the resonances can reconstruct copies of the original polymers. This apparently occurs even if there are physical barriers separating the polymers from the monomer solution.
The article relies on quantum mechanics only to the extent that certain quantum mechanical models of water molecule behavior (coherence domains) are used, since "classical" models that rely on energy levels are not sufficient. There is no claim of teleportation that I could see.