Archive for May 14th, 2008

Spring Into Technical Publishing

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

The following books helped me immensely to get up to speed with self-publishing.

Write Faster, Write Better

Buy from Amazon

This book shows the power of write-page(s)-a-day process where writing incrementally adds up to a book.

Aiming at Amazon: The NEW Business of Self Publishing, or How to Publish Books for Less, Sell Without Hassle, and Double Your Profit (or More) With Print on Demand and Book Marketing on Amazon.com

Buy from Amazon

The book recommends to register as a publisher and use Lightning Source as POD printer and distribution channel.

Perfect Pages: Self Publishing with Microsoft Word, or How to Avoid High-Priced Page Layout Programs or Book Design Fees and Produce Fine Books in MS Word for Desktop Publishing and Print on Demand

Buy from Amazon

Use Microsoft Word to prepare your book. Very good chapters about indexing and cover design. The latter can be created in MS Word too!

POD People: Beating the Print-on-Demand Stigma

Buy from Amazon

This is the book that I recently discovered and read. Although the author discusses POD in the context of fiction publishing it has some good points to remember even if you self-publish professional and technical books. It recommends to use Lulu as POD printer and distributor. I find it useful if you plan to publish one book only. However if you plan to be a full-blown publisher you should use POD services for publishers like Lightning Source.

Hope this helps. I’m also reading other self-publishing and marketing books at the moment and will post reviews of them soon.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

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Technical Books as Software

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

I thought I discovered the concept “Books as Software” but Google search reveals that it was done before me by Shriram Krishnamurthi:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Memos/Books-as-Software/

It’s good to see that I wasn’t alone to notice this concept after publishing my first book on Lulu. However I went further and registered as a publisher and now use Lightning Source for long term publishing through Ingram and online bookstores like Amazon. Lulu now serves the purpose of a bookstore, instant publishing to test concepts, and also to publish in formats that are not available through Lightning Source.

Moving forward and thinking about multiple books brings us to consider book series as software product lines as well. We also need some kind of a management process that I call Iterative and Incremental Publishing taken from the family of scalable Unified Processes like Rational that I am used to. Scaled down to just one book it can be called Iterative and Incremental Writing as well. I was thinking about during past two months and finally came up with an idea to release a short book in October to help others to spring into technical self-publishing and writing especially software engineers. Iterative and Incremental Writing techniques can also be applied to traditional publishing as well where you already have an accepted book proposal similar to vision and requirements documentation and perhaps you have a draft chapter and table of contents that can be considered as a working software prototype.

The forthcoming book has the following draft product details:

  • Title: Technical Books As Software: Iterative and Incremental Writing and Publishing
  • Author: Dmitry Vostokov
  • Publisher: Opentask (15 October 2008)
  • Language: English
  • Product Dimensions: 22.86 x 15.24
  • ISBN-13: 978-1-906717-03-2
  • Paperback: 128 pages

I think there is a big difference between technical and other book genres like fiction so I decided to limit myself to technical book writing and publishing although some concepts of iterative and incremental development can be applied to other book categories as well where a process needs to be established to achieve the writing and publishing goals.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

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