The No Starch Press Blog

Another snippet from the continuing dialog on Slashdot. Here’s my response to someone’s question about the level of editing at No Starch Press.

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I’ve been publishing technical books since 1991. In my experience, and according to reports from the authors we’ve worked with, there doesn’t seem to be a company that consistently edits every title as deeply as we do. Of course I may be wrong and this information is based only on my experience with other publishers and reports from other authors.

The reports that I get from authors are either that their work is left basically unedited (or it’s left to a copyeditor to clean up), or, as was the case with one large publisher that I worked with in the 1990s, a couple of chapters are edited and then the authors are left on their own.

On all of our titles, one of our in-house editors does a developmental edit first. This edit may involve rewriting/reorganizing chapters; extensive queries; reworking paragraphs and sentences; and so on. Or, if the book needs minimal editing, chapters may move on to technical review, once our editor has approved them.

Once chapters are returned by the technical reviewer and cleaned up (by author and editor), they move onto copyedit. Once through copyedit they move onto proofreading. Our authors see every stage of the process.

If you’ve been receiving this level of editing that’s great news. Every publisher in the tech book business should be doing a similar level of editing, as necessary. I wish they all would because the business would be better for it.

Bill

Hey, I wrote something on Slashdot today. Time for a blog post.

Here are my (biased I’m sure) thoughts on selecting a publisher as posted to Slashdot.

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%.

Using an existing VPN should be relatively trivial but setting up a VPN server is another thing entirely. This tutorial http://snipurl.com/ju6nh [www_geek-pages_com] about using OpenVPN with DD-WRT looks promising though I can’t flash our office router with DD-WRT. (I’d need to ditch the router or bridge it.)

Of course, my first thought as a book publisher is: “is there a book in this?” Here’s a brief analysis.

There have been several VPN books over the years but nothing recent seems to have sold very well through the trade. The best-selling title on the topic was published in 2000, from Pearson. It probably sold around 10,000 copies. It’s a stand-out though. More recent titles are selling in the hundreds of copies.

My brief analysis tells me that there may have been a good opportunity in this market years ago, but when I can find a clear, step-by-step tutorial like the one that I link to above in about five minutes on Google, who needs a book?

Granted, some people might buy a book regardless and there’s no doubt that this is a topic that will mystify many, but in this case, Google wins.

Unless, of course, we were to publish a Manga Guide to VPN. We won’t.

I’m a big fan of Trader Joe’s. I admit to not loving the store when I first moved to the Bay Area in 1991 (I was and still am a New York snob), but Trader Joe’s just seems to have gotten better and better over the years. (While Noah’s Rolls has gone wayyyyy downhill.).

While on a recent shopping expedition to Trader Joe’s I started thinking about what it is that makes TJ’s so successful, and what we can learn from Trader Joe’s. I was thinking in particular of what tech book publishers can learn.

Geeks are a pretty amazing audience–both unforgiving and incredibly loyal at the same time, when they’re treated right. When we publish a book that nails the topic squarely on its head, we get tremendous response. When we miss (it’s happened a few times), the response is blah, or why did you publish this, or that’s not a No Starch Press book. That’s important — that’s our readers telling us something.

So back to Trader Joe’s. What are some of the characteristics of Trader Joe’s that make it so successful, and what can we learn from their success? Here’s my take.

Be Picky. Trader Joe’s has a limited selection of products and generally does not have huge piles of products like the ones you’d find in larger chain grocery stores. I find the quality of selections to be quite high although not perfect. They’re picky. They won’t just stick any product on the shelf and nor should we as publishers.

Charge Fair Prices. Fair doesn’t always mean cheap but it does mean don’t price gouge. If a product is rare (like a book without a large audience), a higher price is fair. But if a product is selling in quantity (like the infamous Charles Shaw wine), the price can come way down. I don’t expect too much from a bottle of Charles Shaw (2 buck Chuck), and I don’t really love it, but I know what I’m getting and I’m not going to complain too much at that price.

Keep Things Fresh. When I visit a Trader Joe’s I know to expect some new products (some work and some don’t), but also generally fresh inventory of familiar products. The products aren’t all perfect by any means, but the inventory is kept low so that it doesn’t hang around too long, and the product selection is kept fresh.

Quality, Quality, Quality. One thing I do expect from everything that Trader Joe’s carries is quality. Whether that’s repackaged Straus milk products, Belgian chocolate, or canned salmon. I know that someone at Trader Joe’s is tasting their stuff and choosing the quality products, which is exactly what we need to continue to do when we publish. Keep tasting; keep the tasty stuff.

Always Raise the Bar. As I mentioned in my preamble, I have the distinct impression that Trader Joe’s has been improving over the years. Compare that to Noah’s Supposed Bagels which used to be good but now taste just like rolls with holes. Our goal at No Starch Press is to always make our next book better than our last. I’m not saying that we’ll succeed but if we reach for the moon we’ll get closer than if we just reach for the closest thing on the shelf.

Value Your Customers. Without customers, Trader Joe’s would be nothing. I feel like (true or not) Trader Joe’s staff actually likes the fact that I’m shopping in their store. Unlike, say, the staff at United Airlines, or American Airlines, or PG&E, which just don’t really seem to care whether they get my dollars or not. OK, if you don’t care, I’ll give them to the next competitor who can give me decent service, good products, and who will value my business. We need to always be sure that our customers know that we value them, and we need to be sure that we’re giving back to our customers, always.

Accessorize. Think about those Trader Joe’s shopping bags. I’ve got at least half a dozen of them and counting. Why I even bought their latest one a couple of days ago. Those are pretty nice profit centers for them but they also work for me. I use them when I shop there but I also use them to haul stuff. Think vi mug. Must publish more mugs.

Make it Fun. I look forward to shopping at Trader Joe’s. They’ve got that cute “Fearless Flyer,” and I know that I can get my little cup of coffee and some free sample. The people that work there can be characters, too. Make it fun and I’ll come back. Make our books fun and compelling and our readers will come back, again and again.

Be Human. This is an important one. Trader Joe’s is a big business but you’d never know it from a walk through their stores. They seem like neighborhood grocers. Their staff speaks to me like a human, without the “Hello Mr. Pollock thanks for shopping at Safeway bleep” that I get at, you guessed it Safeway. Why I even have political discussions with their cashiers. That comes from the top down — Trader Joe’s seems to value their employees and they don’t put arbitrary restrictions on their behavior. There must be a corporate culture too that encourages a sort of accepted behavior, just like we find at funkier coffee places. (Probably not Starbucks.)  Be human and you’ll be surrounded by humans.

Give Back. Now here’s something that I actually don’t know too much about with regard to Trader Joe’s. One has the sense from the store that they care about the environment (sensitive packaging, reusable bags), but I don’t know what they do to give back to the community, or if they do. That could all be design and spin. Regardless, giving back to one’s community is very important especially when asking for the support of that community. One way to give back is to actually publish books that people want to read — stuff that’s cool. We aim to do that everyday. We also support various conferences and geek efforts when we can.

Maybe I’ll come up with some additional insights. Maybe you, dear reader, have some insights of your own that you’d like to share.

Anyway, the bottom line is, when the world is crashing around us, we need to keep our eyes focused on what really matters. Everything that we publish has a price tag which means that we’re expecting our readers to part with their hard-earned cash for one of our books. We need to always make sure that whatever they’re buying is actually worth having, and that whatever we’re publishing is something that people really want or need.

Over at the Penguin blog, Nick Hornby neatly captures the uncertainty of the ebook’s future:

There is currently much consternation in the book industry about the future of the conventional book, but my suspicion is that it will prove to be more tenacious than the CD, for the following reasons:

1) Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs. Vinyl yes, CDs no. They are too small for interesting cover art and legible lyrics, the cases break easily, and despite all promises to the contrary, they are extremely easy to break and scratch. Books have remained consistently lovable for several hundred years now. For readers, a wall lined with books is as attractive as any art we could afford to put up there.

Baron Schwartz just posted an exhaustive summary of his experience writing High Performance MySQL for O’Reilly. He has great insight into writing well, research, and the interpersonal side of publishing. Highly recommended reading for aspiring authors and those who work in tech publishing.

On time management…

There’s a non-linear relationship between pages and work, and pages that are going into print are going to take a lot more work than your senior thesis or dissertation, believe me. Anyway, however it works for you, try to get a sense of the hours it’ll need. Now mentally visualize where you’re going to get those hours from. Really, how much time do you think you can spend in evenings and weekends? You still have to do all the ordinary things like paying bills and washing dishes, too.

On tech reviewers…

We also didn’t make it clear to the reviewers that they were supposed to be reviewing, not editing. I’d try not to make this mistake again. Some of the reviewers spent a lot of time editing grammar and style. Unfortunately, this was wasted effort — the material was nowhere near good enough quality to be editing for style and grammar (and the style is up to the author and editor, not tech reviewers).

On production editors…

The production editor was going to just check for spelling and grammar, right? I think someone told me that. Instead, she went through the book in such incredible detail I couldn’t believe it. And she proposed major changes to just about every paragraph in the whole book. She made so many changes that it took me at least a day, sometimes two or three, to review each chapter. That’s weeks of work I never saw coming — every weekend, every night, all the time — just like when I was writing. And these were necessary changes. She found every little ambiguous phrase, every contradiction between parts of the book, missing curly braces in code samples, paragraphs that belonged in other chapters, sentences that needed to be moved, commas in the wrong place, and much more. She was an absolute editing machine.

And as a bonus, he includes a killer set of regexes to catch troublesome constructions.

A few weeks ago, fighting insomnia by reading blog posts,[1] I had an unsettling experience. Once I finished a particularly long and absorbing article, I began reading the comments tacked below, eager to have others confirm or refute my opinion of the author’s work.

But these numbered paragraphs were not comments!–they were endnotes and references supporting the authors’ arguments. Imagine that.

My mistaken assumption made me realize that it was time to give the RSS reader, the blog aggregators, and “Internet writing” at large a little breather. (And more immediately, that it was time to go to bed.)

First-time authors often ask how to “write better.” One of my standard answers is to read better. Or in the words of one of my finest composition teachers: Masterpiece in, masterpiece out.

That’s not to say that a well-researched article with endnotes is necessarily better than a dashed-off blog post with the same number of reader comments. But probability is not in the blogger’s favor. And consider that my old professor’s axiom has an implicit counterpart: Garbage in, garbage out.[2]

There’s much to be said about keeping abreast of every hot new fad–and even more to be said for keeping in touch with your friends, associates, and competitors. Blogs vs. print isn’t an either/or situation–and the availability of high-quality writing online has certainly increased over the past few years.

But if you’re trying to improve your voice as a writer, your style, or even your general intellectual health, I can suggest no better way to do it than improving your literary diet.[3] Try giving your RSS reader a break, invest a few of your leisure dollars in a book or nice little magazine. The resolution is much better anyway. And I’m going to try to follow my own advice.

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[1] I do not recommend blog reading as an insomnia remedy.
[2] Perhaps more directly, you are what you eat.
[3] Writing regularly and revising are also pretty darn important to the first two.

As I write this, the Cult of Mac is number 2 on the Pirate Bay Top 100 ebook list. It feels really odd to be celebrating this “success;” right up there with pirated versions of Dummies books, medical books, even Playboy.

I do want to be very clear that our giving away electronic versions of these two titles is not in any way an attempt to condone piracy or copyright infringement. That’s not the point at all. We made the decision to release these two titles together with their author, Leander Kahney, of Wired.com. There is everything wrong with pirating copyrighted works without the consent of their author or publisher. The illegality of doing so still remains.

I hope that this experiment will show that P2P is not a crime; that it can and is used to good ends. Now, let’s all do the right thing and maybe, just maybe, some other publishers will step up to the plate.

We shall see.

–Bill

We’re live with torrents for Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, by Leander Kahney of Wired.com. Yes, we’re giving the electronic files away.

These are two beautiful books. One, Cult of iPod, won several design awards. Our designer, Derek Yee, did a really amazing job with both books and we’re very proud of them. If you haven’t seen them you’ll be impressed. The design of both of these books will stand up to book design anywhere.

We’ll be watching to see if making the electronic versions of these books available for free has any effect whatsoever on book sales. And if there is some noticeable effect whether it’s a positive one. I hope so because I think P2P can be a very good and powerful too.

In today’s electronic world we can choose to fight a losing battle with DRM, or we can take a counter-intuitive approach and turn things on their head.

First off, all of the PDFs that we sell are DRM free, and they have been from the beginning. We trust our readers and we think that they should have the same rights in an electronic book that they have in a printed book.

But there’s a political issue here as well. I think that publishers (music and book) are spending too much time circling the wagons and not enough time thinking of ways that they can use technology to advantage. Certainly, our move here is a bit unusual, but someone has to take the plunge. May as well be us. After all, we were the first publishers in the United States to come out publicly against the DMCA. Time to put our money where our mouth is, as they say.

By the way, on a personal note, I admit that the experience of posting these two torrents into the wild tonight was an odd one. I’ve been in publishing for just over 20 years and my training has not been to give books away. But I think there’s something to this and logic tells me that if we increase the visibility of our titles, we’ll sell more books.

At the same time, this has been a very empowering experience. Rather than agonize over the appearance of electronic versions of our titles on torrent sites (I have, and I’ve tried to stop them), I think it’s worth trying to use P2P to help us to increase the visibility of our titles in a crowded market. (I can’t stand those Windows help files anyway.)

We believe that when people read our books they’ll see how they good they are, and they’ll buy them. It happens to us all the time at almost every show that we go to. Many people buy literally armloads of our books. It’s kind of amazing, in a good way.

Stay tuned. And please, share!

Watch Wikipedia edits plotted on GoogleMaps in real-time, over at WikipediaVision.

It’s an easy way to get acquainted with Wikipedia’s international scope–and its diversity of articles.

I caught three vandals this morning, just clicking through the diffs.