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%.

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.

Today, Facebook legitimized the past tense for youngsters everywhere. They made the previously mandatory “is” optional for their users’ status updates (e.g., Tyler is exhausted).

Writing a web app yourself? Consider the benefits of allowing your users to write with real verbs (and in the tense of their choice). Sometimes an adjective won’t fit the bill–and I confess rarely feel like indicating continuing or progressive action.

Now, if Facebook could only take care of that subject/verb agreement problem.

(And all the grotesque data collection and dissemination. That’s not cool either.)

Regret the Error is a great blog with a simple concept: republishing media retractions. Craig Silverman just posted a round-up of the year’s best and brightest mistakes, including a gem from the Sentinel-Review (Woodstock, Ontario):

In an article in Monday’s newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to shoot guns and blow things up. The Sentinel-Review apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused.

From the always excellent XKCD.

From Bryan A. Garner’s excellent reference, Modern American Usage, a word of warning:

COMPUTERESE, the JARGON of computer wizards, is making inroads into STANDARD ENGLISH. Thus access and format and sequence have become verbs, input has enjoyed widespread use as both noun and verb, and online and user-friendly have begun to be used as models for NEOLOGISMS (e.g., on-stream used of an oil well, reader-friendly used of well-written documents). No one can rightly object, of course, to computerese in computing contexts, where it is undeniably useful. But many computer terms have acquired figurative senses, thereby invading the general language. Careful users of language are wary of adopting any of these trendy locutions. Although some of the terms may remain and become standard, many others will keep their jargonistic stigma. Still others will thrive for a time and then fall into disuse. Such are the vagaries of the English language. See OBSCURITY.

The editorial staff of the Chicago Manual of Style responds to reader queries here.

Q. My question is, is there any standard for the usage of emoticons? In particular, is there an accepted practice for the use of emoticons that include an opening or closing parenthesis as the final token within a set of parentheses? Should I (1) incorporate the emoticon into the closing of the parentheses (giving a dual purpose to the closing parenthesis, such as in this case. :-) (2) simply leave the emoticon up against the closing parenthesis, ignoring the bizarre visual effect of the doubled closing parenthesis (as I am doing here, producing a doubled-chin effect :-)) (3) put a space or two between the emoticon and the closing parenthesis (like this: :-) ) (4) or avoid the situation by using a different emoticon (Some emoticons are similar. :-D), placing the emoticon elsewhere, or doing without it (i.e., reword to avoid awkwardness)?

A. Until academic standards decline enough to accommodate the use of emoticons, I’m afraid CMOS is unlikely to treat their styling, since the manual is aimed primarily at scholarly publications. And the problems you’ve posed in this note give us added incentive to keep our distance. (But I kind of like that double-chin effect.)

Q. The menu in our cafeteria shows that enchiladas are available “Tues.–Fri.” However, when I ordered one on a Wednesday, I was informed that enchiladas are available on Tuesday AND Friday, not Tuesday THROUGH Friday. When I informed the cafeteria manager that this was incorrect, she seemed shocked and refused to change the sign. Please help determine who is correct!

A. Although the sign was incorrect, I’m not sure you should annoy the person who provides the enchiladas.

Ask your own question here.

via Harpers, “Stet Offensive” [print edition]

There’s all this talk about the blogosphere overtaking – if not supplanting – mainstream media (that’s MSM, to those of you who only speak in acronyms). To which I say, hooey! First off, have you noticed that most blog posts simply point to an article on an MSM website and then offer the blogger’s response and commentary? Heck, you can see that approach in action right here on the “More Stuff, Less Fluff” blog. There’s nothing wrong with it. Not everyone reads the Wall Street Journal, the NY Times or the West Jabip Bugler, but maybe they’ll be turned on to those publications/sites after finding a link on their favorite blog. This is all good. And, speaking for myself, I often find myself wanting to spout off about some article I’ve read in the paper or online, and a blog gives me a place to do it. It’s cheap therapy. And if someone happens to read my blog, it’s group therapy.

Now, I could also go off on a rant about how bloggers aren’t out there doing a real journalist’s job, but I work for a book publisher, not a news organization. What I do want to point out is that most bloggers don’t have editors, and this is an important part of the picture that can get overlooked when comparing blogs to established content providers. Many will say the absence of editors gives the blog reader an unvarnished, honest view that MSM can’t. What it also gives you is a lot of unintelligible nonsense. No matter how popular and populated the blogosphere becomes, the world will always need editors (if not, I’ll be standing in a bread line soon). The ability to punch letters on a keyboard doesn’t make you a writer. Besides needing copy editors to clean up incorrect punctuation, bad grammar, misspellings and poor language, most writers benefit from having an editor to help organize their thoughts and present them in a usable format. Information that can’t be easily digested isn’t of much value, and the best ideas can be lost in a poorly constructed paragraph. Not to mention the fact that sometimes, even the best writers need an outsider’s eyes as a reality check for what they’ve written.

That’s one reason why book publishers won’t disappear. Even computer book publishers. Sure, you can use Google to find a quick answer to a tech issue, visit an online forum to find others discussing the same topic, or consult a blogger who’s passionate on the subject. What you can’t always verify on the Internet is the background and possible bias of the person supplying the information. Many bloggers talk a good game but don’t really know much beyond their limited worldviews. Many blogs are skillfully disguised corporate mouthpieces. And many forum participants are full of baloney, knowingly or innocently so. Go visit Slashdot, choose any article and see if the comments offer a clear perspective on any issue. Half the time, they raise more questions than they answer, and you have no idea who these crackpots are anyway.

With a publisher like No Starch Press, you know you are getting expertise that’s gone through a developmental editor and a tech reviewer, at the very minimum. Then it’s run past a copy editor, so you won’t have to puzzle through bad English to get the gist of the author’s point. The manuscript is also gone over by a proofreader and our in-house production staff, and throughout this process, it’s shuttled back and forth with the author for further refinement. Most of our authors aren’t writers, they are tech geeks, like our readers. They have valuable knowledge to impart, but they need us to help get it into working order. We make sure our books contain correct information, but we also make sure they read well, have personality and even entertain. If you like one of our books, chances are you’ll feel confident to check out another and another – because we’ve proven ourselves to be a reliable source of well-packaged information. Sort of like the NY Times. The thing about book editors is that, when the final product is really good, no one gives us a second thought. But we don’t mind. It’s like the lighting in a movie – who notices unless it’s really bad?