- #Jt rip software printing press tek mark andy update
- #Jt rip software printing press tek mark andy full
The tech publishing industry may work many ways, and I’m no expert on it, but the most surprising thing to me was that in the tech world, you generally don’t write a book and then go look for a publisher who’ll print it. Actually, I may have started working first.
I signed the contract and started working. I went back to O’Reilly and asked for more advances on royalties to cover me working half-time, and that was approved. I spoke to my boss at the Rimm-Kaufman Group, and he was completely supportive of me taking time off work. And I decided that to make this work, it was going to take a lot of time.
#Jt rip software printing press tek mark andy full
I did negotiate to be a full author, rather than just being mentioned in the credits as originally proposed by the O’Reilly team, who thought I wouldn’t really be doing much work. I mulled over it, decided the proposed schedule was amusing, and decided to go ahead with the book anyway, bad contract or no. O’Reilly’s contract, on the other hand, was really vague. If he didn’t get his chapters done, he was not responsible for his co-author’s. He described a process that had been exactly specified his contract had specified what he was responsible for and exactly what steps were involved in publishing the book, who would perform each step, and when they had to happen. I asked a friend of mine who’d written a book for Apress to review it for me. Responsibilities and steps to completion were not specified.
I asked the editor to send me the contract, and took a look at it. He had then added Vadim and Arjen later, but it was clear that it wasn’t going to meet the original schedule no matter what. I don’t know when Peter started on the book, actually Andy Oram had spent years trying to get authors for the second edition, and I think Peter had started quite some time before I came on board. The proposal was to revise the schedule so that everything would go to tech review by October of 2007. The schedule was actually being slipped already, because the book was supposed to go to tech review in June of 2007. The outline followed the first edition’s outline to some extent, and the chapters on benchmarking, profiling, indexing, and query optimization were partially written. At that point, there was an outline in pretty basic form-just chapters and headings, with a sentence or two to explain the outline in a couple of places. When Peter contacted me, I asked about the schedule, the outline, and what was complete so far. At the time I didn’t know who, but I knew there would be a fourth author. In the earliest stages, the idea was that I’d write a couple of appendices and help transform Peter and Vadim’s writing into book-quality material I was to be sort of like a glorified technical editor. Peter Zaitsev contacted me about a year ago and asked if I’d like to help write the book. I’d love to write it well, but there is a lot to say and it’s a lot of work to write a long post in an organized fashion. Please excuse the rambling nature of this post. I’ll have a lot to say about what went right and wrong, and how it helped and hindered the process. Hopefully I won’t come off as sounding peeved at anyone or like I’m trying to put people down. I think it’s important to be objective my purpose here is to help prospective authors get a feeling of what it’s like, and it’s not all good (but I’d encourage people to do it anyway). My take on it now that I have some distance from the project is-I’d definitely work with Andy Oram and O’Reilly again, and I’d be able to make the process a lot easier for myself the second time. I wrote it after an incredible marathon of staying up most of the night for months on end.
#Jt rip software printing press tek mark andy update
Update two, almost a year later: Take this with a grain of salt. Update: see the followup post for more of the story, including my editor’s responses. I kept notes along the way and wanted to describe the process for those who are thinking about writing a book, too. What Is It Like to Write a Technical Book?Īs you probably know, I recently finished writing a book with a few co-authors.
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