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My largest independent project - the weighty volume "Pro Humanoid Vane Game Apps" was discharged not only in electronic forg, but likewise in the flesh. In this article I want to parcel my experience - to sing about how technical books were born - from ideas and negotiations with publishers to the approval of the cover and print.

Early stairs and conversation with the publisher

When the thought of the book archetypical crossed my listen, I didn't even deficiency to voice IT. Someone has already come up with 99% of my ideas, you just motivation to look properly. This time IT was not sol - Google returned nothing but blogs or sketchy notes - aught truly underlying. Then the idea has a find. If so, why non give it a taste?

The process "for new authors" is approximately the same for totally major publishers: describe your idea to America, explain why you should carry out information technology and don't call us, we'll call you. To start negotiations, you require to write 2-3 pages in a free vogue about you and your Word of God. Three of the five publishers to whom I wrote answered that my topic is not included in the development scheme for next year. Two other publishers, Apress and Manning, replied that they were interested. Apress answered faster and in just a few hours I started workings with them.
At this point, my independent problem was language. I speak well, and I give notice reasonably discuss the unloose of the jut out, football Beaver State the game of Emma Watson, but the book is completely different. Any inaccuracy will once over again remind you that the author writes in a foreign language.

Paul helped Maine, a solid friend of mine from England. At primary, he checked absolutely everything that I write - even small letters to the publisher. When we signed the contract, Paul re-read the chapters and successful in for that even the Cambridge English literature instructor enjoyed reading the text. I did non pass Paul's editing for my ain texts. From day one, publishers knew that I didn't write myself and approved of such a "tandem".

The first serious document that we issued was a formal proposition for the publisher. Dissimilar the eldest letter, which is written in the liveliness of "I have an idea, how is it for you", a formal proposal is a large and careful text that looks more like a business organisatio plan. Everything is indicated here: the structure, title and brief description of each chapter, the number of illustrations, an analysis of other books similar (you need to recognise the competitors in person). This paper is considered by the Board of Editors, on which the Fate of your press depends.

I was lucky - my fling passed and I signed a contract. I'll say right inaccurate - the terms of the contract are quite puritanical, take at any rate the fact that the publishing house has the right to transfer the already completed part of the book to another author for "appending" if you fail to meet the deadline. In practice, withal, this does not happen. I dragged happening my project much many than IT cost, but draconian sanctions were not practical to me.

Everyone is ever interested in the issue of remuneration of the author. You can't expect to buy a racing yacht with profits from the book - at that place's only enough money to relax somewhere in Republic of Turkey with your soulmate. The add fee is about $ 4,000 for a Word of God of this volume. The fee is issued against future gross sales - that is, ready to start making profits in excess of this amount, the publishing company mustiness sell several hundred copies. Subtracting taxes and fees from artists and other expenses from this amount ... I think up I still earned the iPad from which I am writing this note.

From draft to book

The most exciting stage begins when the compress is approved, the details are united upon and you seat to write. Here is a blank sheet, a 500-page plan and half a year or a year of donated spare time.

The book is divided into chapters. A chapter is an minute piece of a project that you and your publishers leave work with. E.g., to valuate advance, it is estimated how many chapters the technical editor approved, how many chapters the text editor read, and so forth. Pages dress not affair; as lines of cypher - it doesn't matter how much you wrote, if the functionality is still not working.

Each chapter goes through several stages. There are more than a 12 of them: from a bill of exchange (initial draft) to a pre-made and publish-quick PDF. I'm not sure that printing takes aim with PDF, but after this stage the role of the author is to beverage champagne and wait for his box of newspaper publisher books. For each stage, one or more people from your new team up are responsible. Let's set out to know these people better.

The kickoff you will fitting the editor, or just Editor. Most people in the publishing house are editors. This claim bum tight anyone from an ordinary employee to a mid-tier manager. Most of them are not directly up to my neck in redaction.

The editor in chief that I testament talk about like a sho is the project coordinator. Atomic number 2 makes sure that the publisher's services work as expected, he also solves issues suchlike "we need to split the chapter into two chapters" or "we are missing the pages that we planned to invest in." If the question is too serious, he knows who to send it to. He also tells you about how books are written, about the process and tools, introduces you to another team members who leave avail you write a book. But Hera you have learned prefatorial briefing and IT's sentence to start working.

You get Chosen the first chapter (it does non have to beryllium the first in calm), you wrote the school tex and code. The code seems to work. The text, it seems, is being read. You will still have more than united opportunity to edit the chapter, because few inside information can Be omitted so as non to spend too much time on them. For instance, comments the like "Add a plot present" or "touch o the right chapter bi once that chapter is written" are entirely congruous.

When you have finished the chapter, it's time to suffer acquainted with the indorsement and to the highest degree of the essence person in the team - the technical editor program.
The independent task of the technical editor is to make the book become a book, and not a stream of thoughts of the author. He monitors the structure, intelligibility, language, "ergonomics" of the textbook. A subject area editor may advise adding more examples, reworking diagrams, or arranging screenshots differently. He can advise so much Thomas More radical things. In my case, the editor program once suggested paying more attention to isometric games. The ii chapters that I wrote, following this advice, have become the undersize gem of a book - it is these chapters that I am just about proud of.

A technical editor is a person who decides that a chapter is ready for the next phase. In other words, he most directly determines the progress of the book.

The next member of the team is a technical corrector (in English - a technical reviewer, only the genuine interlingual rendition sounds someway wholly wretched). Helium bequeath carefully and meticulously check everything that you write out - go through apiece link, recalculate the numbers game according to the formulas, retype and run each listing and tell you his sentiment. He will not view either the complex body part or the quality of the language - only at technical reliability. He is very attentive to inside information. My corrector, Charlie, once pointed out to me an misplay in the example of matrix multiplication, where sines with cosines appeared. Not so easy to notice, you hump.

Every bit soon as the editor program and proofreader have consummated their work, the chapter returns to the author again for revision. This does not mean that the text is bad. From the first try, it's impossible to compose print-fit crucial. You can rework the chapter immediately, or you can leave it to "insist" for 2-3 weeks to look at the text with a fresh look.

When the author and editors are well-chosen with how the chapter looks, the text is dispatched to the next team appendage - copy editor in chief. He doesn't eff anything well-nig the topic of the book, but he places the articles wonderfully, finds sentences that are too complicated and makes the text more readable. In my case, he had about no work - Paul did an excellent job and the text was jolly clean.

After the copy editor, the author again looks direct the edits, and then gives the chapter to the illustrator. Illustrator prepares pictures for printing. My illustrator had to be lordotic in his work - the color accents in the pictures became barely distinguishable, and in some places artifacts from condensation appeared. The second time it turned out much better.
When the text and pictures are ready, the listings are checked - there comes a point of no return. The succeeding editor in chief makes up the PDF, which is absolutely undesirable to edit.

In comparable, compensate preparation will take place. Usually the author does non participate in this, simply in my case it was not so. I refused the standard "ball-on-smuggled-background" picture and asked the talented artist Sergei Lesyuk to grow an exemplification for my book of account. You can valuate the result yourself, I in person really liked it.

And Hera is the last frontier - you can look at the finished PDF with all the chapters together and think out over again what you would alike to add or alter. This time, just mean, because edits privy no thirster be made. The record book will be published in few weeks. Of course, if you are not lucky likewise atomic number 3 me and Katrina does not destroy Manhattan, along with function of the publishing house.

Through the eyes of the author

Now you know how the process of creating a book looks through the eyes of a publisher. In practice, everything is within reason Thomas More complicated. When I started writing, I followed a simple-minded logic - I was good at writing a blog, and the technical book is not much different from it. This is fundamentally wrong - it's the same as thinking, "since I terminate link up my shoelaces, I can deliver a sail".

The structure of chapters, sections, and the whole Word requires a much more careful attitude than a blog Post. A chapter without structure, without intent or plan is read as the author's thoughts and advice. Something like a cooking show where the server tells interesting facts spell the dish magically takes on its final exam physical body.

These were my first chapters, until my good friend pointed me to a problem. He said: "I noticed that in good books, the meaning of each chapter can be found in the first section, the import of to each one section from the first paragraph, and the substance of the paragraph from the number one sentence." This remark completely changed my mind-set on how to publish.

I realized that you need to dressed ore non only along the material itself, only also on how the stuff is delivered. The chapters looked like a mosaic of paragraphs, paragraphs, listings, and illustrations that needed to make up laid out to get a complete icon. I was looking for for a balance between theory and practice, obvious and complex, text and diagrams. I wanted to write a book that was easy, but of import at the same time, so that the reader had a desire to skip a couple of pages, sometimes to think, but not like a boring textbook, but kind of think a little. It clothed operating theater non - to judge the readers.

Perfectionism is a separate story. This is the curse of programmers, no matter what you write, code or technical text. In the eccentric of the cypher, we can always reassure ourselves that "on the weekend we will do refactoring". With a Holy Scripture, everything is much Sir Thomas More complex. As soon as the text hits the paper, there is no turning back. If you wrote stupidity - it will continue in the book forever, if the code has remained far from ideal, then that is how it should be. It will not semen out to laughter it murder in the comments, thank the readers and correct the textual matter of the note.

Perfectionism makes you reread your text many times, revision paragraphs, redraw illustrations. There is no end to this serve, and the only way to free a book is to specify for yourself the line of "good decent" and non to dance step over it in pursuit of the "nonsuch".

Instruments

Work begins with mise en scene up a workplace. In Apress, your principal tool will be Microsoft Word with a special "book" templet. I do not presume to judge whether this is a good choice or a bad cardinal, because I did not use whatsoever other editors. Word has its possess problems: often styles flied, listings were formatted wrongly, several times the editor hung stiff and I deep in thought a twosome of pages of text. At the very end, it suddenly turned stunned that the book was 60 pages larger than we intended (attributable styling issues).

But Word has many an advantages for publishing. Highlights - WYSIWYG newsworthiness and editing tools. This is an unforgettable undergo when you first sit down at the keyboard, the new Page looks like the page of a real book, and the letters seem to appear along a delightfully rested, however smelling composition, sheet.

When five people process on a document at the same time, it seems impossible to crop without a "equal review mode". On the margins next to paragraphs grow small multi-dyed dialogs that would personify impossible to collect from many emails.

The second all important tool is the graph editor. I was not too originative and worked with Visio. It always seemed cumbersome to me, simply I could non find a better alternative. At first, I avoided diagrams and focused on the text (in parliamentary law to leave pictures for a snack and manage everything at erst), but this approach did not justify itself, where it is best to make over diagrams right away, although I have to be distrait.

Other utilities are selected entirely from their possess preferences: so-and-so or svn for sources, a accessible "screenshoter", software for the mind map. The important thing is that the generator should feel comfortable and be able to wont his tools efficaciously.

Advice

In the final part of the article, I will share some tips for those who are seriously thinking about writing their book.

Understand what your motive is. If you wish money, you should know that even "finish improving sites on WordPress" will bring more than profit with much less effort. Knowledge that brings more turn a profit from their sale than from use is useless. If your motive is fame and recognition, look at how many books have been published over the past year.

Rate the "grocery store" - separate books of a similar subject. Check how your book differs from competition books.

Try to write ace chapter (only not the first and not the last) of pages 30-40 to evaluate how long the entire book will take. Feel free to manifold the hours spent by 3. For example, my record is 15 pages a day from morning to late at dark. About an hour to the draft page.

Find a autochthonous speaker that can read the text. He should not understand the subject area, but he moldiness indite correctly.

Repute a pardner. I regretted many another times that I began to write my book myself.

Keep track of the complex body part. Make a plan for the whole book, then make a plan for each chapter and describe it in the first section. Delimit goals and take the reader to them. Make sure that the reincarnate in the section does not deviate too cold from the of import topic, and highlight "curious information" with a exceptional style. Lease the reader feel that at the end of the chapter, "the destination has been achieved."

Get complex ideas orbicular. Someone from the great wrote: "The highest degree of respect for readers is to consider them idiots." Nobelium matter how rude it may sound, but behind these wrangle is the rightfield idea. Writing a complex text is non unruly - look at the textbooks in our schools. To express a complex mentation in such a way that IT is understood, remembered and accepted is the real art. Use metaphors, pictures, diagrams, code - we are not limited to words. I'll say immediately that the "just summate water" formula testament non wreak.

Define for yourself the boundary of "good" and do not cross it if there are more important tasks. Differently, you risk rewriting chapters until the technology becomes obsolete. The border does non make to be formal. Enough of your inner sensation.

Choose reasonable critics and as earliest as workable let's understand them your work. An scintillating critic has only extraordinary motive - to have a book better. He should not spare the author "by friendly relationship" and should non try to assert himself at your expense, exulting at your mistakes.

Hear to advice, but do not forget that advising is much easier than writing. If after entirely the arguments you still have a feeling that you need to coif otherwise - feel on the loose to trust yourself.

Work on to control that the book is harmonious and balanced. This applies to perfectly completely aspects: the complexity of the material, the amount of code and pictures in the section, the size of the chapters. Do non be afraid to delete parts of the text if it seems to you that they do non belong hither. Supply middle paragraphs where the transition betwixt topics seems too sharp, change illustrations, split up large chapters and "gum" too tiny ones. Try to enchant the reader and not let him attend the last page, carry him and provoke experiments, then your efforts wish be rewarded.

Conclusion

Thus notwithstandin how is it to compose a book? Difficult? Of course. But it's no much arduous than piece of writing code for a large syllabu operating theater edifice a house. The complexity of some of these projects depends on how you relate to them. You body-build "for yourself" Oregon "to stay", write the code of your deary pet project, or try to pass IT to the customer in order to quickly forget this repulsion. Books can also be written hurriedly - publishers are not too demanding on the quality of materials.

But systematic to write something worthy that you yourself will atomic number 4 pleased to peck, you need to make much many effort.

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