The Best and Worst Tech-Book Publishers? 271
An anonymous reader writes "I am an author working on a technical book about an open-source software package. I am looking for a publisher, and I would like to hear experiences from any Slashdot authors. Who are the best publishers to work with and why are they great? Who are the worst publishers in the tech book business, and what nightmare/horror stories can you tell us about them? Any publishing company in particular you recommend avoiding? Any gems of advice (rights reversion, etc.) you can provide for first-time tech book authors?"
Re:Why not open source your book? (Score:5, Insightful)
People have to eat.
Shockingly, I've seen books devoted to PHP, Apache, and C - books which cost money to buy. But get this - those things are free!
And a few ingenious companies actually built commercial products around them, too!
AC time (Score:5, Insightful)
My god, there's going to be a lot of venting on this thread... how about we make it a lot shorter and ask if any publishers *aren't* a nightmare to deal with?
Note for people about to post -- check your contract. Both of mine explicitly stated you must not say anything nasty about the publisher. You want to go AC on this thread.
Re:Why not open source your book? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why not open source your book? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm...have you ever READ many man pages or much documentation done by programmers? It isn't that hard to improve upon and add value to, and a well written work explaining how to use something provided for free could be well worth the money even to a rational marketeer. Also by your logic we shouldn't pay English teachers or for dictionaries as what they provide is also free. Or math teachers for that matter, even more so in some ways.
Just because part of the subject matter has a certain cost associated with it doesn't mean all related matirials will have the same cost.
Re:the good and the meh (Score:3, Insightful)
You're kidding me, 10-14% is a good royalty rate for an author?! That's disgusting.
Re:Why not open source your book? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Isn't this the age of e-books? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, what an interesting idea. Too bad a couple million people had it before you. For any given subject matter, there are already a lot of people writing about it on the web. Some of them are pretty good. No newcomer is going to rise to top of the search engine results unless their work is really good and they do a lot of viral marketing.
Speaking of marketing, you have a pretty simplistic notion of what publishers do. They don't just print up the books and list them on their web site, they market, advertise, and provide editorial support. That last one is kind of important, assuming that you don't want to look like an illiterate clown.
Another thing: very few technical books earn a significant amount of money. So really, the only reason to do all that work is the prestige of being a published author. Looks really good on your resume, and your mother will want a copy, even if she doesn't understand a word. Actually having your name on a book that's sitting on a shelf over at Barnes and Noble gives you a lot more prestige than just having a PDF on your web site.
Which is not to say that putting your stuff online is a waste of time. It's a good way to get attention, and it's your obvious last resort if you can't get a "real" publisher interested in your work. Actually, my next book will be online before I even finish writing it (assuming I ever start writing it). This will allow me to get feedback as I'm writing, and also allow me to experiment with various modes of authoring and delivery. (Crucial buzzwords: DITA, EPUB, XSL.) But that's all just a means to an end. If my online version never results in a "real" book, I won't be heartbroken — but neither will I consider the online version an adequate substitute.
Hey, here's a really radical idea. Why don't we deal with an Ask Slashdot by actually trying to answer the question?
Re:the good and the meh (Score:4, Insightful)
You're kidding me, 10-14% is a good royalty rate for an author?! That's disgusting.
It sounds disgusting, but the publisher has all the overhead (presses, distribution, marketing, and staff to support) and pretty much all the risk. e-Books excluded, books cost money to edit, typeset, print, ship, get shelf space, etc. Not to mention they also have a shelf life in this particular case. The publisher is absorbing all these costs and the author collects his or her royalties. Yeah it sucks to be getting paid that "little" relatively speaking, but note that the in the case of publishing, most of the heavy lifting is done by these companies, especially in the case of these tech books, where the content isn't so extreme and complex to write about as it would be in many engineering, math, and science textbooks. 10-14% seems pretty reasonable to me, IMHO, but I don't write or publish books.
Re:Why not open source your book? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sex is *never* free....
Re:O'Reilly & Associates (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not open source your book? (Score:4, Insightful)
I like just about everything gratis, but I will say this: A good book is worth every penny.
I have a lot of really tremendous books that you could only pry from my cold dead hands.
Re:Isn't this the age of e-books? (Score:4, Insightful)
On what budget? On whose time? Who's going to design an attractive ad? Who's going to make your attractive website? Who's going to compare ad prices (and pricing models) across sites and ad networks that you've never even heard of? Authors write. Publishers have deep pockets for advertising (bootstrapping sales from a $100 advertising budget is not an option because your product has a limited life cycle), they know graphic designers, they know how to market a book, and they know how effective different types of ad campaigns are and how to get good prices. And a publisher might be able to get you on paper: huge cost but it's a market you'd otherwise be missing. Also you need an editor; a writer is just being unrealistic if she thinks she doesn't need an outside perspective. Grammar checking by people who actually know when to use the past subjunctive or the present indicative mood, yes, but also people who can tell you you're overdoing an easy section or not explaining something clearly enough.
Re:O'Reilly & Associates (Score:1, Insightful)
...nor does it make them spammers, or say anything about how they are as publishers from an author's perspective.
Re:Why not open source your book? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Isn't this the age of e-books? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not open source your book? (Score:4, Insightful)
The O'Reilly books generally read like the author actually liked what they were writing about. The Wrox book read like shovelware.
Re:the good and the meh (Score:4, Insightful)
Uhm ... personally I'd hate to read any book (including eBooks) that haven't been edited and typeset properly.
Typesetting can make the difference between readable and unreadable, even in digital form.
Re:Typeset but not printed (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the sort of thing we work hard to avoid at No Starch Press, and one of the main reasons that we try to focus on publishing new classics rather than what are referred to in the business as "day-and-date" books. We're usually not first out on any topic and our marketing plans don't assume that we'll be first. Given the choice between being first and being best, I'll choose best every time. Of course, our ideal is to be first and best.
Bill Pollock, Founder
No Starch Press