Book Publishers - what do you do

[jwcolby54]

I am writing a book on Event Driven Programming in VBA. It is coming along, and it is a LOT of work.

I am using LibreOffice, and I am looking for any suggestions on anything related to the publishing subject. I am exporting to PDF and I am quite impressed with LibreOffice as well as the resulting PDF. But things like margins, fonts etc are just my own best guess so far. Eventually I will export to one or more ebook formats, though for the immediate term PDF is just simple and efficient for the writing / reading process. At least for me. @Gasman can comment on that.

Anyone with useful experience do feel free to chat me up here.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

GROK Said:- For publishing your VBA book, refine PDF margins (1-inch digital, 0.75–1-inch print) and fonts (Arial 12 pt, Courier New 11 pt for code) using LibreOffice, then check KDP’s formatting guides at https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200635650 and Calibre’s eBook conversion tips at https://calibre-ebook.com/help.

I think @The_Doc_Man - who is an author may be able to advise...

 

[AngelSpeaks]

I believe you can publish the book on Amazon. I know at one time you could.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The trick is, you don't care how you set up anything. Seriously, you just don't care. Your prospective publishers, on their web sites, will have links to a web page or downloadable document that might go by the name "Style Guide" or "Submission Guidelines." That guideline is how you set up your offering, because the PUBLISHERS care. You don't care - but they DO.

Strictly observe those publisher's guidelines. Submit a "clean" document. Try to avoid leaving in any grammatical and technical errors. Since I'm an author of sword-and-sorcery stories, the technical side is just to be self-consistent with what your magic can and can't do. If doing a space-opera, try to not infringe too deeply on the laws of physics. Make your star travel believable. If doing a technical book, make no mistakes and try to make your examples sound like real-world situations.

When I most recently submitted one of my stories, the prospective publisher required PDF delivery derived from a document in Courier New font and 12 point size. They didn't specify and apparently didn't care whether I originally used Word, Word Perfect, WordStar, LibreOffice, or Egyptian heiroglyphs. My original was Word with Bookman Old Style font at 12 point. So I made a quick switch - one the more useful aspects of the "Styles" feature in Word. They actually accepted my novel but then blindsided me. They originally denied they were a vanity press, but in their acceptance response they said that authors were expected to share in the publishing costs; in their particular case, US$ 2500, give or take a few. When it swims like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, , .... quack,

Vanity publishers have limited advertising & distribution support staff and are oriented towards folks who just expect to give out copies to their friends and family. I.e. they are for either niche markets or a purely self-aggrandizing project. During my grad-school days, one of my major professors vanity-published a chemistry book - which he then required as the textbook for the course. He was unscrupulous in other ways, but as noted for Julius Caesar, ... nihil nisi bonum de mortibus. I.e. (Say) nothing but good of the dead.

If I wanted to publish a vanity book, I would have sprung for it. But I think my novels have at least some commercial potential, so I don't want to go the vanity press route quite yet. There are publishers who will web-publish your work and will even manage the royalties for you - for a price. Amazon publishes through Kindle Direct Publishing. In this link below from Reddit, there is some disagreement but in general there are more down sides than up sides to use Amazon's KDP service. I don't doubt that some scrupulous publishers exist. I hope I can find one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/comments/1e3fftx/amazon_direct_publishing_yay_or_nay

 

[jwcolby54]

Yea, I'm not anywhere close to actual book publishing yet. At this moment I am just looking for info on making a pdf easy to read. At some point I do intend to paper publish, or ebook publish, but that is far away..

 

[GPGeorge]

Yea, I'm not anywhere close to actual book publishing yet. At this moment I am just looking for info on making a pdf easy to read. At some point I do intend to paper publish, or ebook publish, but that is far away..

Having read the first half or so, I'd say that the overall tone and approach are good. On that score, it's on point.

This is a tough subject. The more illustrations you can include the better. I prefer shorter sentences and paragraphs as well. White space is a good thing.

At some point, you probably need to enlist a good editor/proofreader. It's nearly impossible to catch all of the little things that occur in writing.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

It's nearly impossible to catch all of the little things that occur in writing.

Not entirely true... but it takes dedication, acceptance of tedium, and you HAVE to take a break from proof-reading now and then. The problem that you face with a work of any significant length starts with the fact that you wrote it and will probably remember what you intended to write. But like the phenomenon of "highway hypnosis" you will start to see what you expected to see rather than the details that are actually there. And at that point your eyes and brain are useless for a while. Someone else might help with proofreading, but you will need to go read a novel on some other topic, or binge-watch some TV series. You have to untrain your brain.

One of my friends is a former teacher of middle-school English. She was astonished at how clean my first novel really was. Even so, when I made yet another pass for cleanups and tweaking, I found a few things that shouldn't have been there, or at least not in the form they were in. It happens and it is simply a matter of human nature, human psychology, human adaptation to that which is familiar.

I'll also add that when the author is doing his/her own proofreading, the "adaptation to the familiar" takes a lot less time. I proofread my novels at least a dozen times each... more for the earlier ones.

 

[jwcolby54]

On point @The_Doc_Man . As a developer the same thing occurs. I know how the program works so I can't see the flaws so to speak. "It just works" for me, but not so for the first time user.

In fact this is one of the points of the concepts behind my work and my book. If I as a developer try to build a consistent user interface, but do so over and over, piecemeal, each time I encounter that control or that concept in a new form, the interface is going to be all over the place. How did I do that last time?

If I design my class control wrappers to do some interface thing, and I get it working as intended, and I get it loading and functioning automatically every time that interface piece is encountered, then whatever my user interface is supposed to look like becomes consistent. It just works, every time, and if it doesn't I can fix it in one place.

And it is precisely to your point that a reader such as @Gasman is so useful or even critical. Even more so in a technical read. My ex was a proofreader for many years. And she would be useful as a reader to catch the "English language semantics" side of things, voice and such, but she is not an Access programmer, and so she can't really pick up on what is wrong technically. It takes a village as the saying goes.

I put this book off for many years for a variety of reasons, one of which is simply that it is a huge task for a single person to do. I broke out little pieces as seen in my blog. While that is a good start, it really doesn't address the bigger issue of how to design a consistent user interface using these class wrappers around interface controls.

My wife is out of commission due to a knee replacement and I had to take 4 or 5 weeks of Family Medical Leave Allowance to take care of my disabled daughter. For the first time in years I have a chunk of time to do this work. I am actually pretty happy in how it is coming together.

@GPGeorge download the latest. It changes over time.

 

[GPGeorge]

Not entirely true... but it takes dedication, acceptance of tedium, and you HAVE to take a break from proof-reading now and then. The problem that you face with a work of any significant length starts with the fact that you wrote it and will probably remember what you intended to write. But like the phenomenon of "highway hypnosis" you will start to see what you expected to see rather than the details that are actually there. And at that point your eyes and brain are useless for a while. Someone else might help with proofreading, but you will need to go read a novel on some other topic, or binge-watch some TV series. You have to untrain your brain.

One of my friends is a former teacher of middle-school English. She was astonished at how clean my first novel really was. Even so, when I made yet another pass for cleanups and tweaking, I found a few things that shouldn't have been there, or at least not in the form they were in. It happens and it is simply a matter of human nature, human psychology, human adaptation to that which is familiar.

I'll also add that when the author is doing his/her own proofreading, the "adaptation to the familiar" takes a lot less time. I proofread my novels at least a dozen times each... more for the earlier ones.

I respect you, Doc Man, so I'm not going to quibble over whether it's nearly impossible or merely tedious and difficult.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I respect you, Doc Man, so I'm not going to quibble over whether it's nearly impossible or merely tedious and difficult.

Perhaps we merely disagree in degree. It is not impossible because we don't have an infinite number of words to check. It is a finite problem that can be supplemented by modern spell checkers and writing-style checkers. And, if you have the right kind of subscription, by AI language checkers.

I would agree with you completely if the subject of the discussion is a high-school or college history book. Those really DO seem to have an infinite supply of words that blend together and remain intractable.

 

[Pat Hartman]

My best friend used to publish bridge books. She is mostly retired so doesn't do much any more. A lot of the writers have switched to websites and blogs which probably end up making them more money. Technically, she is a vanity publisher since bridge books are a niche market anyway and maybe that is the same for technical books these days. I used to read her final drafts for both technical and grammatical errors. I was only good for one read so it had to be at the very end. I caught very few grammatical errors since she was very good at that but I did manage to catch some significant technical errors. And in my early days as a consultant, I had a side gig editing IBM manuals. Technically, they were supposed to be on topics I was already familiar with but they threw some really obscure ones my way. It was a lot of work for not much money so I only did it for a year.

I agree with George. Lots of white space and examples. A well organized table of contents is also critical. I think Word can make an index but I'm not sure.

Before Borders closed, I used to buy several, very expensive, technical books every year (including a few of George's). I still have a strong preference for books because they are more likely to be well organized and have good tables of contents making it easier to drill down to what I am looking for. Books are also better edited than vanity blogs and websites and so are more technically reliable. You'd think the "indexed" quality of web pages would make them better to search but not so. You have to know what you are looking for in order to make effective use of a word search feature. That's one of the biggest issues we see with questions here. If you don't know what words to look for, you can never find what you need.

 

[GPGeorge]

Perhaps we merely disagree in degree. It is not impossible because we don't have an infinite number of words to check. It is a finite problem that can be supplemented by modern spell checkers and writing-style checkers. And, if you have the right kind of subscription, by AI language checkers.

I would agree with you completely if the subject of the discussion is a high-school or college history book. Those really DO seem to have an infinite supply of words that blend together and remain intractable.

I guess the fact that I said "nearly impossible", rather than "totally impossible" slipped by the proof-reader?

 

[jwcolby54]

What the heck is a bridge book? Like a book on the London bridge?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

What the heck is a bridge book? Like a book on the London bridge?

Pat and I (and probably a few other members) are aficionados of the card game "Contract Bridge."

I guess the fact that I said "nearly impossible", rather than "totally impossible" slipped by the proof-reader?

If you had said "history books" and "absolutely impossible" I would not have even twitched. But perhaps my personal prejudices might be slipping through into this conversation?

 

[Pat Hartman]

What the heck is a bridge book? Like a book on the London bridge?

It's only the best card game in the world

 

[Gasman]

It's only the best card game in the world

I always liked Snap. roflmao

 

[jwcolby54]

I was a spades kinda guy. Lots of that played in the Navy. I did play bridge after I got out. I liked it as well.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Bridge is a non-trivial game. You can learn the mechanics of it in a few hours but it takes a lifetime to master. Most people no longer have the patience. We've been trained by TV and twitter to have short term concentration periods only. In the past, it was a skill that was de regur for social gatherings. There used to be annual televised matches between the US and Parliament. Omar Sharif and his "Bridge Circus" team used to travel the world challenging country teams as well as corporate teams to matches. No one seems to want to play thinking games any more.

The game was very popular with the wizards of Wall Street so 20 years ago I wouldn't be surprised to find myself in a field playing against Jamie Dimond or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or even Hollywood stars and prominent politicians.

Why Bridge Is The Best Card Game That Everyone’s Forgotten

While many think bridge is hard, it's the perfect balance of fun and logic. Learn the card game's history, how to play, and where you can play nowadays.

www.southernliving.com

If you have an interest in learning or playing with robots, check out acbl.org (American Contract Bridge, tournament schedules and learning materials) or BridgeBase.com (many free playing/practice options)

 

[GPGeorge]

Pat and I (and probably a few other members) are aficionados of the card game "Contract Bridge."



If you had said "history books" and "absolutely impossible" I would not have even twitched. But perhaps my personal prejudices might be slipping through into this conversation?

But I said neither. And that is the point. However, I was unclear, and that's my fault.

I was thinking about the fact that it's very difficult to catch every single syntax error, every single misspelling, every single run on sentence, and every single misused punctuation, and all of the other vagaries of extended exposition in any kind of writing, from short notes to 700 page textbooks. Technical materials are either right or wrong, and one can debate that at some length. That's not what I'm talking about. I should have made that clear.

I believe it to be nearly impossible to write an exposition of any length without leaving behind a typo or two.

I believe that strongly enough to refuse to expose myself to the hazards of a claim that absolutely every minute detail was correct from page one through page 700 in anything I was asked to review, or to write.

 

[Gasman]

Yes, I find that in Kindle books, which for some reason spoils the book for me.