The book
Just a little status update... The book went to print last night, so I guess that makes me a published author or something. Cool, huh?
Status of the book
The book has been written for a while, along with the technical editing and review. The copy edits have been done since last week. There are only two chapters left for page layout. The process has been interesting, educational, and in some parts long. The hardest part though? Ironically, it's filling in the marketing questionnaire. I've never done anything approaching sales before, although I have done customer facing work. Some parts of the questionnaire are easy... The target audience for instance, a short pitch for the book, that sort of thing. What about things like which magazines to ask to do a review? What about people who might be willing to do reviews? Got suggestions? Reply in a comment?
The book process continues
Despite my lack of posting here in the last couple of weeks, and the death of my laptop (which I believe is traditional when you write a book), the book process continues. This is the first time I've written a book, and the process itself is pretty interesting. At the moment I'm looking through edits from the copy editor for the first chapter (previously this chapter has survived technical review, a review from the acquisitions editor, and review from the project manager). The copy editor is providing comments on my writing style and how to make the chapter easier to read. I guess that I could take the comments as hurtful, but to be honest it's fun. It's kinda like having a personal coach trying to teach you how to write better. I like that. One interesting thing that has happened is that the chapter title was tweaked to "be more active", which I like. I guess that means some of the chapter descriptions I have already posted might actually be wrong. Oh well.
ImageMagick book – Chapter 4: Other ImageMagick Tools
It's been a while since I wrote one of these chapter summaries here, and the reason for that is that I've been busy writing chapters, attending conferences, caring for a sick wife, and stuff like that. The book is still pretty much on track (I'm currently running about a week behind on the chapter deadlines, but I think I can have the whole thing done by the overall deadline). Chapter 4 is an interesting one as it discusses all the tools which aren't going to be covered elsewhere in the book. The reality of ImageMagick is that 95% of the functionality is exposed in the convert command, so you can discuss most things there. There are however some cool things which happen in commands of their own, and those are the things discussed in this chapter. The chapter is so early on in the book because I don't want to give the impression that ImageMagick is a one trick pony, and because any book claiming to be a complete coverage of ImageMagick really does have to discuss them. I wont go into a blow by blow account of what commands are covered, as that would be quite dull to read.…
Comparison shopping for books
This was on Boing Boing a while ago, but I only just caught up with the post... SMS and ISBN to an Australian phone number, and get back a bunch of comparative prices. I just gave it a go, and it just works. Now, that's cool. [icbm: work]
Want to be an acquisitions editor on Open Source topics
Because the Average Joe is looking for one. [icbm: home]
Ministry of re-shelving
Re-shelve copies of 1984 under "current affairs" or "politics" in your local bookshop. [icbm: work]
Random segue: how I came up with the original table of contents
One of the problems I grappled with early on with was how do you come up with a table of contents for a book? It's a complicated process, and it's really important. If the book doesn't flow, then people are left confused about what goes where, and the book is a lot less useful. Additionally, when you sit down to actually write, then you need to know what is covered where so that you can refer the reader to the right place to find out more about a specific topic -- even if you haven't covered that topic yet. So how did I come up with the first cut of the table of contents for the ImageMagick book? Well, I started by looking at all of the command line options to the various ImageMagick commands. I wrote this down on a stack of old business cards, and then distributed those cards in logical sounding piles on the floor. Those piles pretty much became the chapters that I originally submitted. That's the card mound. Anyway, once that was done, Matt (the editor) and I sat down and worked on the table of contents description until it flowed nicely, covered everything we…
The Apress page for the book
I just noticed that Apress has a page up for the book as well. Perhaps I should stop pointing these things out, but I find it exciting. There's something deeply weird about reading about yourself though.
Working on review comments for Chapters 2, 3 and 4 tonight
Michael Carden asks in a comment to my previous post to the book if I had considered making draft chapters available for public comment before printing. To be completely honest it hadn't occurred to me until Michael suggested it, and it does fit well with all the open source stuff I have done over the years. It's a hard call though, because there is already a review team of four or five, and there isn't much spare time in the process because we really want the book published in time for Christmas. This is why I'm going to say no this time to the offer of a more public review, and I'll do my best to take that on board next time when I know more about how long this sort of thing can take (I'm actually only about two days over schedule at the moment, but I really don't want to slip any further). Sorry Michael. Anyways, I'm working on review comments for three chapters tonight, which is one of the things that made me think about this more. I'm really rather surprised about how positive the review comments have been so far given how I feel about the…