The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFatherhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

Done with my Dummies book!

For those of you that aren't familiar with the process of writing and publishing a technical book, here's how it worked for this title...

First, the acquisitions editor and I collaborated on an extensive table of contents (about 8 pages or so) that detailed what was covered, in what order, and at what depth. A target page count was also agreed upon at that point. That went to a group within the publishing firm (J. Wiley & Son) known as the new book screening board (or something like that). They chew over the title, content, organization, and whether the topic fits into the current plans.

Once that's all agreed upon, the work shifts to the author, and it's write, write, write, write and, occasionally, test. :-) With, typically, oodles of screenshots. Keeping track of all the resultant files (Solaris for Dummies, all told, is split across about 240 different files, mostly screenshots).

As the book is written, chapters are sent to the development editor who forwards them along to a copy editor and sends a copy to one or more technical editor. The copy editor does that grammar thing while the tech editor tests and verifies to ensure we aren't saying blue when something is red, etc. Once the copy editor is done, the development editor goes through the document and adds the comments from the tech editor and their own $0.02 on structure, meaning, usefulness of examples, etc.

The combined document (with 3-5 people's comments embedded) is then sent back to the author for revision. The subsequent cycle of revise, submit, edit, return to author can go on for as many cycles as necessary for everything to be 'just so' according to the boss of the process, the managing editor.

This is the milestone I reached today with the Dummies book: we're done with revisions, everything's laid out for printing, and we're ready to get this baby into production. The only step left now, from an author's perspective, is to (ideally!) be able to read through the page-proofs of the book post layout, but pre-printing, and to contribute to the cover copy and material.

Basically, in 30-45 days I expect to receive a box of books on my front doorstep, while everyone else gets to see it in their local bookstore.

Sound intimidating and tedious? It's not. It's fun. But then again, I like this kind of thing, so go figure. :-)

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