Not to beat about the bush, I'm thinking about moving to a different publisher for my future books. EEs in this group: when you think of publishers in this field, who do you think of? Or do you just search Amazon based on title/subject matter when you're looking for a good book on a given topic?
The first name that comes to my mind is O'Reilly, but what do others think?
If there are authors here who have worked with various other publishers, obviously I'd appreciate any specific input you have on this topic too. I'm not overly concerned with royalty percentages or generous advances; my main interest is active editorial involvement and if possible technical expertise from the publisher end; i.e. when I'm pitching an idea I'd like to be able to explain it in real language, not Little Golden Book language.
My first and only book was published through Elsevier / Newnes. for wha it is worth it is called "Excel by Example: A Microsoft Excel Cookbook fo Electronics Engineers ".
I never had to pitch the idea for the book- I was approached after I ha written a 3 part article for Circuit Cellar on the subject. As a result am unaware about the initial contact, however I do know that they take th book proposal and farm it out to several engineers and authors and pay the (or at least promise to pay them) for their time to review the proposal. know, I reviewed one and I was also asked for the names of some engineer who would be qualified to do some reviews.
I worked with 2 editors and I found my interaction with them to be mos rewarding, but neither were directly technical. Of course this is a direc function of the personalities involved on both sides.
Once written, the "manuscript" was never subjected to peer review which found puzzling, but having read a number of books in my career, it seem to me that this is not done, perhaps in order to get to market sooner. O course it was edited and typeset, but there was far less attempt to chang my style than there is by the editors in the magazines I have written for.
When someone posted a fallacious review on Amazon, after much effort the managed to get it removed. However they have been less than successful i dealing with illegal copies of the book on the 'net. I don't know if any publisher has been successful in this regard. I also feel that since the are such a large publisher, they don't put a lot of advertising effor behind most of the books. I am not sure how they select the few that the do push.
I know Tim Wescott is active on this forum and has the same publisher as do "Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" by Tim Wescott Elsevier/Newnes,
I've published three with Elsevier, with the fourth out next year; this is why I feel it's time for a change.
Me too! The acquisitions editor there contacted me after I had an article published in Embedded Systems Programming.
If you're in the US, I probably know one of them; initials T.G. - who was the other one?
This is a bit annoying, true. All my books are circulating on the peer- to-peer networks. But this is true of many other books also. Can't be helped :(
Yes, I know Tim - I was one of the reviewers for his book (I don't remember if I read the proposal but I definitely remember reading the ms.). Small world :)
The "Pragmatic Programmers" are running a publishing house for software books, and when someone buys a PDF, they re-generate the PDF with the purchaser's name in the footer of every 2nd page. It'd be possible to strip that out if you tried hard enough (or if the practice was wide- spread enough for some hacker to publish a program for the purpose), but it has served fairly well to limit the release of these books.
It's something that every E-book publisher should be doing. Ask yours why they aren't.
These are not e-books, these are printed physical books. My first book came with a PDF on the CD-ROM, OK, I can see that dropping onto the networks. My other two books were physical paper; they have been dissected and scanned. Search the P2P networks for any technology title released in the last 5 years, you'll find it there..
Better to issue a key to allow downloading the (watermarked) PDF.
Oh, ok. That happens too, but the resulting EBooks are too painful to use - anyone who actually cares will spring for a proper copy, and you wouldn't sell to the others anyhow.
Yes, of course. But with the purchaser's name in the footer, a publisher can at least refuse to sell that individual anything else... so far as they can identify the individual... and assuming they're willing to scan the networks themselves.
no :( these were done pretty well. At a guess they saw off the spine and use a sheet-fed scanner and OCR software. The PDFs are well- aligned and fully searchable.
There were a couple of flavors floating around. One of them you could see the sawn edge of the pages, definitely a "pro-amateur" job. But the quality was still pretty good. There was another version I believe to have been a "stripped" Amazon.com e-book download. My second book wasn't made available as an e-book IIRC. I find it hard to remember. Nothing I can do about it in any case.
If you or your publishers were really smart, you would learn to work with the flow as opposed to trying, in vain, to work against it. As was said in this thread, people who download your books from P2P networks wouldn't be buying them if they couldn't download them. The people who download books are doing so because they don't have enough money to trivialize the cost of a legal copy. Worst case, they read a couple of books they "stole" from you, get smarter, get a (better) job, and look for other books to purchase with your name on the spine because they trust you and now have the money to invest in you. Look at it the way Microsoft looks at piracy in China, building an audience.
Two words of advice for publishers. One, digital copies of a book should be significantly cheaper than paper copies, because far fewer costs go into producing and selling them. Two, every paper copy of a book should come with a free digital copy (easier to search, longer lasting in general, more portable).
Uh-huh, yes, sure, etc. I don't have a lot of comment to pass on this except to say that almost nobody who speaks this way has actually written a book or produced a movie or whatever the case might be.
I couldn't really care less about the lost royalties. The monetary return from an embedded systems book (with few exceptions) is not much. The reason for writing is the same as for filing patents: i.e. to keep my name in view and add credibility to the resume. But it galls me to see Russian websites selling PDFs of my book - without paying royalties. That's theft right there. Starving student in an attic stealing a copy, not so much.
It's not justification it's reasoning. If companies would learn to understand why people do things, they would know how better to get that same group of people to do what they want (buy more product). Your attitude is one of ignorance, which will lead you to concentrate to much time an assests on counteracting "thieves" and not enough time on pleasing customers. This will, at the very least, limit your potential as a profitable business (much more than the "thieves" did in the first place).
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