March 22, 1999 — Newsletter #20

Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors…

This is Newsletter 20, and in addition, we’re about to top
20,000 subscribers. I think there’s some cosmic connection
there.

Wow, last week’s newsletter really sparked a lot of e-mail.
Many of you agreed with me, but then a lot of you thought I
was on the Microsoft payroll. I assure you that is not true.
If anything, the money flow is from me to Microsoft rather
than the other way around.

Did you hear that according to Jobs Rated Almanac,
“Webmaster” is the best job to have in America? I still think
“Lottery Winner” might rank higher….

My father got an A on his midterm.

Now, on to today’s topic…

If you’ve ever taken a creative writing or script writing
class, then you’ve probably heard the old adage, “Write what
you know.” Well, for the last two months, I have known about
finishing up the JavaScript Goodies book.

This is my second book. “HTML Goodies” was my first, of course.
But HTML Goodies seems a long distant memory now. I am at the
end of the process. In fact, I have to be “all in” by the end
of this month. “All in” means all editing and writing is
completely finished and the book can go to print. It’s a long
process that I thought I’d give you a glimpse into.

If you’ve ever wanted to be an author, keep this in mind: be
careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

>From start to finish, here’s my experience of the process for
getting a computer book on the market.

First off, and this is the hardest part, you need to find a
publisher who is actually willing to listen to you. There is
a process of “pitching” your idea to someone who has the power
to get this thing into print, and better yet, market it once
it’s there.

You can go about it two ways. I’ve tried both. First, you can
do the research yourself. Find a series of publishers. I did
it by simply going to the bookstore and writing down the names
of publishers from the spines of the relevant books on the
shelves. Or you can try and find an agent. I did that, too.

If you go the route of contacting the publishers yourself,
you’ll need to either head to their Web sites or call them
on the phone. Each publisher has what they call “Author
Guidelines” that you can download or have sent to you. I’ll
get into to what all that is in a second.

If you go the agent route, first you need to find one. There
are numerous books out there that discuss how to get books
published, and will list literary agent after literary agent.
Read over the list. The agent is usually very up-front in that
they only deal with fiction, or children’s stories, or
computer books, etc. Find one who deals with your topic, and
follow their guidelines for possible representation. Usually
you have to send them at least a chapter, a table of contents,
and an outline. The gentleman who represented me for a while
demanded the entire book, a full manuscript.

Once you get representation, then comes all the contract fun.
How much does your agent get? Usually you’ll have a reading
fee, or fee for office expenses. But in return, this person
has the ear on the publishing world and can get your
manuscript read. You may not be able to do that yourself.

I’ve been actually pretty fortunate in that respect. My
relationship with Macmillan came through my relationship
with Earthweb. Before HTML Goodies was purchased, I had
literary representation, and the manuscript was read, but
turned down at a few places.

When you approach a publisher, you’re asked to answer a few
very basic, but unbelievably difficult-to-answer questions.
Publishers like to know little things like, Who would buy
this book? Why is this book better than what is already out
there? What will separate this book in the book buyer’s
mind? It’s very easy to puff out your chest and proclaim
that your book will be the best ever written, but can
everything that’s already out there be junk? These are hard
questions to answer.

Once all the wrangling is done, and a publisher is willing
to take a shot with you, then all the fun legal and financial
stuff gets started. Here’s a hint: If you get into writing
books to get rich, play the lottery. There is not a great
deal of profit at the author end. You really have to want to
do this because you love it far more than because you need
to pay the electric bill. Now, that’s not to say that three
or four books down the line that you’ll have a nice tidy
royalty coming in, but don’t bet the farm on your book.

My deal pays me a percentage of the cost of every book sold.
But wait! That doesn’t mean a percentage of the retail cost.
That means a percentage of the cost of the book from the
publisher to the retail store, which is less than what your
local bookstore gets from you.

And so it starts. The paperwork is done and you begin to edit.
The first step in the process is to get the book into
publishable format. This has nothing to do with your content.
What you have written must be put into a publisher template.
This is where you state that this line will be a heading,
this will be a subheading, this will be bold, this will be
italic, this is where an image will go, this is the caption
for the image, etc., etc., etc. Furthermore, if you are
offering any images, now is when you capture them to a
specific image format that I have never seen used anywhere
except in this instance. It is amazingly tedious and time-
consuming.

Now you, the author, edit the content one last time. When
you’re happy with it, you send it off to your editor. I
actually have two editors this time around. I guess I make a
lot of mistakes.

The editor makes more changes than you’d like and then sends
it off to a tech editor whose job it is to make sure you are
not giving out any bogus programming advice. My tech editor
this time around is a JavaScript programmer at Netscape.
Pretty cool, huh?!

Finally, this terribly convoluted chapter arrives back on
your doorstep. It’s actually quite hard to read at first.
The original text is in black. The editor’s comments and
repairs are in red. The tech editor’s comments are in an
off-green. Any comments that you make will show up in
purple. Finally, any changes made to the text will show
up in blue. But not just blue, strike-through blue. You
see, once something is on the page, it never leaves. It
just gets struck through and given a different color.

You get one last look at it all. A few small battles break
out here and there because you don’t like your text being
changed. You become embarrassed because you misspelled
something easy or made a blatantly stupid programming error.
You both curse the editors and thank your lucky stars that
they were there to help you not sound like a jerk who got a
book deal.

Once you make all of your final changes, the editor runs the
chapter through some kind of devise that eliminates all of
the comments and strike-through text and off it all goes to
the layout and design team to be turned into chapter.

I have nine chapters in the JavaScript Goodies book so this
will all happen nine times before it’s all said and done.

Finally, you are asked to write up your bio, acknowledgments,
dedications, and book introduction. Once all that’s in, you
sit back and wait for the cover art to show up. You give it
the thumbs up or down, and then it’s pretty much out of your
hands. The sales and advertising force at the publisher
takes over and you hope people lay down good money for what
you had to say.

People have been buying HTML Goodies at a fairly steady
rate. The powers that be seem happy. I mean, they gave me
a second book deal. I’m hoping that this one will also sell
well, because as much as I kick and scream during the
process, I’m actually looking forward to getting started on
a third one. In fact, I’ve already verbally pitched the
idea. My editor seems somewhat interested.

But he said I have to finish this one first.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

And that’s that. Thanks for taking the time to read it.

Joe Burns, Ph.D.

And Remember: I am again looking forward to my beloved
Cleveland Indians going back to the World Series this year!
With that in mind, did you know that the original rules of
baseball required the winning team to score 21 runs? They
would simply keep playing innings until the score was met.
Games that didn’t meet 21 were called a draw. In addition,
the original rules of baseball allowed you to force a player
out by throwing the ball at him. If he was off base, and you
hit him, he was out.