

I self-published a programming book, here's my story - fekberg
http://blog.filipekberg.se/2012/08/27/self-publishing-a-book-part-1-where-it-all-began/

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tjic
> They said "This is the worst type-setting I’ve ever seen"...This got me
> thinking, if the first reactions are not even constructive

Uh, actually, I think that that's wonderfully constructive advice: if someone
says that, then you immediately know that your graphic design is such a big
problem that nothing else you're doing is even getting through.

I'd __LOVE __to get advice that's that clear, pointed, and actionable!

~~~
kalid
Totally agree. "This is the worst book I've ever seen" is not constructive.
Specifically calling out the type-setting is one of the best pieces of
feedback he could have hoped to receive.

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jpallen
As soon as I read his opening piece I thought 'this guy needs to use LaTeX',
so I'm glad that he did in the end. I've benefited a lot from the stories and
comments here at HN, so I'd like to offer my help in getting you started with
LaTeX if you'd like to do something similar.

I'd say that the major of downside of LaTeX is that it's not very accessible.
One of my goals at the moment is to improve that, and that's part of my
motivation for working on ShareLaTeX [1], which is probably one of the easiest
ways to get started with LaTeX (I am of course biased.) We've cut out all of
the installation and configuration needed to set up LaTeX, so you can dive
straight in.

[1] <https://www.sharelatex.com>

~~~
_delirium
The biggest accessibility problem I have with LaTeX for bookwriting is that
the stylesheet language is very strange by modern standards. You can ignore it
if you're writing academic papers with a provided stylesheet (or with one of
the default ones), but you often will want to do some custom formatting if
you're writing a book. I've heard ConTeXt might be an improvement, though.

~~~
TylerE
Context is better for book type content, if you want to do things like
sidebars, colors, etc. It's also a little more "do what I say" vs LaTeX's "do
what you think is best", which generally produces good results, but can be
infuriating when e.g. you really want a figure and certain text on the same
page or something like that.

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dobbsbob
nostarchpress is pretty good. you can simply email them your idea and if they
like it, will parter you with editors and designers to take care of all the
typesetting/layout. this according to some friends of mine i'm not published
by nostarch

sounds better than the rest of the publishers who want a full draft

i'm too obscure to be published, i have no alphabet soup credentials so i self
publish. majority of sales were from my site which was linked in the ebooks i
sold on kindle, warriorforums and smashwords

never heard of LaTeX I'll check it out, I write everything plain text in emacs
and then pay somebody in Uzbek to slap it together using minamalist design

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jcurbo
What about writing it in Markdown then doing conversion to LaTeX using pandoc?
I'm working on a research paper this way and it is working out nicely. Pandoc
allows you to include a LaTeX template that you can customize to your heart's
content yet still keep separate from your content. (you can also do html and
epub directly from pandoc, with templates, if you desire)

~~~
Stwerp
I've been living in Emacs + Auctex for a while now, so my questions about
markdown/pandoc: I have grown very accustomed to regex (and normal) searches
on my bibtex/reference database and easily plugging in citations in my
document. Is there support for this (reftex) in any of the markdown editors? I
don't know if I've seen a good solution to this.

The other thing is preview-latex which inline-png's all equations, section
titles and images in the emacs buffer. This is very valuable to me to easily
see a figure without needing to tab between windows. I don't think markdown
would support something like this, as far as I'm aware.

I like the idea of complete separation of content and appearance/layout, but
Latex has many customizations (psfrag for image text replacement, tikz,
programming custom macros) that I would be somewhat lost without. For
instance, I start all my outlines in org-mode, and love having quick html, or
tex->pdf output, but for the real nitty-gritty content, I _need_ my straight
latex code.

~~~
jcurbo
Citations: Pandoc has its own format for citations that it translates to LaTeX
etc as needed. Most Markdown editors I have seen or used don't have any
support for pandoc's extended features. So while I am sure this could be
possible with work on Emacs (or vim, or whatever) I'm not aware of anything
that does what you do out of the box. Personally, I am writing in Byword (with
some tweaks in macvim as necessary) and storing/looking up citations in
BibDesk.

Same deal with preview-latex - you can include LaTeX directly in pandoc
documents, but no editor I know of will do previews of it for you. I do think
that is an awesome feature though.

Overall I think the audience for Markdown is people who don't want to get down
in the weeds with, say, LaTeX and Emacs like you do. Thus, the feature set for
Markdown-focused editors is still fairly simple. Pandoc is useful because it
lets you add a layer of complexity on top of your Markdown as necessary
(through templates) and get it into different formats easily. (The same can
probably be said for other Markdown systems like MultiMarkdown but I like
Pandoc) I have managed to set up my workflow to get Pandoc-flavored markdown
into an apa6 LaTeX template without any significant issues, due to pandoc
being fairly flexible, but it's not quite at WYSIWYG-style writing just yet.

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ayi
My only concern about all this Markdown, Latex etc. is "spell checking". I'm
Turkish and written several books (jQuery, php, javascript) but all of them
were written in Microsoft Word because only Word has the most comprehensive
spell checking for Turkish.

Can someone suggest me a good Latex editor with good spell-checking (other
than English)?

~~~
marios
Since someone mentionned emacs, I feel obligated to mention vim :)

Much like emacs, a great editor. I have used it alongide the LanguageTool[1]
plugin for the spell checking part. I didn't like the fact it required Java
(the plugin, not vim) to do it's job, but having spell/grammar checking within
vim without having to resort to dirty tricks with Word / LibreOffice was well
worth it. [1]<http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3223>

~~~
arooaroo
Just to be clear, Vim has had built-in spelling checker since v7.0 (released
2006). The LanguageTool plugin may be handy for spelling and other grammar
checking issues but users requiring straight-forward spelling functionality
will most likely have essential spell-checking features available out-of-the-
box.

------
cristianpascu
Just curious here: Are _all_ publishers interested in proposals from first
time authors?

How hard it is to get a publisher interested in promoting your book?

~~~
fekberg
All the publishers that I've been in contact, where I initiated the contact,
they wanted proposals that followed a certain guideline. The guideline can be
different from publisher to publisher. Some publishers don't even respond if
they don't like your initial presentation/idea.

I've been contacted with publishers after publishing this book where they had
a plan for the entire project but the royalties aren't even worth comparing
against self-publishing or where you initiated the contact with a "big"
publisher.

If you have a good idea and have written a Chapter that is based in the middle
of the book containing about 30 pages, then I don't think it's too hard
getting a publishers attention. Or do you mean if I wanted to get a publisher
to promote the book now afterwards?

~~~
cristianpascu
Yes, I was mainly interested in the promotion part. For instance, if I want to
target US market, but I'm not from US.

I realize that there are many factors, like for instance you background,
qualifications, etc. But I was particularly interested in this aspect. Every
author publishes their first book at one point, right?

~~~
fekberg
Right! As far as I know either you go all-in with a publisher or you don't go
with them at all. So they won't help you promote the book if they haven't
helped you published it.

However, CreateSpace that I've used to self-publish the book has options for
expanding distribution to other channels such as book stores in U.S. That
requires that the book store buys the books, so you're still back to square
one; getting them to know you exist.

Technology books are a bit different from "Normal" books from that I've heard.
If you publish a normal book the publisher want the entire book before they
make a decision. As for techical books they just want a chapter or two before
they say yes or no to your book. If you go with a publisher they will help you
with everything from proofing to marketing in all different channels and you
will sell a lot more books but get a lot less royalties.

What I did to enter new markets such as US and Spain was that I sent some free
copies to influential people that I knew liked to read and talk about
technology books. If they liked what they read they would talk about it, if
they didn't they would at least know who I was. This of course requires that
you pay for the marketing yourself.

Hope this answered the question, sort of!

~~~
cristianpascu
I did. Thanks a lot!

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k_nitin_r
How do you create an awareness of your book and promote sales? If you have a
publisher and you have a print edition of the book, that may give you the
advantage of being able to have your book on store shelves to speak for
themselves, but if it's an e-book then getting the word out seems harder.

------
csense
The most useful part for those considering self-publishing is the stylesheet
linked later in this series of blog posts,

<https://github.com/aginiewicz/createspace>

------
robomartin
How does this compare to tools like Sigil?

~~~
bxbb
Sigil is, as far as I read (since I've never use it), tied only to EPUB
format. TeX can be compiled and converted to multiple formats. To make an EPUB
one just need to create appropriate sructure and opf/xml, then pack it.

------
danso
How have your e-book sales compared to your print ones?

~~~
fekberg
Since the e-book is included when you purchase the printed copy, the printed
versions have sold better because you get everything.

Maybe 1/3 is plain Kindle/PDF sales and the rest is printed.

When it's time to write the next book I will certainly be targeting all the
different formats again because everyone likes to read differently. A lot of
the printed sales haven't even requested the e-book.

