
Writing a Technical Book for Manning - tunetheweb
https://www.tunetheweb.com/blog/writing-a-technical-book-for-manning/
======
softwaredoug
I wrote a book for Manning (Relevant Search). It was a grueling process. I can
confirm much that's in here. I will say that I generally felt Manning

(a) really understood how to craft good tech books

(b) was really dedicated to tech books as a medium, despite all the attempts
to 'disrupt books' which I respected

(c) was full of dedicated people that treated this as their craft

The other point I'll make is the author's name goes on the cover, but the work
is really a team effort between dedicated editors, the publisher, reviewers,
and others. No part is replaceable.

If I was to write another book, I'd definitely consider doing it with them.
Not because they made it easy, but because they really were dedicated to the
quality I wanted in my book

I also loved their super old school, Web 1.0, "we just do books" website 5
years ago :)

~~~
louthy
I was a technical proofer for a Manning book, and I concur with all of your
points. They’re super professional and dedicated to getting the best outcome
(a useful book)

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danpalmer
Great post, lots of detail. After reading this I would be more likely to want
to publish with and buy from Manning. I’ve been a technical reviewer for
Packt, and since doing so would avoid buying any of their books. As a customer
of Mannings’, they seem better, and seeing the inside of the process and the
amount of review that happens, I think they sound great all things considered.

~~~
StavrosK
Why would you avoid Packt?

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slezyr
Read few Packt books written by authors that know nothing about the topic of
the book.

For example their blender book is absolute trash and waste of time.

[https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-
creative/blender-3d-ba...](https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-
creative/blender-3d-basics-second-edition)

Their model in the middle of the book could be made in 5mins. And most of the
book author writes about history of animation and other offtopics.

[https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/hardware_and_creative...](https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/hardware_and_creative/9781783984909/5/ch05lvl1sec112/turning-
a-cube-into-a-boat-with-box-modeling)

~~~
StavrosK
Oh wow, that's egregious, thanks.

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raboukhalil
If you want to hear about the alternative approach of self-publishing, check
out my post about how I wrote a WebAssembly book in 200 hours:
[https://medium.com/@robaboukhalil/how-i-wrote-a-technical-
bo...](https://medium.com/@robaboukhalil/how-i-wrote-a-technical-book-in-
under-200-hours-911d5e4f9e8c?source=friends_link&sk=13c5b15048cf1c8676d6e208181462b7)

This is my second self-published book and I've loved this approach. It lets me
focus on writing and marketing, and I get to craft every aspect of the book.

~~~
kerng
Did you know what typical minimum page count requirements are? I have a non-
technical, more program management focused book with about 100 pages. Was told
by a publisher it's too short... wondering how you approached that when self
publishing, since your post mentions it's about 100-150 pages. Did you get any
feedback from readers that it is too short?

~~~
raboukhalil
I have not received feedback that my book was too short. In my own experience,
I've rarely ever completed a technical book--in fact, I've often wished they
were shorter!

~~~
kerng
I have the same takeaway, many technical books with 300+ pages seem more like
reference material rather then being focused on teaching the reader.

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jedberg
Book writing is a punishing endeavor. I started writing a book once. We got a
contract, we got an advance ($5,000), we even wrote 3/4 of the book. Then in
one month twelve(12!) books came out on the same topic. The publisher pulled
our contract because they didn't want to be yet another book on the same
topic. That seemed reasonable.

They were kind enough to allow us to keep the advance and maintain the
copyright on what we had written, some of which were turned into blog posts.

~~~
justin66
> They were kind enough to allow us to keep the advance and maintain the
> copyright on what we had written

It'd be shocking if this weren't the case.

~~~
jedberg
Well the contract said originally that they get the copyright since they paid
an advance and it was a "work for hire". If they had stuck to the contract the
copyright wouldn't have returned to us unless we paid back the advance and
then bought it back from them at "market value".

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DrJosiah
Wrote a book for Manning (Redis in Action), from December '11 to July '12
(available online), editing through the summer of '12.

Was offered the Word Doc or Docbook-based XML format w/ Java validator +
validating xsd, and others. Went with the XML, but built my own tooling for
injecting runnable code (what is available in my git repository for the book)
into the book, using code comments to define figures so I didn't have to copy
/ paste / update / etc., along with figure, and other convenient "macros" to
save from typing the XML. Call it 85%-90% XML, 10% other stuff.

The major challenge I faced was that the validator provided to me was not the
same as what was used by the publisher when I uploaded my xml for automatic
generation for editing, leaving me in a situation where I didn't even know
that my xml wasn't valid until I get a crappy message after `svn commit` and
having to submit a build to their system (typically 1-3 minute delay to find
out your pdf generation didn't work, try to find what weird xml edgecase you
missed that your validator doesn't care about, and submit again). About 2-3
months before finishing with final edits, I found an XML editor that would
validate with the xsd directly, finally getting my document validated (but
breaking all of my formatting, requiring extra steps in my build process,
...), and allowing me to eliminate 30-40 minutes of the typical "find out
what's wrong with my hand-written XML tonight" when editing.

They had a forum for discussing ongoing author issues, and I remember there
was an author who was using his own Asciidoc -> docbook tool. Looks like they
may have imported it more recently if OP was using that and there was no
docbook option. I had started early on with a reStructuredText equivalent, but
then realized that I didn't want to write / maintain a tool to write a book
(and to maintain that tool for others going forward), and ended up with what I
used - less than 150 total lines, no external libraries, and no maintenance
going forward. :)

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perlgeek
I've written three books for Apress, and their process seems to be a bit
leaner (less review), so more of the book quality is the author's
responsibility.

The technical reviewers were good, but certainly not world experts on the
topics.

I didn't get any say in the cover images, just a proposal to which they showed
me.

\---

Regarding the topic of writer's block, my advice is to write blog posts
instead of book chapters first. Depending on your contract, you might or might
not be allowed to actually publish them, but if you did a bit of blogging
first, you are likely used to writing blog posts, so the idea is not as scary
as writing a book chapter.

You can do enough editing later, but starting from blog posts gives the
chapters some independence that I as a reader appreciate.

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mjcohen
Found a few typos:

"if you ever what to write a book," \- "want"

"I needed to tke care of including images" \- "take"

"in an attempt to illicit feedback" \- "elicit"

"likely won't actually be approved until early 2010, " \- "2020" (probably)

"copy-editing to correct grammar, and spelling," \- "grammar and spelling"

"Manning do a lot of promotion" \- "does"

"a random random tip of this list isshown" \- "random", "is shown"

"it's shocking amount" \- "a shocking"

~~~
newscracker
> "Manning do a lot of promotion" \- "does"

I'm going to nitpick. The original sentence is grammatically correct in the UK
and some other non-U.S. English speaking parts. I know this may sound very
weird, but it's all fine and correct somewhere else, treating companies and
establishments as plural.

~~~
tunetheweb
Yeah I was trying to figure out what to do with that one. In the end I
“corrected” it as suggested but could have gone either way depending whether
Manning is a singular company or a plural collection of people.

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kerng
I'm curious about publishing a book, what are the typical length requirements?
I have seen some books with 400+ pages. Is that what publishers require?
Anyone has an experience where page count was much less?

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theredbox
Would not consider buying from manning again. The books are unreadable on
kindle and they made no effort to correct it.

~~~
garren
Device or app? I've found that pretty much all technical books look terrible
on Kindle devices - the screens are too small, the technical content (source)
usually formats poorly, and diagrams are often screwed up. That's not unique
to Manning.

I have a lot of Manning books that I've purchased directly from their site
and/or from Amazon. I generally read them in the Kindle app (iOS, lt, web) or
in iBooks. The only Kindle device that I've comfortably read any technical
books on is the old Kindle DX, and that was just because the screen was
relatively large.

Technical content and smaller e-reader devices will never be a good fit.
Occasionally it's tolerable, usually it's not.

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WoodenChair
I've written three technical books: one with Apress and two with Manning
([https://classicproblems.com](https://classicproblems.com)). Usually first-
time authors (like first-time anything) don't have a lot of perspective
because they don't know what it's like with another publisher. But, this post
by Barry is pretty spot-on. To summarize (a TLDR if you want and these are
widely known points anyway):

\- Manning has a high quality review process and generally puts out high
quality books

\- Manning's current production phase (what happens after content is done) and
production timeline leave a lot to be desired; I know they have had some
turnover in the department and they are self-aware and working on it to be
fair

\- Manning's main tooling (aka Word templates) leaves a lot to be desired as
well. You have the choice to work with AsciiDoc (I did my first with them in
Asciidoc and the second in Word) but their tooling for that is even less
mature.

\- You don't write technical books for the money. You do it for the career
advancement and/or satisfaction. You read blog posts about the outliers
(people who made a lot and people who made a little) because they're the
loudest voices, but generally even a good technical book sells around 2000
copies because the audience of paying readers is so niche.

\- He's right about the royalty negotiation. First-time, unknown authors have
almost no leverage. After you have successfully completed a book you can
negotiate a higher royalty rate/advance.

I'll add a few more points (hopefully they're not pissed at me for writing
publicly about this):

\- They do a very good job marketing to their own existing audience. They do
less of a good job marketing to external audiences, although this has improved
in the last couple of years.

\- So much of how high quality the process is depends on who you randomly get
as a development editor/technical editor/technical reviewer/copy editor. You
don't have much say in the matter. So, it's a total crapshoot.

\- It's better if you come to them than they come to you. I came to publishers
with all three of my topics, not the other way around. You can then shop
around. I submitted my proposals to multiple publishers and got multiple
offers.

I disagree with another author who posted in this comment section—books, even
by traditional publishers, are not always a team effort. 90% of the content of
my three books is the same as would've existed if I had self-published. Of
course being receptive to feedback is very important, but how valuable it is
really depends on how good a writer/explainer you are to begin with and how
good the people giving that feedback are.

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nickdrozd
> I also got to pick the cover image from one of three suggestions the
> publisher sent me. Manning uses images of historical figures on the covers
> of their books ... I picked the image of the woman carrying clothes as I
> thought it was at least somewhat related to a transport protocol carrying
> messages (a stretch I know but I was rather pleased with myself for coming
> up with that analogy to justify the cover image somewhat).

~~~
afraca
Meta: I would appreciate it if quotes are accompanied by some explanation of
why you chose it.

~~~
timClicks
I choose the cover of Rust in Action because the subject is carrying lots of
things, a hint towards concurrency. I also think that she's probably doing
some sort of chore, which is the kind of work that gets done with Rust. She's
also from the Caucus mountains, an area I would love to visit.

