My experience in technical proofreading books for foreign publishers

As far as I can remember, I always wanted to participate in the creation of an interesting book and see my name in it, if not on the cover, then at least in the list of thanks. But I myself have always been lazy to write something bigger than my Facebook status, and I didn’t have rare and valuable skills that were useful in preparing publications, so I didn’t have to rely on the book finding me myself. And there have always been few creative friends, so no one has invited anyone anywhere for the company. So my childhood dream remained a dream until recently.



Years went by. I received a master's degree in computer science from a renowned technical university and became an applied programmer at a large company. Occasionally kommitit small fixes in not the most popular githaba repositories. I registered on the websites of publishers and bought there technical books with big discounts, instead of which I still read a single and cathedral Habrahabr. In the evenings he played tanchiki and with a dog. In general, he led a completely ordinary life of a not fully self-confident vegetable of the post-industrial era. And then one fine May day they knocked my email.



The manager for luring new authors to the British publisher Packt Publishing wrote that she liked my profile on the githaba, and offered to become one of the technical proofreaders of an upcoming book with recipes using Apache JMeter called JMeter Cookbook.



JMeter is a fairly well-known open source program for load testing applications. In appearance, it is pretty simple, but the devil is in the details. And in plugins. She has so many plug-ins and details that even if something is to be done, but she’s typed on a book. And if so, then why not publish this book.

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To be honest, I still do not fully understand how the publishers found my profile on GitHub. Yes, the topic of load testing is interesting to me and I worked quite closely with JMeter, both at the time of writing the diploma and then at the company, but from my profile this is not at all obvious. The only thing that connects me to the development of JMeter is the only small commit to the code of the plug-in that connects it to the Maven build system. I suspect that the presence of my profile on the publisher’s website played a significant role, but I cannot confirm this. My master's diploma with a mention of JMeter on the net is also available, but hardly anyone except my supervisor has read it. Riddle. Although, on the other hand, if a British publisher, almost all of whose editors are in India, orders a book from an author from Nigeria who lives in the USA, then who else should they invite as a technical corrector, if not a Belarusian from Holland.



The terms of cooperation were quite simple. By the time of the first contact with the publisher, the author had drafts of the first two chapters ready. There should be eight total chapters. As soon as they were ready, they were sent to me and other proofreaders, we read the text, reviewed the pictures and ran the prepared scripts, then described our comments in the comments of the Word documents and sent the edits to the editor along with a form that included questions like "what would you like to add to the text" and "what would you like to remove from the text." For the proofreading of one chapter of 20-30 pages, four days were given, usually including weekends. A couple of times I was late for a day or two with proofreading, but there were no problems with this: the publishing company understood that the correctors are freelance employees and do not always have enough free time.



From me, as a technical corrector, it was only required that I pay the editor’s attention to the inaccuracies and errors that were related to the content of the book, but not to its design. So, I noticed a lot of wrong language turns, but I did not try to correct them, focusing on the correctness of the technical description of the processes. As far as I understand, some people deal with text design issues at one of the last stages of the publication preparation, after the technical proofreading.



There was no payment for cooperation. Instead of money, I was offered to mention me in the list of proofreaders of the book with the inclusion of a brief biography, to send a printed or electronic edition of the book after its publication, and also to choose at its discretion one e-book from their catalog. It turned out such a scheme of wines-wines, where it is good and economical publishing, and vain me. As a result, I spent about 25 hours working on a book, most of which was devoted to leisurely reading useful, though not the best-designed, material.



I did not find any serious mistakes in the book. The main remarks that I sent to the publisher were, in my opinion, not entirely logical structure of chapters and recipes in them. In addition, I found minor errors in the source codes, several semantic misprints like using the word text instead of test, and so on. It can be said that the author approached the writing of the book quite responsibly and there was no frank nonsense in it.



As a result, by the end of September I finished all my work on the publication of the publication, and at the very end of October a beautifully designed book was published in people. I haven’t yet received my own printed copy, but judging by the text of the chapters I have corrected, I think that both beginners and experienced users of JMeter will find in the book many useful work habits. Although the water in it decently.



So I have more than one fulfilled children's dream. In general, I rate the experience of working on this book as positive, and I recommend that you also take part in such projects, if the opportunity presents itself.