Publishing your own book: from A to Z

After a note about the release of the book “Accelerate Your Website” I was asked to highlight the process of publishing my own publication. I will not say that the actions described below were simple and obvious: in the course of this, a lot of questions arose that I could hardly answer myself, so I had to look for advice literally everywhere.

Prehistory

We must begin first of all with having a clear idea of ​​the book and time to write it. In my case, the fact that at the time of writing all the material was actually collected was very helpful to me, and I only needed to arrange it, recheck and clarify it.

If you do not have a clear outline of the presentation of the material, it is better not to begin the process of writing. In this case, it can become long, painful, and the result will not satisfy potential readers at all.

Publisher Search

Naturally, if there is no publisher, the publication is possible only in electronic form. Publishing in the process of publishing the book in paper form is the very "necessary evil": it assumes all the risks and costs associated with printing, storing and distributing the book. Only the publisher has a contract with a network of distributors, only through which the book can be in the store.
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Yes, you can fully attend to proofreading and checking the manuscript, prepress preparation, negotiations with the printing house, transporting the circulation first from the printing house, and then to warehouses for suppliers (of course, only after negotiations with suppliers and concluding an agreement is clearly not on the best conditions - you have no personal contact or big name). If you calculate the whole process from a monetary point of view, the publication through the publisher, although it gives quite a bit (I will cover this question in more detail below), but much more reliably: you can focus specifically on the content of the book, and not think about a bunch of related moments.

So, my search for a publishing house began with BHV-Petersburg (quite adequate publishing house according to Artemy Lomov ). They also published a book by Vlad Merzhevich , which, according to them, was poorly sold in 2005–2006, so they were not very determined to promote another “competing” edition. After that, I was thinking of just writing a book and putting it in electronic access.

In fact, the fact that the book will not be published on paper has somewhat spurred me: I realized that I could fully concentrate on the content, which I did. A table of contents was published , and I began to actively work on each declared chapter (as a result, a month later it was possible to post the first version of the manuscript ). In this process, I found an offer from my old friend, Serezha Panteleev , to try publishing through Open Systems ( intuit.ru ). I started the second stage of negotiations.

So, when it comes to finding publishers, you can only advise one thing: look for a well-known and (or) respected company that has a series that fits your topic . Everything else is secondary.

Terms of publication

Terms of publishing books are somewhat different from publisher to publisher. For example, in the same “BHV-Petersburg” the author's fee is paid once a quarter, there is no prepayment. This means that after writing the manuscript, it will take about six months before it is possible to receive the first money for it. Others, most likely, rest on exclusive rights to the manuscript and the impossibility of reprinting in other organizations. Third, for example, “Open Systems” needs exactly the content that could be used as efficiently as possible - this is a real web 2.0 approach — and the exclusivity of the content is not so important as to include the requirement in the contract.

The rest of the conditions are more or less stable: 10% (they say it happens less) from the wholesale price (I’ll emphasize that it’s wholesale: retail is usually two to three times higher), a certain amount (in my case it’s 20) copyright copies, editing provision , proofreading and layout at the expense of the publishing house (or with the conclusion of additional contracts with each link).

What you should pay attention to when concluding a contract:

• Copyright: Everything except the direct publication of the book and its distribution through the stores, should be done with your written consent. Otherwise, the publisher will be able to publish an e-book and distribute it independently. Or, each distribution channel should be specifically mentioned (CD / DVD, website usage, PDF / CHM version, creation of audio or video materials, etc.). You also need to track the item about the reprint of the work: it should be only with the consent of the author.
• Copyrights: whether the rights to the publication of the manuscript are exclusive or not (in my case, this was a line in the contract “the author has the right to transfer the rights to his work or parts of it to third parties”).
• Copyright: electronic distribution (for me personally, it was essential that the electronic version of the book could be distributed free of charge) - “the author has the right to distribute the work on CDs, floppy disks, and also via network methods via the Internet without notifying the Publisher.”
• Deadlines: it is worth checking that the deadlines for making a decision on the manuscript and its publication do not exceed 30 days - otherwise the whole process may be significantly delayed. It is also worth discussing the process in person in the publishing house,
• Payment: these same 10% of the wholesale price - the standard rate. The wholesale price is most likely determined by agreement with the publisher itself.
• Payment: payment of remuneration. At this point, each publisher has its own standards (correlated with the cash flows within the enterprise), so you shouldn’t bend your line very much. In my case, a nice bonus was the fact that half of the amount is paid within a month after the book is published, and the second half - after three months (regardless of the speed of the book’s sale, but the circulation has not turned out so big).
• Payment: free copies of the book (a nice bonus). Additionally, it is worth discussing with the publishing house the price of buying out a part of the circulation from them (if you plan to distribute it yourself).

It is very important to personally agree with the publishing house (in the person of the editor-in-chief or his deputy) about all the conditions of publication: in Russia, for the time being, it is the informal agreement that is primarily valued, rather than the legal agreement.

Manuscript preparation

Fortunately, this stage did not take me much time simply because 2/3 of the materials were already written in some form. however, even this layout took a month (at the same time, of course, I was still working on the main job). The volume of the book is 260 pages. Based on this, you can estimate the approximate amount of time in your case.

The final manuscript was in .doc format, the publisher was quite happy with this. All further correspondence was carried out using this particular format. After the final version of the manuscript began its verification.

During the test and proofreading, I talked to the editor (who checked the general sense) and proofreader (who checked the spelling and punctuation). After a few disputes, the manuscript for two weeks finally got to the coder. Here the main problems began.

Most of all in the course of the layout, the drawings suffered (for in the manuscript they were colored and “by hand”, and in the book itself - black and white and standardized). Signatures to the figures were collected by hand (as a result, additional prints appeared in them), the code also suffered (in particular, it was necessary to track the disappearance of two hyphens in constructions with conditional comments). Next time, probably, I will still try to negotiate with the illustrator in order to make the publication more colorful. But this is my personal preference.

Also, towards the end of the creation of the pre-print layout, you will need to develop a cover. But it also remains more on the conscience of the publisher (after all, it assumes all the design work). The process of coordinating the layout and cover took another two or three weeks.

In general, at the entire stage of manuscript coordination, one needs to have patience and not to let in the print obvious blunders from the corrector. In any case, all edits are agreed, so that without your knowledge, nothing in the final book will fall.

Electronic version

For me it was essential to have an electronic version of the book that could be freely distributed. To this end, a cover was included in the final layout (and some edits were made for compatibility with some platforms). Then, based on the DOC file (which you had to make all the edits that occurred during the reconciliation), the FB2 and CHM files were created, then the HTML and WOL versions of the book, all of them <a href = " speedupyourwebsite.ru/ books / speed-up-your-website have been posted online.

Along the way, together with the publishing house (because, as I mentioned, they are interested in using authoring content to the maximum), the video course “Basics of Client Optimization” was filmed and a set of tests prepared for it. All this took place in parallel with the waiting line at the printing house and ended quite well.

The best that the electronic version provides is direct feedback from direct readers . Publishing a work on the Internet provides just what the usual book lacks: contacts with those on the other side of the paper. But let me emphasize that in this case it is not worthwhile to focus strongly on the position being described, for such free distribution is not acceptable everywhere.

Out of print

The last stage in the publication - This, of course, the output of the book from the printing house. Moscow publishing houses are usually printed in the regions, therefore overlays are possible related to the delivery of copies to Moscow (in fact, I ran into them: the book appeared in Moscow three weeks later than expected). Here only personal contact with the publishing house will help: it is not very profitable to fix any deadlines in the contract, and shifts can be quite substantial.

After the book is published, it usually takes about two weeks before it appears in stores, because the publisher needs to transfer part of the circulation to distributors. The retail price, as a rule, exceeds the wholesale price by two to three times due to transportation costs and other risks (a large amount of circulation, for example), but it may also be unprofitable to take on these costs and independently sell the book. And yet I want to take a chance and distribute part of the circulation on my own (in particular, along with visiting brotherly Ukraine and other cities, you can ask in private about my plans for the near future: I can take the book for a symbolic price of 300r).

Next, there will probably be some continuation of this story. But for now, having partially mastered this process, I am going to repeat it and convey to the grateful readers a new piece of information (by the way, Steve Souders is also going to write a continuation of the book High Performance Web Sites - Even Faster Web Sites ).

PS Yes, after the publication of the electronic version I had to face a couple of cases of piracy . Thank God, all of them were amicably resolved.