I self-published a programming book, here's my story | Hacker News Reader

I self-published a programming book, here's my story

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84 pointsfekberg34 comments

> 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!

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.

You're right, at the time though it didn't feel very constructive to hear those words. There are much better ways that it could have been presented to me however the impact of a nicer way to say it might have changed the outcome of the book...

It all lead to something great and I am grateful for that.

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

Thanks for the input!

The biggest problem I had with LaTeX was after the book was done and I wanted to get it ready for Kindle and Epub. Luckily I found tex4ht which compiles LaTeX to HTML/XML which I just needed to write CSS for.

Writing the book using LaTeX is one of the best decisions that I made.

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.

You have a good point there. The problem is that LaTeX doesn't have a fundamental distinction between 'style' and 'commands'. Everything is really just a command, but by convention some of them are wrappers around predefined styles, like \section and \chapter for example. If you want to change the style of these yourself then you have to dive into the internals of LaTeX where things get messy.

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.

If all this typesetting talk has ignited people's interest in LaTeX then I can recommend a handy beginner's guide: Getting to Grips with LaTeX (http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex) I can recommend it because I wrote it ;)

Funnily enough I've been meaning to make my guide into a self-published book too...

Thank you for these tutorials. I have been willing to teach LaTeX to some of my grad students friends in the biology department (these poor souls still use Microsoft Word) and your link will definitely come in handy !

Rest assured that my tutorials have been tried-and-tested by many under- and post-grads over the years. They've been included in college & university syllabi and I've get a lot of positive feedback from postgrads who've opted for the LaTeX route rather than word processors.

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

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)

I second this. I used to write pure LaTeX by hand all the time. I feel like Markdown lets me focus more on my content than my markup, and Pandoc's version of Markdown has some extensions that make it easy to take advantage of the LaTeX backend (including titles and LaTeX math). Pandoc is excellent and I've yet to encounter a use case where I feel like it'd be easier to switch back to writing LaTeX.

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.

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.

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)?

Emacs is a great editor for LaTeX and also has spell checking. I don't know what open source Turkish spell checking is available, though.

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

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.

Notepad++ also has a spell checker which is pretty decent and afaik supports other languages.

It supports spell checking with ASpell but it doesn't have Turkish pack.

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?

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?

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?

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!

I did. Thanks a lot!

Can't drop names as they might not like it but in my experience knowing and talking with several major tech publishers, yes - publishers are more desperate for authors than ever before, thanks to both the loss of stigma with regards to self publishing and the relative loss of cachet of going with a mainstream publishing.

If you clearly know your stuff and can convince a publisher you'll deliver a book in an area that isn't entirely moribund, your odds of even landing a major publisher are not insignificant.

One thing that even happens from time to time nowadays is publishers will approach successful self published authors to offer them distribution, editing, and similar services, just to get their books under their umbrella. (Pragmatic Bookshelf did this a few times last year with people I know.)

Note: I'm only talking non-fiction tech books here.

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.

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

How does this compare to tools like Sigil?

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.

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

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.

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