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I was approached by two "real" publishers asking me whether I want to publish my book with them. I had declined both of them as they only offered 10% royalty r

I was approached by two "real" publishers asking me whether I want to publish my book with them. I had declined both of them as they only offered 10% royalty rates. I didn't have to pay for editing. I did everything myself: writing, diagrams, proofreading, marketing. In fact, I decided to self-publish it after reading this article from Antonio Goncalves about his Java EE 7 book: https://antoniogoncalves.org/2014/09/16/the-uncensored-java-ee-7-book/ https://antoniogoncalves.org/2014/09/16/the-uncensored-java-...

ghaff 6y ago
Everyone should obviously do things as they individually see fit. But, in my experience, publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general. All I know is that I find it hard to even publish a blog post without typos if someone else doesn't edit it--and sometimes even then. (The good news is that it's not really expensive to pay someone to do if you don't really need the services of a full-blown editor who is advising on structure, flow, etc.)
- vladmihalcea 6y ago
  I'm using Grammarly to correct my spelling mistakes. It also provides tips about phrasing.
- munificent 6y ago
  > publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general. Agreed, but it's easy to hire a freelance copy editor. In fact, that's often what traditional publishers do too.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Yep. The one time I really wanted one, I just paid an intern working for a magazine editor friend of mine a few hundred dollars and that was fine. IMO, it's not something you can rely on software for although software catches a lot of course. The one time I didn't do it worked out OK. But I had a co-author and we had sufficiently reworked the (somewhat shorter) book enough times over a fairly long period that I decided it had had enough fresh eyes on it to stand on its own. And of course publishers aren't perfect either. I've found a few typos in my last book which did go through a traditional publisher even though I also proofread it pretty carefully. (One mistake was in front matter which I added fairly late on which makes me suspect there would have been a lot more errors in the book if I didn't check it carefully myself.)

ghaff 6y ago

Everyone should obviously do things as they individually see fit. But, in my experience, publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general. All I know is that I find it hard to even publish a blog post without typos if someone else doesn't edit it--and sometimes even then. (The good news is that it's not really expensive to pay someone to do if you don't really need the services of a full-blown editor who is advising on structure, flow, etc.)

vladmihalcea 6y ago
I'm using Grammarly to correct my spelling mistakes. It also provides tips about phrasing.
munificent 6y ago
> publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general. Agreed, but it's easy to hire a freelance copy editor. In fact, that's often what traditional publishers do too.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Yep. The one time I really wanted one, I just paid an intern working for a magazine editor friend of mine a few hundred dollars and that was fine. IMO, it's not something you can rely on software for although software catches a lot of course. The one time I didn't do it worked out OK. But I had a co-author and we had sufficiently reworked the (somewhat shorter) book enough times over a fairly long period that I decided it had had enough fresh eyes on it to stand on its own. And of course publishers aren't perfect either. I've found a few typos in my last book which did go through a traditional publisher even though I also proofread it pretty carefully. (One mistake was in front matter which I added fairly late on which makes me suspect there would have been a lot more errors in the book if I didn't check it carefully myself.)