4 ms·

I have a follow-up question. How do you convince publishers to use what you're comfortable with. I tried editing / writing for Apress and I gave up because they

I have a follow-up question. How do you convince publishers to use what you're comfortable with. I tried editing / writing for Apress and I gave up because they wanted me to use MS Word. Not even Libreol Office. I wanted to use vim and RestructuredText with Sphinx. It's a hard problem.

dcminter 5y ago
I published with Apress a few years back. I think the solution is probably that you need to choose a publisher that is already more aligned with the tooling that you want to use. You have to remember that (by the numbers) the author is a small part of the production process. The reviewers, copy editors, and editors all need to use tooling that they're comfortable with. You're going to have to offer them a powerful incentive to be the special case. If you want to make your CV (resumé) look spiffy then working with an established publishers is a good idea. Otherwise I think self-publishing is a much better idea; you can proceed at your own pace, you'll reap any financial advantage yourself, and you can use whatever tooling you like. Just be aware that it likely still won't be very remunerative. Oh, and get a good copy editor - after a while it's hard to see mistakes in text you've read many times. Edit: Also, I thought their Word template was reasonably good, but I would have loved a plaintext format and source control to make it easier to review and compare changes. So I totally get where you're coming from. Edit 2: And to answer the original poster's question - I think if I was going to self-publish then I would go with a Markdown/Pandoc/LaTeX solution like the one in this Stack Overflow thread: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/246871 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/246871
- dcminter 5y ago
  Sigh. For "copy editor", read "proof reader" as appropriate. Accidentally making my own point there...

dcminter 5y ago

I published with Apress a few years back. I think the solution is probably that you need to choose a publisher that is already more aligned with the tooling that you want to use. You have to remember that (by the numbers) the author is a small part of the production process. The reviewers, copy editors, and editors all need to use tooling that they're comfortable with. You're going to have to offer them a powerful incentive to be the special case. If you want to make your CV (resumé) look spiffy then working with an established publishers is a good idea. Otherwise I think self-publishing is a much better idea; you can proceed at your own pace, you'll reap any financial advantage yourself, and you can use whatever tooling you like. Just be aware that it likely still won't be very remunerative. Oh, and get a good copy editor - after a while it's hard to see mistakes in text you've read many times. Edit: Also, I thought their Word template was reasonably good, but I would have loved a plaintext format and source control to make it easier to review and compare changes. So I totally get where you're coming from. Edit 2: And to answer the original poster's question - I think if I was going to self-publish then I would go with a Markdown/Pandoc/LaTeX solution like the one in this Stack Overflow thread: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/246871 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/246871

dcminter 5y ago
Sigh. For "copy editor", read "proof reader" as appropriate. Accidentally making my own point there...