4 ms·
Publishers do provide editorial service. If an author writes a book in a year, there're more than 2 years of editorial process before the initial writing become
by the1 13y ago
Publishers do provide editorial service. If an author writes a book in a year, there're more than 2 years of editorial process before the initial writing becomes a consumable.
Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate. Think about your weekend prototype project. And how much effort it takes to make it into a "successful" start up. For books, you put all the effort before printing. And that effort to turn a prototype into a profitable product is what publishers provide you. And many publishers are really good at that.
Of course with ebooks and tablet, you can start thinking of a book as software: an interactive multimedia thingy that can be updated often. You are welcome to innovate this digital medium. But we are not there yet.
- willurd 13y ago> Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate. That's not true at all. Check out https://leanpub.com/ https://leanpub.com/, Manning's MEAPs, The Pragmatic Programmers' Beta books, Apress' Alpha books, Oreilly's Early Release books, etc, etc. Of course these are all digital (mostly PDFs), but they are still very much books.
- specialist 13y agoBooks aren't like software where you can release often and iterate. Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java was written in public. Early drafts were available as PDFs. High quality feedback, iterations, rapid releases, community engagement, mindshare, etc. It was great to observe. Once it hit paper, I bought maybe 10 copies, as gifts, just to support the author and the new strategy. I'm a bit disappointed it hasn't become the norm. Being on the outside, I rightly don't understand why. I don't recall if Eckel had a publisher at the outset. Or if he was able to get a publisher by demonstrating the size of his audience. (The market for Java books at the time was flooded with schlock.)