{"id":686,"date":"2008-06-20T09:57:49","date_gmt":"2008-06-20T08:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/686-real-world-book-authoring.html"},"modified":"2008-06-20T09:57:49","modified_gmt":"2008-06-20T08:57:49","slug":"real-world-book-authoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/686-real-world-book-authoring.html","title":{"rendered":"Real-world book authoring"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lengthy but worthwhile post on what is it like to write a technical book<\/a>, from O\u2019Reilly author Baron Schwartz.<\/p>\n

Two things that particularly interest me here. One, it is a good account of how much work is involved in writing something worthwhile. Two, the discussion of authoring tools is fascinating: bugs and inadequacies in Open Office and Word.<\/p>\n

I have done a couple of quick books; they were low-budget affairs and the process was simpler, but they were still a considerable labour. The first was well received and sold remarkably well. In the second, I misjudged the readership and it bombed. I\u2019d like to do more but I need to block out a large chunk of time, as well as coming up with a winning idea and execution. I\u2019m happy to take a chance on the latter, but finding time is the biggest problem.<\/p>\n

For my books I used Pagemaker<\/a>, and although there were a few annoyances, it never skipped a beat. I\u2019d be quite inclined to use it again, even though it is deprecated in favour of InDesign. Pagemaker\u2019s long document support is excellent. For collaborative authoring though, DocBook<\/a> might be better.<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: book authoring<\/a>, baron schwartz<\/a>, o’reilly<\/a>, pagemaker<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lengthy but worthwhile post on what is it like to write a technical book, from O\u2019Reilly author Baron Schwartz. Two things that particularly interest me here. One, it is a good account of how much work is involved in writing something worthwhile. Two, the discussion of authoring tools is fascinating: bugs and inadequacies in Open … Continue reading Real-world book authoring<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adobe","category-open-source"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}