OT: writing a book, creating a community, etc....

Tue Oct 13 02:31:42 UTC 2009

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Rajinder Yadav <devguy.ca-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Well,
>
> I just came across this blog and found out you really don't make much money
> writing a tech book? It seems some of the authors are really smart, some
> cover a vast amount of material, others may go into a subject a bit deeper.
> Yet you get pimped by the publisher at the end.

Publishing is a mighty mature industry (it began in 1439, after all!),
so you can expect it to be fairly well understood, and profits fairly
much fully extracted.

> These days my mind is all over the map trying to be an entrepreneur. So I am
> playing with several ideas.

Part of entrepreneurship is to find business opportunities that are
somehow *new*.

Selling books is "so 1439" :-).  There may be new things to do about
publishing, but to be sure, authorship tends NOT to be
ultra-profitable, except for a few superstars.

Magnum P.I. had, as part of its premise, that Magnum was the on-site
security for the eponymous "Robin Masters," who was apparently such a
successful author that he could afford to have a mansion on Hawaii,
complete with Ferrari sports car for use by the security guard, that
said author never got around to visiting.

In real life, authors tend NOT to make millions of dollars, and
writing isn't a notable "entrepreneurial opportunity."

> I started to write my own cheat sheet while learning Ruby, it's now grown
> and become to be known as 'RubyQuickNotes'. Being a programmer, I kept to
> small notes about language syntax and usage (mostly for me), it's not long
> winded with fluff (yet) and still some areas are not complete and I am
> already up to 76 page with no page breaks, picture, or diagrams.
>
> I also gave up on LYX and Latex, it (Lyx) is buggy and annoying as hell, you
> still ended up fight Lyx trying to get things to layout, I don't care too
> much for their mantra. The few times, I would have an error when trying to
> view, and had to undo the last few edits to figure out where the dam stupid
> error was coming from. I got paranoid with my writing as it started to get
> long that I would type, save and try to view. It was not the most effective
> way to work. Trying to add sample code was annoying, never mind trying to
> add picture with layout, I didn't even bother.

If your process is all about layout, then you need to write with a
tool that focuses on that.

The thing I *like* about Lyx is that it allows me to IGNORE layout
considerations, to a great degree.

When *writing*, that's usually the case.

If the word's the thing (analagous to "the play's the thing), then
layout is mostly an extraneous detail.

For most writers over the last 500 years, that was indeed so.  Pages
covered with nothing more than words, whether hand-written or
typewritten would be transformed by printers into type, and there was
NO need for the drafts to have remotely analagous layout to the final
version.

It's only in probably the last 15 years that anyone had an expectation
of working with documents in something notably similar to the
to-be-typeset form.

> I know I was headed down the wrong path to hell with Lyx so I bailed and
> transferred the tech notes to using OpenOffice. It's like night and day! I
> am a MS Word kind of guy and this does everything Lyx can do but easier and
> without the stupid view build error or learning Latex code that stop you
> cold at odd times. The version of Lyx I have (latest on Kubuntu)  could not
> export to text, my code sample was missing. I had to learn Latex to insert
> code section by hand, was a pain in the neck, and in the end the sample code
> output was lost.

I suspect that what you *actually* need is something else still; the
traditional good professional "layout-sensitive" tools were things
like QuarkXPress, Framemaker, Ventura Publisher, but they're pretty
pricey, and Microsoft has certainly taken over the mindshare in the
"prole market," with OpenOffice.org slavishly following down their
garden path.

> My real reason to learn Ruby and Rails is to be able to slap up a online
> merchandising website, starting off selling custom designed printed (geek)
> tee shirts, it's more for the experience and learning to create a powerful
> community. FYI: the online tee shirt thing, looked into it, its been done
> (working model) to show you can make money, visited local print shop and one
> owner told me there was money to be made, he started off like I did printing
> a few tees. There is one site online that is selling over 1 million tee a
> year, it was started up by 2 web developers who fumbled their way to
> success, and they don't design the tee, the community does, they just pick,
> print and make money. That didn't happen over night unfortunately, but it's
> possible for anyone, not rocket science here.
>
> I've been told most successful entrepreneurs failed at their first few ideas
> before they got it right, so the tee shirt thing is not my ultimate goal,
> but I am not starting it up to fail either. If I succeed cool, it will
> become my cash cow for my other ideas, if not I will take everything from it
> and the experience and try again with something different. Think of
> criagslist, it's built a community and it's something anyone with some
> programing skills can reproduce with little starting cost, it provided a
> good live for its creator/owner and a few of his employees.

I wonder what's involved there that hasn't already been done by one of:
a) CafePress
b) lulu
c) ThinkGeek

But whatever floats your boat...
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