Book Royalties

[William Park]

James T. Dennis <jadestar at idiom.com> wrote:
> I started my book (_Linux_System_Administration_, New Riders) in LaTeX
> and did most of my own indexing.  As I added a couple of co-authors
> they taught themselves enough LaTeX to use my macros and those macros
> did most of the indexing, except for things we wanted to add "by
> hand."  We convinced our publishers/editors to hire a TeXnician to
> create a stylesheet to fit our LaTeX sources into their printing
> requirements (they were planning on re-typing all of our work into
> Quark, or something like that!)  (My LaTeX is almost purely
> structural, I'm not an expert in eliciting conformance to some
> particular "look."

Why couldn't you deliver camera ready Postscript file?  They would
eventually have to produce it, even with Quark.


> Personally I'd be wary of self-publishing, though. The economics of
> publishing are pretty harsh for small presses and self-published work
> is likely to get just about zero distribution.  In general, when it
> comes to printed media, if you can't publish it through the existing
> channels, then it's effectively unpublishable.

Yes, the key (and cost) is marketing and distribution.

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
8 CPU cluster, NAS, (Slackware) Linux, Python, LaTeX, Vim, Mutt, Tin