It’s tough to say. I’d been asked to write here for a fairly long time and the deadline for this piece coincided with the worst of the page proof reviewing and arguing with my book designers so basically I just powered through it and thought of it more like a blog post [albeit one with reviewers] than as a book-style piece of writing.

Since my writing style can be fairly informal, a “this is what I did” piece of writing is easier than a “this is what you should do” sort of thing where people are more likely to argue or nitpick. One of the things I’ve learned writing for the web for over a decade is that people can be super picky over small stuff and so I have a “measure twice cut once” approach and try to proofread carefully or at least correct errors. I think an error on my blog is more likely to zip around the internet than an error in my book which is a little odd.

I think working with my editor definitely improved my writing. She had great ideas about ordering the content that I found it hard to see, being on the inside of it. She managed to improve my writing without muting what I like to think of as “my voice” and was enthusiastic and supportive when I was flailing.

That said, I’m not sure how much this is a necessary part of writing something that is more like a manual, i.e. would the book have been “good enough” without an editor and self-published in a situation where I’d be retaining more than 15% [or whatever it is, it may be 12] of the cover price, or could set a lower cover price? I’m not sure and it’s something I think about a lot, whether I could have had friends review/edit for a fixed price and then sold the book for half what this one is selling for and done more or less as well, popularitywise and incomewise.

Which, of course, comes back to “why do you write a book in 2011 anyhow?” which was what brought me to write this in the first place. Even after writing down my thoughts and trying to untangle them here, I’m not totally sure what motivates me.

And Emily, yeah I think librarians often feel like the non-experts when it comes to publishing and that industry which may explain why we’re a little adrift in the ebook world lately. The style guide stuff was nothing major, mostly stuff like “I want to say email not ‘e-mail’” and use words like lower case internet and website as one word and not the ridiculous [to me] “Web site” I know it’s all small stuff but it was really important to me to make a stand for sensible use of these words as people who actually work in tech use them.

And my last little hill I decided to die on was, in the long list of web links at the end of the book, using a font that was small enough so most of the URLs didn’t wrap. At some level if they’re long enough obviously that can’t be helped but I was surprised that this wasn’t something the book designers cared about, for whatever reason and in some cases the URLs not only wrapped but in cases where they wrapped on a word that was an English word, the designers had inserted a hyphen? Really strange stuff and I have no idea if this was just shoddy workmanship or if they have a style guide that, for some nutty reason, tells them to do this.

Do you have any more thoughts about that process to share that you didn’t get to expand on in this piece?

Also, I’d like to hear more nitty gritty details about your style guide.

How does your personal, unedited writing process on your regular blog and elsewhere compare with the process of writing a book? What about with the process for writing a post on this blog, which I think includes peer editing?

I’m also interested to read that “self-publishing is a viable alternative”. Did working with an editor/publisher make your work
better?