Some interesting things I learned about the process of publishing:
- There are professional indexers who write the index.
- This amazes me, because we had to proofread our index and I’ve never been so bored in my life. These people must have the exact opposite personality I do. And, in our case, they spelled “Ruby gems” as “Ruby germs.”
- Blog posts are a better length
- In 500 words, I can edit and polish something until it’s a shimmering jewel of a, uh, blog post. It’s really hard to make a hundred thousand words even have a reasonable flow, never mind be “perfect.”
- Illustrations will be assimilated.
- When we submitted the manuscript, I had (the night before) whipped up the illustrations in Photoshop that looked like this:
Every document is a beautiful snowflake (because they're all unique) At the final stage of the editing process, these all got replaced by O’Reilly illustrations, which looked a lot more professional.
Well la-dee-da. I’m pretty impressed by how well they matched what I was going for, but wish I hadn’t spent so long making those damn snowflakes.
- An advance is an advance on sales.
- In retrospect, I should have realized this, but I never really thought about it before. If O’Reilly advanced us $100,000 (they didn’t), that just means we wouldn’t get any royalty checks until people bought enough books to give us $100k in royalties. So, essentially, authors write books for free. This kind of amazes me.
All and all, it was really fun and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. In the future, I wouldn’t stick to the schedule quite as rigorously. At the beginning, O’Reilly gave us the following timeline:
- 3 months = 2 chapters
- 6 months = first half
- 9 months = whole book
I write best when I splorch down everything that comes to me as fast as possible and then edit it fifty times. So next time I’d do:
- 3 months = book of crap
- 6 months = semi-literate book
- 9 months = great American (technical) novel.
Andrew suggested we do the National Novel Writing Month, so now I’m trying to think of another thing to write about. I’ll probably do a MongoDB book, but not sure what yet…
Congrats. I was not one of the luck 4 winners of your book tonight. I’ll order it tomorrow. I was hoping they would be for sale in Boston so I could get Mike to autograph it. Alas, I will have to stalk the two of you with a sharpie later.
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Haha happy to sign it anytime – sure I’ll be seeing you sometime soon.
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Thanks! Sorry you didn’t win one, you deserve it.
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Just ordered my copy of #mongodb the definitive guide, and got more proof I need to formalize my “#MongoDB as an #MSAccess Killer” rant in a blog post.
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Yay! From the twitpic, looks like it’ll be tough for us to sign (being an ebook and all).
I’d read that rant 🙂
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The pic and the order both say paperback.
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Oh, I saw the big Nook in the picture and assumed it was the Nook store. Carry on.
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I was informed from Amazon that the delivery of the book would be deferred.
At that time, to be honest, I worried a bit that you and the co-author might get stuck with something I couldn’t imagine.
In any case, congrats.
I’m looking forward to seeing a copy as soon as possible.
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Thanks! I think it was delayed by a week (it was supposed to come out the 15th) but I’m not sure why, I think we got everything in on time or early.
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I wrote for Pragmatic, and we didn’t see a dime until we got the royalties. Puts all the burden on me to get the damn thing out. Not complaining, mind you.
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Yeah, it probably varies by the publisher. In some ways no advance is nice because you’ll start getting royalties right away, but I think I prefer to get a little up front.
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Posted a review on my blog http://www.justaprogrammer.net/2010/09/28/mongodb-the-definitive-guide-the-definitive-review/
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Hi Kristina,
Not sure where else to put this since I don’t know how to get a hold of you by e-mail. I have a question on an example in Chapter 6 – Aggregation Page 85. The first example on that page where you are counting tags grouped by day is stumping me. The result set includes the “day” tag, but I don’t see “day” being used as a key in the example. I only see “tag” as a key. How does the result set have “day” when I don’t see it referenced in the example?
Thanks,
Amit
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It’s an error, thanks for letting me know! It should be:
Whoops.
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Hello All just wanted to know that did anyone face any issue of :error command line: unknown option priority
when starting the mongo database using : nohup mongod –config mongodb.conf –replSet rs0 &
and we have priority set to 1 in the primary config file and to 0 in secondary.
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You cannot set priority in the config file. See http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/deploy-replica-set/ and http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/adjust-replica-set-member-priority/ for instructions on setting up a replica set and changing its priority.
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