Month: October 2009

Back when I was in school I hated English classes.  Macbeth, poetry, short stories, etc all bored me to tears.  In the Leaving Cert (set of Irish state exams when you’re finishing secondary/high school) I managed to pull in a D in the lower level English exam when I was getting great grades in things like Construction, Biology and Technical Drawing higher papers.  Ask any of my teachers and they probably thought I would end up in the construction industry as a draftsman or engineer.  So me writing something for a book definitely wasn’t on the forecast.

A while back, I was lucky enough to be asked to contribute to a new book.  Schedules got all messed up and the original publication didn’t happen.  That all got fixed earlier this year and we’re on schedule to be published according to plan.  What was writing this like?

The first thing was the writing style.  The lead author has a very distinct style and like to give real world examples in everything, injected with a little humour here and there.  Lucky for me, I like to write with practical implementations in mind.  I think I surprised the editors by how much I like to use screenshots.  I’m probably using them much more than my co-editors because I think people can relate more to the contents of a book if they can visualise what the author is talking about.  I also hate it when I’m reading page 256 and I’m asked to flip to page 189 to look at a diagram or screenshot so there’s a couple of repeat shots in there.

The time for writing each chapter was around 1 month.  I was given a minimum set of things to cover and after that it was up to me to find relevant materials.  As time went by new facts or solutions might appear and they’d be added to the chapter as I was writing.  The publisher has a formatting tweak for MS Office that we used to format the text, headers, tables, etc.  The bit that continues to mess me up is the screenshots and diagrams.  The publisher doesn’t want them embedded in the word document because that compromises the image quality.  Instead, I’d name the file according to a naming standard.  After the text describing and referring to the screenshot/diagram, I’d put in a “slug”.  That slug describes the image.  It also refers to the file name for the final processing of the document.  Adding and removing images basically meant going through all the filenames to increase/decrease numbers and doing the same in the document.  Very painful!

After the initial writing I thought the bulk of my work was done.  I knew there would be technical reviews, language edits, etc but I had no idea.  The bulk of the work was still to be done.

Each chapter went off to the editors.  One appeared to review the technical side of things to test what I had been writing.  Another did the expected stuff and also enforced the publisher’s standardisations.  The chapter would come back with plenty of stuff marked in red for me to go back through.  I dreaded this.  The first time a chapter came back I was afraid to open the attachment.  But it wasn’t too bad.  The editors have been fair and are just as likely to put in something like “nice paragraph” as they are to request a change.

The biggest surprise for me was the request that I remove any personal references such as “I”, “me”, etc.  I’d used examples from my past to illustrate how to do or not do things.  Examples were great.  But the book is a joint exercise so “I” should be “we” and “me” should be “us”.  That meant I had to change a lot of text.  I usually like to put in a screenshot and then describe it.  The publisher prefers to talk about a subject and reference a following screenshot.  Again, more changes and a lot of time double checking things to make sure everything flowed OK and in the correct order.

After that the document goes off to a copy editor.  According to Wikipedia, this “is the work that an editor does to improve the formatting, style, and accuracy (but not content) of a manuscript”.  A lot of formatting changes went on here.  The Office tweak used for formatting has an unbelievable number of options and it was never obvious to me which ones to use.  Take the Word 2007 ribbon and change them all so each one is used for formatting, not just a little section like in the default Ribbon.  My Irish way of speaking was Americanized and this was where my D-grade English got corrected 🙂

After that comes the layout edit.  I’m halfway between the copy edit and layout stages now.  In the layout a PDF is created to create the manuscript that will be printed.  The images are finally brought in.  Why not use Word?  Because it adjusts everything according to whatever default printer is attached so you might get different results on different machines.  It’s here that the document starts to look like a chapter in a book, e.g. watermarks behind the chapter title.  It’s around now that you get sick of reading your own material.  The PDF still has the occasional mistake which must be highlighted and changed.  In the first one of these I’ve done I also spotted a few things I wanted to tweak, e.g. to make a sentence clearer.

I reckon about 50% of the work goes into doing the labs, trying out the scenarios, edge testing and writing the original content.  Maybe 50% of the work I’ve done has been done after the original submission.  It’s a lot of hard work.  The pay isn’t great but I knew that going in – you certainly can make much more pay doing ordinary work.  It will be great to see my name in print at the end, though, and it’ll always be on my CV/resume.

It won’t be long until the book is out.  The name of the book? Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2.