Publication Formats for Technical Documentation

For those who have been paying attention, you may have noticed that occasionally I have been known to grouse about publishers and the restrictions of publication formats. It’s true. I’m a little fed up with an archaic format and archaic ways of doing things. I think there is a place for print books, and I value very highly the books that I have. A good reference book is great to have on the desk next to you as you are working through a tough subject. More than that, I would follow a trusted author through any format he/she might experiment with (the source and quality of the information is more important than the format of the information).

In the past I’ve ranted against the lack of a printed manual for software. I just like to have something tangible, where I can see and feel the scope of the documentation and the software in my hands. Further, it’s possibly more than a little hypocritical of me to publish a book and then start criticizing publishers, yeah, I get that.

But like everything, life goes on. This recent book took over a year to make, which you might expect from a 1200+ page book, but it should have taken much less. Some of that was my fault. I got married, and being married is not exactly compatible with the type of obsession it requires to write a 1200 page book in a couple of months. I could have gone faster with nights and weekends, and 14 hour days, but I didn’t. So yes, in part it was my fault. But on the other hand, I’m working with a publisher that is over 100 years old, and while I do respect experience, I think editing most of the book 4 times instead of editing the combined efforts of 4 editors once would have been more efficient, and  some financial credit for nearly 1 GB of videos would have gone some way to calm me down.

The most insulting part, though is that the store that puts these on the shelf and sells them gets 4-8X the reward that I get to write the book in the first place. Of all the parties it takes to publish a book, the author makes the least. I think I wrote recently that I was approached by a publisher called Packt, and they made me an offer to write for them that worked out to something less than $2/hr.  I have since had other offers that make writing more worth while, but it wasn’t from a publisher. For someone with a little drive, the day is over when they really need a publisher to be heard.

So it’s not writing the books that is wearing me out, it’s what it costs me to work with the publisher.

I have worked with video production houses, and I can tell you that the author gets 10x the reward for 1/4 of the work. For some reason people pay a lot more for video lessons than they do for printed book lessons, even though the video costs far less to produce, and give far less information.

My next project, self-funded and already underway, will be web based, and probably published on WordPress, same platform as this blog. It may be membership based or possibly Patreon, I haven’t decided that yet. With web-based content, it is easier to control updates, you can include more kinds of data (3D, video), deliverable on many devices, translatable by web tools, no disappointing PDF limitations, and the path from outline to published information is so much shorter. More than that, it’s far more efficient, and I’ll make maybe 90% of gross, as compared to ~5%. For example, the SW2013 Bible sells on Amazon for ~$30. Of that, Wiley gets ~$21.67, and I get ~$2 from the Wiley pile.

This is really the future of my stuff at least, if not necessarily a lot  of other things. The new format will have images, animated gifs, videos, polls, quizzes, and live 3D embedded in the sites. It might even have some sort of chat or commenting feature so you can tag items in the page and talk to other site members or even to me about those things. I’ll probably start with topics that haven’t been treated in a while, (admin, surfacing, and maybe even addins for SW advanced packages), and then start working on more general topics. This way I can roll out topics as I get them done. Years ago I used to publish a PDF on Tools/Options settings, and I may revisit that, and offer it as a free sample just to show what can be done in this format.