Playing With Chaos, August Update

The book is done! Well, not done, done, as in out-the-door done. But I finished all the chapters and all the code and all the images. I’ve worked over every chapter 2-3 times myself and now the book is over to a team of tech reviewers and a professional copy editor. This will give the book the final polish in both the technical sense, making sure the explanations are correct and the code works, and also in a spelling/grammar/style sense, making me look more literate than I am. I’m already getting some great feedback from the reviewers, and while my ego always takes a huge hit at this stage of the game, it’s all going to mean a higher quality book that hits your hands. I’m hoping to wrap up this stage of things in the next couple of weeks and have the book ready on Kindle by mid-September.

I just wanted to make a quick comment on the activity of self-publishing. It’s been an amazing experience! I’ve written or co-written something like 12 books before this, which has been extremely helpful during the process of writing my own book. I have a pretty good idea how to structure things, what voice to use, the importance of consistency, how the various workflows go, etc. But doing the whole thing by myself … the analogy that comes to mind, though it may not make sense to you, is that it’s like the first time you go on a big trip by yourself. Not Disneyland with your parents, or those school or maybe even business trips, but the first time you decide you want to go somewhere, you choose where you’ll go, book the flight, book the hotel, rent the car, pay for everything, put it on the calendar, pack your own bags, make it out the door on time without forgetting anything vital, arrive at your destination, have fun, and make it back home alive. It’s all you, and there’s a sense of pride that you handled it all yourself. OK, to be honest, I still feel that way when I book a trip myself, but anyway…

That’s what this experience was like. I decided to write the book, came up with the subject, didn’t have to get approval from anyone at any stage of the process. Came up with an outline, started writing, came up with my own workflows, got my own reviewers and editor. When working for a publisher, as edits come in, I always felt like, “OK, whatever. They want it that way, we’ll do it that way.” Particularly in the late stage copy edits. I’d get a marked up manuscript with a bunch of corrections and some questions for clarification. I’d answer the questions and for the most part just blindly sign off on the rest of it. This time around, it’s so intimately my own creation that there’s a very different feeling that goes along with it. Any change I make that’s based on someone else’s advice is something I closely scrutinize. That’s not to say that I’m rejecting stuff outright, but I’m still 100% mentally involved in the process at this point and 100% focused, which is not always the case in the late stages of a publisher-controlled book.

Anyway, I guess it’s neither here nor there, but personally, it’s such a huge difference for me that I wanted to say something about it. At this point, I couldn’t imagine going back to a traditional publisher. Not that my experiences with them were bad – in particular, I always had a great time with the folks at Friends of ED – but being in charge of the process myself is so much better.