Progress on Making Things Move AS3

I always forget how much work happens after the initial writing of a book. I finished writing the last chapter of Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move for AS3 about three weeks ago. But I’m still hard at work on the book.

For anyone who hasn’t been part of a book before, here’s how it generally goes:

First you write the chapters. Duh.

Then they get some general editing, just to make sure you are covering what you are supposed to be covering, and the stuff is legible and not totally confused. For me, this is done by Chris Mills, that big scary looking guy you see at conferences, who is really quite tame and likable.

The editing step often gets wrapped up into the tech editing phase, which is where someone who knows the technology makes sure that you aren’t saying anything completely false, and ideally tests every line of code to make sure that it actually works. Friends of ED generally goes with a single tech editor from what I’ve seen, but sometimes 2-3. They are pretty well paid and are counted on to do their job well and are a part of the team. Todd Yard is the tech editor for this version and the first. I think this works well. Other publishers pay a bit of pocket money and a few free books and open the book up to a dozen or so tech editors and hope that by putting enough half-hearted people on it, the job will somehow get done well. It doesn’t. This phase of the project generally results in the most re-writing. The tech editor might say, “this isn’t correct,” or “this changed in the last version,” or “here you say you are going to cover that in more depth later in the chapter, but you never do.” Anyway, the author gets the chapters back after the editing and tech editing phase and does whatever necessary to fix them up. Depending on the schedule, they may even go back for a second round of tech editing. In the case of Making Things Move, the tech editing phase was done last week.

Then comes the copy edit phase. After all the geeks have worked it over, the copy editor has at it. This person is someone who knows English the same way we know ActionScript. They go through and remove all the commas, replace some of them with semicolons, take out all the weird cliches, make sure everything is in the correct person, tense and number, all the code is in code font, etc. In other words, they make the code monkey sound like a well educated primate. Generally there is not a lot of work for the author on this phase. The editor just makes the changes and I have to make sure that she didn’t actually change some technical meaning or nuance in the process. Occasionally, if something is worded in a confusing way, I might be asked to reword it, but it’s usually just a sentence or so. We’re more than half way through the copy edit phase.

Finally there is the proof review. This is when all the copy edits are done and the whole thing is laid out the way it will actually appear in the final book and output as pdf. This is the last chance to change anything. And any changes other than spacing, misspelling, or other very minor changes are highly discouraged, as anything larger could change the layout of the whole chapter. Essentially what I have to do in this phase is read the entire book, literally paying attention to every word, spacing, font, etc. and noting anything not perfect. This can take a couple of hours or more per chapter. We’ve just started this phase. It is as tedious as it sounds, but any mistakes not caught here will wind up in the printed book, so it’s gotta be done right.

Anyway, that’s how it works, and that’s where it’s at. So amazingly, there is still quite a bit more work to be done. Hopefully we can finish it up by the end of the year, or early January. The book is schedule to ship some time in February I believe. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out so far, and I hope you will be too. And hopefully you also have an idea of how many people actually end up contributing to the book being as good as it can be. If you’ve ever thought about self-publishing, you should first try doing a book with a good company like Friends of ED and see just how many people have their hands in it, and how expert they all are in performing their particular piece. I get my name on the cover, but I really couldn’t do it without all of them.