📖 Book Update: The Turning Wheels of Publishing

I’m pleased to announce (somewhat belatedly) that Business Success with Open Source is content complete!

This means that all of the writing is DONE (thank dog). In fact, it’s been done since the end of May, but June was a surprisingly busy month for me so I’m only just announcing it now on the blog.

The steps that remain:

1. Second technical review: The first two thirds of the book have already received invaluable feedback from technical reviewers. Now the rest of the book gets the same treatment. Most of that feedback has arrived already, so next Monday I’ll start revisions based on it.
2. Cleanup: The GitLab repo for the book currently shows 24 open issues tagged cleanup. I need to resolve all of those.
3. Copy editing: The revised and cleaned content then goes to a copy editor, who’ll fix typos, grammatical errors, and other similar wonkiness.
4. Layout: After the copy editor’s done their work (and I’ve double-checked it), the layout team works their magic to ensure the finished content looks decent.
5. Indexing: At some point during the publication prep process, a team of professional indexers go through the thing and build out the index, including all the special markup that’s required for it in the source for the book.
6. Publication!

The wheels of publication can turn slowly, since all of these steps require coordination of specialists. According to my editor, the finished hard copy of the book should be available around November-ish.

However, if you buy the e-book now you’ll receive the entire (slightly in flux) text of the book today and updates to the polished finished version when it’s available.

This has been a very long road for me (nearly 450 pages worth of long road, in fact), and it’s a relief to be so near the end. Initial reviews are blush-inducingly positive, which means the work will pay off by helping a lot of people. Which, after all, is the hope and the goal.