[Scribus] OT - Guidance needed for Book Publishing

[Tim Jowers]

Asif,

   I had good luck with LuLu.com. $99 and a PDF book gets you on Amazon.com.
See: http://www.serviza.com/bizbook/SoftwareIsFree.php
   A few fits and starts as only B&W is allowed through their
distributor and had to learn to use ps2pdf13 to get into the ADBE
format. So it took me 1.5 months of submitting and resubmitting rather
than the efficient 1.5 weeks I'd expect next time. Amazingly, AMZN
picked it up almost instantly once I released it to the distributor
(well, on each Wed LuLu pushes to the distributor and I approved on
Tue).
  WRT making it free. I've had towards 100 downloads but not one
feedback email. Disappointing. One idea with tech books are they are
outdated as soon as they are written so one has to start on the next
version right away. Still did not decipher the mystery of how AMZN
derives the book price but guess I can worry about that later.

TimJowers


On 10/30/06, John R. Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> wrote:
> On Monday 30 October 2006 16:27, Asif Lodhi wrote:
> > Hi Andreas,
> >
> > On 10/31/06, avox <avox at arcor.de> wrote:
> > > Now you've made us very curious as to what the book will be about... :-)
> > > Any hint?
> > >
> > :) There are many subjects to choose from and many strategies as well.
> >
> >  Certainly, it should provide some genuine value that none of the
> > existing books of the same category provide and at a reasonable cost -
> > if I want it to be sold, that is.  Initially, I aimed to write one on
> > Maths or Chemistry but then I have seen so many good ones on these
> > subjects that I have dropped the idea altogether.  It's going to be on
> > an IT subject area and will be aimed at complete beginners - well,
> > there are many books on the subject but I have my own niche.  I'll
> > write it in my free-time so it's going to take some time to write the
> > whole book.
> >
> > I was really scared of TeX but I have only read the first 16 pages of
> > "The TeX Book" and it has become one of my favorites.  Dr. Knuth has
> > explained everything in a very easy style and every layman can read
> > this book.  I recommend it to everybody.  I have used LyX/Latex but
> > would rather go for TeX - it's really easy - at least, that's what I
> > feel after reading Dr. Knuth's book a bit.
> >
> > --
> > Thanks & regards,
> >
> > Asif
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Scribus at nashi.altmuehlnet.de
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>
> The family tree ot TeX is a bit complcated. There is a base of primitive
> commands that are not intended to be used by themselves. When you use the
> command "tex" what you get is these primitive plus a "format" or set of
> cmmands built on primitives that is called plain tex. LaTeX is another such
> format and by far the most popular one. Other formats include Context, which
> is what I use for anything very complicated. It is an alternative to Latex.
>
> Lyx is a graphic front end to LaTeX. It generates LaTeX source code.
>
> Knuth's book describes the primitives and the plain tex commands. For an old
> but good quick inroduction see "A Gentle Introduction to TeX" which also
> describes plain tex. I have it stored here:
> http://wexfordpress.com/tex/gentle.pdf
> --
> John Culleton
> Able Indexing and Typesetting
> Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost.
> Satisfaction guaranteed.
> http://wexfordpress.com
>
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