jonobacon@home

This time one year ago, I was peering into 2006 wondering what the year would bring. Back then I worked at OpenAdvantage as an Open Source Advocate. I knew 2006 would be a challenging year, and back then I was gritted and determined to help push free software and myself as best as I could. In the tradition of others providing a retrospective, I figured I will follow the flock like the sheep I am and weigh in on my own 2006. What a year it has been…

Work - As I just said, back at the start of 2006 I was working at OpenAdvantage. I knew back then that the project was going to finish in March 2007, and I knew that I would likely need to consider a new job by the end of the year. One of the problems with my line of work is that there are very few people paid to be Open Source advocates. As such, the scope of companies was and is fairly restrictive. That was not the real sucker-punch though, oh no. The real kick in the goolies was that being a good advocate means you have to advocate things that you truly believe in. As such, this mean’t I could only reasonably work for companies that make the software and subscribe the ethics and direction that I believe in. From a distribution stand-point this locked out Novell, Yellow Dog, Mandriva, Red Hat and more - they all do great work, but I was and am an Ubuntu guy. As such, Canonical were always my #1 choice for my next step. Back in May when I started talking to Mark about the job, I never anticipated looking for work until later in the year, but this blog entry started the discussion. After a lengthy interview process (apparently the job was very heavily applied for) I got the good news and Mark announced it and so did I. OpenAdvantage was a truly awesome place to work at and I miss them all hugely. Working there was a fulfilling, inspiring experience and I hope to work with my friends there again. Now I am at Canonical and working longer days, getting more email and looking after an incredible worldwide community of Ubuntu contributors. Moving to Canonical was daunting, but has been a great experience and I am loving every moment of it. Family - 2006 was a great but challenging year for family. Just prior to new year 2006 my nanna sadly died and I attended and spoke at her funeral in the tiny village of Kirby Hill in North Yorkshire. In other bad news Banger died rather surprisingly and I felt a level of grief and sadness I had never experienced, not even with my nan’s death. It was a dark, intense time, but Sooz, Frankie and I managed to get through it. Despite the sadness, the awesome bundle of joy that is Pepper entered our lives. In non-dog-family related news the Bacon and Curtis clans remained safe, healthy and together for another year. Jokosher - This time last year Jokosher never existed, which is nuts. I am hugely proud of the achievements made in the Jokosher team in the last ten months, and I am proud that our little project has gone on to not only achieve success but to also be revered by many as an important project for the Linux desktop. Its been a tough ride, and we have all worked long hours and spent lots of time thinking and working on hard problems, but our efforts have been made easier by the awesome development team that has formed. Laszlo blogged about his views, and I am similarly enamoured to have worked with such incredible people. 2007 is the year when we really kick some ass. No kidding. It is the year when we not only match our competitors, but really stick the boot in and take some names. Keep your eyes peeled folks. LUGRadio - After three years of LUGRadio, we always expected the interest to die down a little and the show to hit hard times, but the LUGRadio rollercoaster keeps on rolling. This year has seen yet more growth in the show, and the year saw LUGRadio Live 2006 happen, which was a great success. Our community has grown, we have seen a fan podcast appear in the form of hashlugradio and I feel that artistically the show has remained true to the original recipe. We have had on some excellent guests, covered some important, inspiring and ridiculous subjects and we have always involved our insanely cool community at every step. This year we also became the Award Winning LUGRadio and got written up in a bunch of magazines and websites. I love the LUGRadio community, and again, I am proud to know so many of them. Thanks guys! Music - 2006 was a turbulent year for my musical interests. On the Seraphidian side we started out well, doing lots of gigs and finished writing our second album with the working title of Death Blow. We were scheduled to hit the studio to record Death Blow in September when we heard that our drummer Jon needed to take some time away from the band. Since then we have been writing and recording and looking for a new drummer - more on that in 2007. On my solo music side, Recreant View has been getting more and more attention, and my last.fm page has been getting hot too - just need a MySpace page now. In 2006 I wrote and recorded seven songs, and I am tickled pink with them all. I also grew the studio in 2006 and at some point I plan on building a dedicated studio and recording bands and artists. Speaking - 2006 has been a good year for refining my public speaking. At the start of the year I set myself the goal of “getting good at public speaking” and throughout the year I did 18 speaking gigs. Included here were my first gigs in the USA and Spain and a UK LUG Tour with my pal and yours Ted Haeger. I am pleased with the progress I have made, and 2007 is shaping up to be a good year for speaking, with four countries and five dates already booked for the first three months. I hope to be in your part of the world next year. Writing - 2006 saw a change in my writing. As the year has progressed I have done less and less magazine writing due to time constraints, but pushed out two books - The Official Ubuntu Book and Practical PHP and MySQL. I have written many of my articles and thoughts on my blog as opposed to in article form or on my O’Reilly Blog, as my blog is now far better syndicated and read than it used to be. As such, my views and thoughts and occasional tutorials will now appear here on jonobacon.org. I really wish I had the time to do more magazine work, and I would love to continue writing for Linux Format and Linux User & Developer, but alas, there are only some hours in the day. Not sure what 2007 will see in terms of writing - although I would like to write another book, but on community/advocacy. Who knows? Community - This year has been a great year for community. I love the free software community, and it has been great to get to know more and more people. This year I have got to know more and more GNOME, GStreamer, Ubuntu, KDE, LUGRadio and FSF people, and got to meet lots of old and new friends alike. Many people get a kick out of meeting so-called celebrities in the Open Source world, and I have been fortunate in that I have got to know a bunch of these celebrities through work and travelling, but for me, I find the most fun and inspirational people are the guys and girls on the ground. As an example, meeting people like Melissa, Joey, Mark, Jorge, Brandon, Jenda, Scott and Matt from the Ubuntu community, or Edward, Jan, Thomas, Christian, Wim and Tim from the GStreamer community is truly inspiring. The celebrities will always get the attention, and the celebrities will always get the focus, but it is these people on the ground that I love to get to know, drink beer with, exchange stories with and work with in our incredible free software community. We need to never lose sight of this.

So, enough babble from me. 2006 has been one hell of a year, and I know 2007 is going to be even more insane than this year was. Lets all head into 2007 together and really start the free software smackdown.

Shameless self-plug, not too dissimilar from my orange-haired friend:

Practical PHP and MySQL has got a great review from Application Development Trends magazine. In summary, the review says “If you want to learn PHP and MySQL and follow along with some useful real-world examples in the process, this is the book for you”. Thanks folks!

Don’t trust me, trust them, get out there and get the book, and don’t forget to review it, at least on the Amazon page.

You know, jet lag sucks. Jet lag combined with ill health sucks even more. As such, I woke at 4.30am this morning, wide awake. I headed into our company IRC channel and got chatting to some others about writing books. It struck me that this kind of discussion could be useful to others, so I figured I would totally blog about it (said in tacky American accent).

Writing is a funny old game. These days it seems every man and his dog have a book deal, and at pretty much every conference I go to, people are talking about getting their chapters in on time. This is understandable. Writing a book says something about you - it demonstrates an astute knowledge, a drive and an ability to convert complex concepts and subjects into a language that others can understand. Not only that, writing a book shows how you can organise and structure your thoughts effectively. Eloquent those reasons may be, they are not why people write books. People write books for ego. They write books because writing a book has a lot of wow factor, and that wow factor wins jobs and the admiration of others.

People certainly don’t write computer books for money. The money involved in writing is pretty abysmal. An average computer book will net you between $5000 and $10,000 in an advance payment, with some kind of royalty agreement when that advance has been earned. This requires a certain amount of books to be shipped, and with the computer book market struggling, you cannot guarantee that you will make lots of money from royalties. Th equivalent amount of work for the freelance magazine trade can net you two or three times as much money. This is why so many people write one or two books and then stop. They typically stop due to money reasons as well as the sheer workload involved in writing a book.

Getting a book contract various hugely between different people. There are hundreds of publishers out there, and while some publishers are very cautious about who they take on, some publishers will take on just about anyone. There are two approaches to selling books here, and most publishers take one of these two approaches. One method is to take on a limited number of high quality authors and projects, spend lots of time working on them, and spend lots of money in the reseller channel and marketing them. The books are higher quality and better marketed, but there are fewer products to tempt people with. This requires larger unit sales per book for it to be a success. This deal here is usually a large advance and smaller royalties. The other method is take on a huge number of projects with less established authors and sell fewer copies of each book with more limited marketing applied to each book. The deal here is typically a lower advance but very high royalties - you make your money if it sells. The problem with the latter approach is that there is a higher possibility of failure when it comes to these projects as the writers are less experienced and less familiar with just what is involved in writing a book. The upside of the latter approach is that those publishers are often more diverse in the subjects they cover.

Getting the contract is different for everyone, so let me outline my own experience. When I was at university, I used to do lots of uni work during the days and lots of drinking, partying and coding in the evenings. I used to go out to the pub or gigs most nights, get back in and then spend every night between the hours of 12 midnight and 7am hacking on KDE software, watching the Paramount Comedy Channel and just doing my own thing. I would then be up for university the following day from midday until 6pm. This demanding lifestyle gave me the benefits of university work (during the day), time with my girlfriend and mates (the evening) and time for my own work (most of the night). Sleep was a 7am - midday thing.

It was in the midnight - 7am period that I started freelancing for computer magazines. I remember going to the Linux Expo in London the first year at university, and I got drunk with the Linux Format guys in a bar near Olympia. It was there that I asked if I could write an article for them and they said “sure, but if it sucks we get to reject it and not pay you anything”. It sounded reasonable to me, so I started writing. After two years or so of writing a huge number of articles for three Linux magazines, a book agency approached me to ask if they could represent me as an author in the book trade. After some conference calls I agreed, and I have been with the same company ever since. If it was not for my crazy life at university, and the large number of articles I wrote in addition to my uni work, I would never have been approached by my agency. My experience is certainly not the same for everyone, but every author needs to prove themselves somewhere before they will be accepted to write a book, particularly if you want to write for a decent publisher who will actually sell a decent amount of units of your book.

Writing a book is hard…really, really hard. I remember when I started my first book, which was a non-starter KDE 2 project for Sams (the book came about when I was doing my final year at University, so never really got very far), I was told by my agent that “Writing a book is one of the hardest things you will do. Everyone expects it will be much easier than it really is, but it will test your time management, technical skill and mental ability to cope with a large writing project”. He was not wrong. Writing a book takes a huge amount of energy, and unlike freelance projects, the huge scope of a book means setting firm deadlines and making sure you hit those deadlines. When I wrote Linux Desktop Hacks, I divided the project length by the number of hacks I needed to write and this gave me a deadline for each hack. I also factored in a one day buffer per hack - this would account for those hacks that required extra time. Each book is different, and requires its own planning. For Practical PHP and MySQL, I divided project length into a bunch of milestones, but each chapter had its own PHP application that needed developing too, so I dedicated one week for coding each app and one week for writing each chapter. The key thing here is that you should always aim to smash your deadlines early. This always gives you more flexibility for crunch time.

Crunch time on a project is when you are nearing a deadline, and everything ramps up a notch. For book projects you will have an editor who looks over your work, and when each chapter is complete it usually goes out to reviewers. Each of these reviewers leave their opinions and comments, as does your editor. Your responsibility is to then fix these issues as soon as possible. At the end of a project, the time allocated for this process is very thin and this can mean huge amounts of extra work to get everything ready. This is particularly relevant for new authors who make a number of common mistakes. As an example, Practical PHP and MySQL was originally going to be an O’Reilly title, but O’Reilly vastly over-commissioned a bunch of books, and mine, like many others got the chop. After my good relationship with Prentice Hall over The Official Ubuntu Book, I took it there. When I originally wrote the content for what is now Practical PHP and MySQL, I wrote it in a very British way, fairly passive with lots of amusing quips and random humour spread throughout the book. This was very different to the largely North American O’Reilly style. As such, as the project continued to develop, large chunks of my content needed rewriting to cater for this style.

This is where a good publishing house really comes in. A good publisher will have very high quality editors working for them, who will help you get the style, tone and organisation of your book right as you write it instead of when you crunch at the end. I have worked with a bunch of different publishers, some of which were shocking when it came to editing. A new author with a good editor can make amazing books. A new author with a bad editor will make heartburn.

I know a bunch of you will have read this blog entry with interest as you are yourself keen to write a computer book. My main intention is to not scare people away from writing books, but to provide some experience of the real world issues when taking on a book project. It is an intense process, often driven by intense people, and it is not for everyone. But, if you like a challenge and you can write, it is an incredibly rewarding process. When you get your first printed copy sent to you, you feel hugely proud of your efforts. If it then sells well, it is even more inspiring. My main interest is in helping prospective authors to see the full picture and be prepared for some of the strangeness in the publishing world. Good luck!