Expert needed - McGraw-Hill professional technical book author/contributor

[[email protected]]

Hello,

My name is Victoria Roberts and I am the Acquisitions Administrator for
Lone Wolf Enterprises, Ltd., a book producer. McGraw-Hill has asked us
to produce books on the following general topics: signal processing,
emerging communications technologies, cutting edge digital design
techniques, and optical engineering. The prospective author should
have significant standing in his professional community and/or a strong
promotional platform.

If you are interested in becoming a published author, please reply with
your credentials to me

Thank you,

Victoria Roberts
Acquisitions Administrator
Lone Wolf Enterprises, Ltd.
13 Gurnet Road PMB#300
Brunswick, ME 04011
Phone: 207-725-8251
Fax: 207-725-8385
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.lonewolfent.net

 

[John Larkin]

Hello,

My name is Victoria Roberts and I am the Acquisitions Administrator for
Lone Wolf Enterprises, Ltd., a book producer. McGraw-Hill has asked us
to produce books on the following general topics: signal processing,
emerging communications technologies, cutting edge digital design
techniques, and optical engineering. The prospective author should
have significant standing in his professional community and/or a strong
promotional platform.

If you are interested in becoming a published author, please reply with
your credentials to me

Thank you,

Victoria Roberts

How many copies would you expect to sell in, say, the first five
years, and what would be the ballpark revenue to the author?

John

 

[John Jardine.]

Hello,

My name is Victoria Roberts and I am the Acquisitions Administrator for
Lone Wolf Enterprises, Ltd., a book producer. McGraw-Hill has asked us
to produce books on the following general topics: signal processing,
emerging communications technologies, cutting edge digital design
techniques, and optical engineering. The prospective author should
have significant standing in his professional community and/or a strong
promotional platform.

If you are interested in becoming a published author, please reply with
your credentials to me

Having read (read 'scanned') and been so sorely dissapointed with so many
books advertised with ballsy marketing phrases such as "cutting edge" and
"emerging", I have now concluded (with benefit of infinite wisdom), that
books in the traditional sense of being a labour of love, joyously written
over a number of years by a literate real author with a real need to share
their hard won knowledge and enlighten the world (just a little), no longer
exist.
"Authors" they now are not, just cut and paste experts, assemblers of second
rate text, poor diagrams and obscure analysis. Like rap, this stuff could
even be assembled near randomly by computer.
10 weeks, at least 800 pages, a lot of white space and hey-presto! another
'learned' textbook to be bought at a ridiculous price by the institutes and
libraries.
A few big drinks for the publisher, a few scraps for the 'author' and then
off to the pulpers and landfills.
john

 

[Winfield Hill]

[email protected] wrote...

My name is Victoria Roberts and I am the Acquisitions Administrator
for Lone Wolf Enterprises, Ltd., a book producer. McGraw-Hill has
asked us to produce books on the following general topics: signal
processing, emerging communications technologies, cutting edge
digital design techniques, and optical engineering. The prospective
author should have significant standing in his professional community
and/or a strong promotional platform.

If you are interested in becoming a published author, please reply
with your credentials to me

Thank you,

Victoria Roberts
Acquisitions Administrator

Thanks for your post, Victoria, but you should know that there are
plenty of experts here in the specific topics you mention, but most
are not likely to respond.

 

[[email protected]]

Thanks Win. Your manners are much appreciated.

 

[Tim Wescott]

Hello,

My name is Victoria Roberts and I am the Acquisitions Administrator for
Lone Wolf Enterprises, Ltd., a book producer. McGraw-Hill has asked us
to produce books on the following general topics: signal processing,
emerging communications technologies, cutting edge digital design
techniques, and optical engineering. The prospective author should
have significant standing in his professional community and/or a strong
promotional platform.

If you are interested in becoming a published author, please reply with
your credentials to me

Thank you,

Victoria Roberts
Acquisitions Administrator
Lone Wolf Enterprises, Ltd.
13 Gurnet Road PMB#300
Brunswick, ME 04011
Phone: 207-725-8251
Fax: 207-725-8385
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.lonewolfent.net

A suggestion: Rather than (or perhaps in addition to) trolling the
newsgroups looking for volunteers, go looking for likely victims (er --
authors) and contact them. I was recruited at the Embedded Systems
Conference, because I was giving a talk. My editor-to-be asked if I had
thought of writing a book -- and dangit if I didn't have a table of
contents already prepared.

Find folks with well-written, on-topic web sites, or who are giving
well-constructed, on-topic talks, or who write good, cognizant posts on
topics you may wish to publish. Then ask them if they're interested in
writing a book.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google? See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

 

[Tim Wescott]

How many copies would you expect to sell in, say, the first five
years, and what would be the ballpark revenue to the author?

John

Mine's only been out for a few weeks, but everyone I talk to with any
experience tells me that I won't recover my effort in royaltie checks
(although they may buy more than a coffee). I'm hoping that it'll lead
to more business, but if not then I've at least done my bit for
explaining a corner of human knowledge in (hopefully) a bit more
accessible way than has been done to date.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google? See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

 

[Robert Latest]

On 18 Apr 2006 21:34:54 -0700,

Thanks Win. Your manners are much appreciated.

Only his manners?

robert

 

[Winfield Hill]

Robert Latest wrote...

[email protected] wrote

Only his manners?

Wait till I tell my mom.

 

[Fred Bloggs]

Having read (read 'scanned') and been so sorely dissapointed with so many
books advertised with ballsy marketing phrases such as "cutting edge" and
"emerging", I have now concluded (with benefit of infinite wisdom), that
books in the traditional sense of being a labour of love, joyously written
over a number of years by a literate real author with a real need to share
their hard won knowledge and enlighten the world (just a little), no longer
exist.

The publishers are in the business to make a profit and that means
popular acceptance of their product. The keyword here is popular. If the
book is too challenging or not entertaining enough for the readers, they
will trash it in the customer reviews and sales will fall. This is
especially true of textbooks intended for additional reading or
self-learning. The end result is that the products with the most
superficial presentation and content win the market. You will always
have the high-end super specialized market, but the volume is apparently
so small these books are pushing close to $200 average.

 

[[email protected]]

I was in the college textbook racket...I mean business for a number of
years. Although not in electronics, the books I worked on were
basically rehashing of other books; they were overpriced; and you could
get the same information on the internet. There is a movement about to
lower college textbook prices. It is gaining a lot of momentum; if you
want to learn about it, check out my blog: www.inthetext.com

 

[John Larkin]

Mine's only been out for a few weeks, but everyone I talk to with any
experience tells me that I won't recover my effort in royaltie checks
(although they may buy more than a coffee). I'm hoping that it'll lead
to more business, but if not then I've at least done my bit for
explaining a corner of human knowledge in (hopefully) a bit more
accessible way than has been done to date.

Yeah. Vic chooses to not address my question. I suspect that the deal
is that her company gets the money, and you get to furnish the work
and the "strong promotional platform" (ie, do the marketing for them
as well) for the honor of being a "published author."

It's almost as bad as the scientific journals gig, where *you* pay
*them* to have your paper published.

John

 

[Joel Kolstad]

You will always have the high-end super specialized market, but the volume
is apparently so small these books are pushing close to $200 average.

I like Hans Camenzind's approach with his IC design book -- it's available
freely as an eBook, or you can get the printed copy on Amazon for all of $22
hardback/$16 paperback. His book is perhaps not as "high-end" as something
like Zverev (hardcover new $285!!! -- but at least paperback is $70) or
Matthaei, Young & Jones ($139 hardcover), but it still demonstrates the point
that technical books don't *have* to be spendy.

I imagine that Tim's new book would have a price tag considerably higher than
$60 if he had published through someone like McGraw-Hill, Wiley, Cambridge
Press, or Artech House rather than Newnes. I've seen some truly awful books
from Newnes that really never should have been published, but I'm willing to
accept that if it means the really good books are considerably cheaper than
going with the "big boys."

I do find it somewhat entertaining that authors such as Rudolf Graf and
Joeseph Carr (and, if we shift to computers rather than electronics, Herbert
Schildt) seem to manage to get what's often more or less the same material
published over and over again in different books! Those guys can sure crank
out pages...