The Slappey Press is my personal publisher. That’s me: John H. Fogarty, lifelong nerd and non-writer.
I’m not a social person – in fact, I’m fond of very few people. A can imagine few things less fun than talking with new people about things I don’t care about. I’ve never seen an entire football game, am uncertain of the rules, and find the idea of ‘fantasy football’ as attractive as a root canal. The word ‘party’ is synonymous with ‘stress.’
I write code. For humans, I’ve written white papers, business plans, product proposals; until now, I’ve had no interest in describing something for the rest of the world. As a lifelong geek, I’ve always loved to teach others – but in my case, it's been inside the closed world of various companies, rather than academia.
Putting together a set of lesson plans, then working with students to help them understand the material, has always taught me more on a topic than I knew before starting. Knowing this, I decided that writing about smart machines for an imaginary audience would be a great way to organize my thoughts and drive my research. My wife, Mary, always laughs when I say, ‘independent study.’
After a while I realized that writing for its own sake wasn’t enough. I felt like I’d learned things other geeky people would also like to know. That’s the unselfish side – the selfish side is that I could show off what a smart guy I am; I’m more asocial than anti-social. On the flip side, it might also show off what a moron I am, since I’m writing about something that I haven’t spent a lifetime doing. Sigh. There’s risk in everything.
So when I decided to write Considering Thought, a book that combines topics from artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive philosophy, and neuroscience, I’d never written anything significant before, and naturally, had never published a book. As I began writing, I also learned everything I could about the world of non-fiction publishing. The situation, especially for someone like me, is appalling.
The market is shrinking, publishers are dropping established mid-list authors like flies; they are so risk-averse, the chances of them picking up a new unpublished author – especially one with limited credentials, no media presence, and the charisma of a dead fish, is indistinguishable from zero. If they do pick up a newbie, then they foist all the marketing costs on the author; rather than helping with publication, they hinder it with unconscionable delays, archaic formatting rules, and no apparent benefits other than the publisher’s name.
The world of ‘vanity publishing’, where you throw your text over a fence, along with huge bundles of cash to companies like Author Solutions (i.e.: AuthorHouse, Balboa, Crossbooks, iUniverse, Trafford, WestBow, or Xlibris) is a snake’s nest of shady activity, indistinguishable from boiler room scams on little old ladies. No joy there.
Luckily for me, a third option is now available. As an ‘indie’ publisher, all I have to do is everything the big boys used to do. Print-on-demand printers, and online distribution of books through Amazon, Apple, Nook, Kobo, etc., make it possible to get a book on the market without any middlemen. The down side is there’s a long slog through the details of producing and marketing a book by yourself. That’s OK, I’m a geek, and geeks thrive on detail.
The book I’ve written is formatted in LaTeX. All geeks know LaTeX (or at least have heard of it), because they all know Donald Knuth. We appreciate the fact that he gives hexadecimal checks (8 squared cents) to anyone who finds an error in one of his manuscripts. LaTeX pretends to be a typesetting notation, but it's really a way for programmers to program their writing instead of doing repetitive tasks.
All programmers are lazy. Good programmers are so lazy they’ll spend hours writing a script to do a repetitive task that would take ten minutes. It doesn’t matter that writing the code takes longer than the task, because the programming is novel and the elements of the task aren’t. If you understand this, then you’re a programmer.
You can write a book with a word processor like Word (ugh), but before you can create a print-ready book, much less an eBook in any one of its varied formats, you are committed to converting it into multiple copies, one for each possible format. All programmers know this violates the DRY rule (Don’t Repeat Yourself); once the source of the book has been forked into different branches, any additional changes will require changing the text in multiple places.
Writing a book in LaTeX and wrapping it with various scripts allows me to turn a crank to generate every version of my book, multiple times a day, as I write it. It generates indices, equations, page numbers, figure lists, citations, and bibliographies; all things that require manual tweaking with other tools. I doesn’t matter that I spent hundreds of hours fine tuning the LaTeX and Bash scripting side of it, since that doesn’t violate DRY.
Even if the total time I spend reformatting for different versions is shorter; even if I had a third party doing the reformatting; to allow the forking of the source text is a thing too morally repugnant to contemplate.
Everything should be perfectly clear now.
By the way, since I’m a nice person, I put the LaTeX and scripting tools on GitHub so you can get at them.