Publishing

The penultimate review for the book is the index, and I just hit Save on it. Creating the index was a surprisingly interesting as well as challenging part of writing the book, and I’m very glad to have tackled it myself. Having taken book indexes for granted myself, I have a new appreciation.

When the book appeared in the Amazon marketplace I set up an author’s page and claimed the title. I expected some sort of verification, but they just granted me the book I asked for. This allows me to publish my bio and also see reports on sales ranking and so forth.

This Monday morning I started the week by discovering that a publication date is set for the book: October 19, 2021.

Once the title was chosen by the publisher (in consultation, of course) the cover design becomes the next topic of discussion. Cover design is up to the publisher, and I’m quite happy with that having zero experience. My input was that I personally prefer the dark background style of their security book series, while being open to anything the publisher might propose.

Writing about software design is difficult because there is little to no standard methodology or practice – everyone does it differently. So there is a challenge as to how to show secure software design.

Copy edit is the last chance to make significant changes to the text. Most chapters involve plenty of sentence rewriting and a few moves of a paragraph, but much of the delta is punctuation and word choice.

The artwork came back as a PDF with one drawing per page, labeled by filename. The first batch was pretty good, considering that Richard (I learned the artist’s name) must have had no idea what the symbols meant.