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Enter soon: Technical Writing 101 contest ends tomorrow
Monday, June 29, 2009 — posted by Alan Pringle
We're giving away two printed copies of Technical Writing 101 (third edition) on Wednesday. Please enter the drawing before it closes tomorrow.We're giving away the books to celebrate the book's wider release to online bookstores such as Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, and BN.com; you can also place a special order for Technical Writing 101 at your local bookstore. If you want instant access to the book, you can download the PDF version for $20 from our online store.
We achieved this wider distribution by working with another print on demand (POD) company, Lightning Source. We're quite happy with the quality of the books from our other POD partner, Lulu.com. However, at this time, Lulu doesn't offer distribution for publishers who use their own International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs). We've released books under our own ISBNs since we published the first edition of Technical Writing 101 in 2000, and I frankly was not comfortable assigning an ISBN owned by a POD firm to content we developed. Using a publisher's ISBN would cause problems if we wanted to switch to another publisher later. We'd have to assign a new ISBN, and then the book would be in the marketplace with two different ISBNs. I wanted to prevent that marketing (and distribution) headache from ever happening.
I'm not going to write a long post about the virtues of Lulu.com and other POD publishers vs. Lightning Source because many other people have done that (in this blog post, for example). What I will say, though, is that Lightning Source is geared more toward experienced publishers, and Lulu provides more guidance that newer authors and publishers will certainly appreciate. If you want to get your feet wet in the POD pool, Lulu is a great place to start, but if you're a publisher who has published several titles with your own ISBNs, Lightning Source may be better suited for your needs.
Labels: book, print on demand, technical writing
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