Today was the “release
date” for my new book, which
was very confusing to me because it’s actually been available on Amazon
for almost two weeks. I was stunned when friends first started telling me that
they were receiving copies, because I knew it wasn’t supposed to be out yet. I
called my editor at Jossey-Bass
to see if something was wrong. “How could this have happened?”
She told me it was
normal. Release dates in publishing are very different from release dates in
software development. In software, release dates are optimistic and software
almost never ships early. It’s often late by months, sometimes years. Even as
the final date approaches, it’s common for things to slip a few days or weeks.
In publishing, they
often beat the release date. They don’t want to start promoting a book until
they know that it will be available in bookstores everywhere, so the release
date is based on how long it takes to ship a book to the smallest bookstore in
the most remote Alaskan town. High-profile books like the next Harry Potter are
an exception. In that case, they work hard to make sure the books arrive on exactly
the right date—not early but also not late. (My book is not, alas, in that
category.)
Release dates for
books are more predictable because the tail end of the release cycle has less
variability. When programmers think they are “finished”, the hard work has only
just begun, and there is a high likelihood of discovering some fatal and
hard-to-fix bug.
When a writer thinks
their book is done, there is also lots of hard work still to come—like
copy-editing, endorsements, front-cover art, back-cover text, page-proofs,
galleys, and so on—but the likelihood of discovering a hard-to-fix bug is low. If
you find a misspelled word or an ungrammatical sentence, you fix it. Fixing a
sentence in one chapter doesn’t break unrelated sentences in distant chapters
in the way that software fixes often break apparently unrelated code in distant
modules. Even if there is a bug, it doesn’t matter that much because buggy
books don’t crash or delete your data.
I got my copy on the "Release Date":) it is an awesome book. The analogy that you have used the book makes so much sense and they are wonderful.
Also the last paragraph in this blog made me smile; bugs in a book and in softrware.
Posted by: | January 23, 2009 at 11:58 AM
Hi,
I'm in India and I can't afford the US edition of this book. Is this coming out in paperback sometime here?
Posted by: Anonymous | January 25, 2009 at 12:33 AM