Bill Clementson's Blog

Another Lisp book on the way

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

In Markus Fix's weblog posting today, he mentioned that he'll "be attending the lisp-hh meeting on 28th of November. Hope to meet Edi Weitz there. We'll be discussing a new book project." That immediately got my attention as I hadn't heard that Edi was writing a book (Edi's CL packages are noted for both the quality of his code and the quality of his documentation). Smelling a story, I donned my investigative reporters hat ;-) and sent Edi an email to see what was going on. He sent me the following (reproduced with permission and edited to include links and merge content from several emails):

"Oops, I'm a bit surprised that Markus already made this public but it's not a secret either.

> Are you going to write a Lisp book? That would be fantastic news!

Well, it's a long story. In the summer of 2003 I was approached by Franz Inc. They knew the CL Cookbook project at Sourceforge and asked me whether I'd like to write a similar book. I said yes and they brought me together with Apress. I signed a contract with Apress and now I had to submit my initial three chapters until Dec 31.

I started from scratch (I didn't want to use anything from the SF project because of its license) and managed to actually submit something in time. (In fact, I wrote the final page about an hour before we started our New Year's Eve party.)

Next thing that happened was that nothing happened. Apress didn't answer although they were obliged by the contract to answer within a month. I asked several times but never got answers longer than one sentence. The bottom line was that my 'editor' knew nothing about Lisp and wanted to give the text to some 'Franz guy' but this 'Franz guy' was obviously very busy (or he never asked him - I don't know).

I thought: 'Well, it's a new publisher, they're busy, so let's just wait. There are enough other things to do.' In September (almost nine months after submitting my three chapters) I finally decided to ask them what was happening because I really wanted to know.

The answer (again a one-line email) was that they currently don't want to publish the book, they want to wait to see how Peter's book sells! But what made me really angry was that they never even looked at the book. They just had it lying there for more than half a year and didn't even bother to talk to me. (I have no problems with Franz, by the way. They were always nice and supportive and they're certainly not liable for the strange behaviour shown by Apress.)

So I cancelled the contract and approached Markus Fix who is about to publish David Lamkins' book. He read my first three chapters and said that he really liked them and wanted to publish the book. The current plan is to prepare a nice dead-tree edition and print it on demand but also make the book available online at no cost.

Obviously, I won't make much money with this approach but the Apress contract wasn't much better either. Compared to what I earn by writing programs I shouldn't do this at all. But it's fun and it's cool to see your name on a 'real' book. I know 'cause I already (co-)wrote one... :)

> There seemed to be quite a long lead time for getting 'Successful
> Lisp' published (I spoke to Markus at ILC2003 and he was working on
> it then). Did you discuss any 'roadmap' for completing/publishing
> the book with him?


We'll talk about details when we meet in Hamburg but the plan is to publish the book online as a 'work in progress,' more or less like Peter did it. As I said, I already have three chapters (and a bit more) ready and I could in theory publish them now but I want to set up some infrastructure (related to my workflow, not to the web hosting) first. Expect to see something in December or January."