Wrox Blox in the editing Fastlane

One of the most frequent author complaints (and reader complaints) I get as a computer book editor is "why can't you get the book done faster?" I think regardless of what publisher you're talking about, there's author and reader desire for the book to go from that 100% first draft done stage to published faster.

That's another advantage of the Wrox Blox approach, we can get these to market really fast. For the first 4 we launched with the timeline was something like this:

• The editors started seriously looking at topics in July
• The first call for authors went out in the 2nd half of July
• Contracts were mostly out by early August
• First drafts for these came in during the last 10 days of August and first 10 days of September
• They were generally edited (development and technical edit - YES, these do get a technical verification of the code just like a book) and back to the author in a week
• The authors took 2-3 days to check the edits and turn in a final draft
• The final drafts went to production between Sept 7 and Sept 24
• They were laid out generally in a day or two, proofread, and back to us, then back to layout for corrections and finalization in a day or two more
• Because these were the first batch, we also had the authors double check the page layouts for a day or two
• Because Adobe AIR went into beta 2 between first draft and launching Wrox Blox, we had code changes for beta 2 on pages on that one less than 10 days before we put it on sale - that's really hard to do with a printed book
• The final PDFs were all done and to our media team the week of Oct 1 to be loaded onto the ecommerce server, tested, and ready for sale by Oct 8

So on some of these, we went from 100% first draft in from the author through all the editing, review, and layout and had these on sale in under a month. Including extra rounds of proofing and beta code changes.

Having worked in books most of my career, I can say, that's fast. Having worked on a magazine for 2 years, I can say, that would even be too fast for most monthly magazines to turnaround.

And, now that we have some kinks out of the process and all the backend systems built, I think we can even go faster on average, and a lot faster on special cases.

So authors, tell your Wrox editors what you want to write in a Wrox Blox that you'd like to finish next week and publish in a month!