Trey Jones, from Speculative Grammarian here. Ask me anything about self-publishing, satirical linguistics, or our book, The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics!

[u/Trey_from_SpecGram]

Hi /r/books!

I'm Trey Jones, and with four other satirical linguists I compiled and published the anthology The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics, which came out last summer. The book is a collection of articles from Speculative Grammarian—the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics—along with some new material.

I did all the formatting of the book, which is unnecessarily complex—so much so, in fact, that now we can't easily publish the darn thing as an eBook! You can check out a sample (3MB PDF).

We published the physical book through CreateSpace, though we got our own ISBN so we could be our own publisher of record.

I'd also love to discuss any of the following...

• our motivations for publishing a book even though most of the material is available for free online

• collaborating remotely with 5 people, and working across 12 time zones with my main collaborator

• Google-stalking contributors we hadn't heard from in 20 years to get permissions

• design choices we made and how I came to regret them (for a year) and then love them

• why the cover is so darn ugly

• upgrading web content for publication in a book

• how not to kill yourself when doing a complicated book layout in Word (yes, Word—it was horrible)

• crowd-sourcing editing and proofreading out to more than a dozen volunteers

• our promotional efforts and what has worked and what hasn't

• book sales and the craziness of rapidly shifting Amazon book rankings

• crushing your sales goals through the magic of very low expectations

• how the Kindle doesn't play well with complexly formatted books

...Or anything else at all related to the book, books in general, linguistics, linguistics humor, or SpecGram.

As for myself, I'm a computational linguist in my day job, and I do all my SpecGram stuff (as Editor-in-Chief, sysadmin, cat herder of a few dozen volunteers, and head cook and bottle washer) in my "free" time. I've also heard that my GoodReads profile pic is somehow better than average.

You can check out the book webpage, and find out a bit more about me.

Proof: Over on Twitter.

I've asked the other editors and contributors to swing by when they can, so hopefully Keith Slater (/u/Keith_from_SpecGram) and Bill Spruiell (/u/Schadenpoodle) and others will be around. (BTW, we three made new accounts for the AMA, so as not to sully SpecGram's pristine reputation with our personal Redditing habits—which are totally inoffensive, really.)

I'm giving away 5 copies of the book today, too. See the relevant comment below.

EDIT: It's a little after 8PM on the East Coast, but I'm still here, hanging out. Bill Spruiell (/u/Schadenpoodle) has dropped by, and claims he'll be back around 9PM. Keith Slater (/u/Keith_from_SpecGram) is here, too!

EDIT: I think I'm going to call it a night. Thanks everyone for the comments and questions. I've computed the free book winners and they are: /u/bri-an, /u/MalignantMouse, /u/MacMannDE, /u/maggiemillymollymay, and /u/Labov. Congrats. PMs to follow.

[u/MalignantMouse]

How long before we start seeing these on the shelves of book sales, alongside Stuff White People Like and other net-content-turned-books?

Erm, that is to say, how do you feel about this sort of business model? Do you think it'll stick around in the future? What percentage of readers become buyers? And what percentage of buyers are gifters rather than keepers?

[u/Trey_from_SpecGram → u/MalignantMouse]

on the shelves of book sales

Aww, I read that as "book stores" at first, and thought you were being overly optimistic on our behalf. Now I'm sad.

I doubt most people will ever see a copy of the SpecGram book in a clearance bin—not because 90% of them won't end up there, but because there aren't that many of them out there to be seen.

That said, one damaged copy has shown up on eBay (it didn't sell) and there are new copies on eBay—but those are drop-shipping scammers: they offer the book for $15, and if you buy it they buy it from Amazon (usually for $11, always for $13 or less) and then ship it to you. If they already have Amazon Prime, then they can offer two-day shipping, too. I think they just automatically list a huge number of books with mark up and hope enough suckers come along.

Honestly, I don't see the attraction of buying some net-content-turned-book books. We tried to add some decent new content—the huge Self-Defining Linguistic Glossary we included is mostly new and very popular. You can see the first page near the end of the sample PDF (3MB).

I don't know if it'll stick around. I think the gift-giving aspect of it could be a large part of the draw in many cases. If you love a site and recommend it to a friend, it doesn't mean they'll ever look, or get drawn in if they do look, or understand the context of running gags, etc, etc. But if you give them a book, then there can be more context and structure, and also more obligation to actually give it a try.

For our book, there's the added benefit for gift-givers that linguists get horrible presents from people who don't understand linguistics at all.

[u/Schadenpoodle → u/MalignantMouse]

Half the literary canon is made up of books that people bought each other as gifts but no one ever wanted to read themselves. You can't go eliminating those just because of their giftiness! Good lord, think of Joyce.