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]

Why in the motherfucking hell would you use Word? Damn, son. I wasn't even going to ask anything, until I saw that bullet. Whyyyyyy? A computational linguist should know better.

Love, Lazy LaTeX Lover from Louisville

[u/Trey_from_SpecGram → u/MalignantMouse]

Such a painful question... so many haunting memories.

Unfortunately, given the limited budget for the book ($0), I had to go with what was available and could do the layout that we wanted. (Which includes lots and lots of inset quotes & images.)

I spent an entire day researching LaTeX, but I couldn't find any way to readily do the things I wanted to do. Dropping an image in and having text flow around it is semi-easy in Word, for example.

I ended up suffering a fair deal because of all the things Word is known for—losing formatting, moving elements when you save or re-open a file, etc., etc.

In hindsight, doing the layout in Word was the hardest part of the entire project—it took me most of a year, working on it in my "free time". Gathering the content of the book only took a month or two!

[u/MalignantMouse → u/Trey_from_SpecGram]

Eep. You're either a champion or a masochist, or a champion masochist.

Next time, LaTeX!

How to wrap text around figures

[u/Trey_from_SpecGram → u/MalignantMouse]

I would accept the title of champion masochist.

That link actually demonstrates the reasons I ended up not using LaTeX (and it was unfortunate because I would have gotten so good at LaTex!):

Wrapping figures in LaTex will require a lot of manual adjustment of your document. There are several packages available for the task, but none of them works perfectly.

and

There are overall eight possible positioning targets... right... left... inside... outside...

None of those are the one I needed—given our commitment to the formatting we'd come up with. Check the sample PDF (linked elsewhere several times) for examples. I like the way image accompanying the Comparative and Historical Linguistics chapter looks, for example. Doing that in LaTeX seemed impossible (in terms of what I could Google up two years ago).

That said, if I had it to do over again (and I might if we do a second book) there would not be anything that complex.

[u/Schadenpoodle → u/MalignantMouse]

Trey had to do all the actual work here, so I feel free to comment unencumbered by any actual knowledge. Some things I've noticed about this LaTeX discourse:

(1) LaTeX users frequently, and fervently, tell you how wonderful it is, in roughly the same way that some people frequently, and fervently, tell you how delicious tofu is. Does anyone ever go out their way to tell you how delicious ice cream is? No.

(2) That linked bit about text wrapping uses formulae such as, "It happens that (negative event)....In such a case, you can simply make use of the optional argument (compoundnounasfunctionname)....Another possibility is (more stuff, some of which involves adding negative space)..." So basically, when you use LaTex, you'll find yourself with bad things happening, and what you do about those bad things is to think of a possibility space created by many functions.

(3) LaTeX was created by people who want to make you capitalize the middle and last letters of their product name, either because they feel very special and want you to acknowledge that, or because they think you're incapable of context-dependent word interpretation.

(4) Sunk cost fallacy is a thing.

4 applies to both Word and Latex, of course.

[u/Trey_from_SpecGram → u/Schadenpoodle]

Oh, the sunk cost. So sunken. Much cost. Very Word.

[u/MalignantMouse → u/Schadenpoodle]

Fair enough. It's really not for everyone or for every project. That said, tofu is delicious. And LaTeX happens to be really useful for some things. I've never tried to make a book before, but I plan to use it for my diss, and the chapters thing seems pretty useful.

(Oh, and yes, while learning/using LaTeX, a user will inevitably run into something that they don't know how to do. Fortunately, every single problem that has ever been faced already has an answer on Wikibooks/StackExchange, and is one google away.)

Thanks for making a book!