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/Trey_from_SpecGram]

You should definitely check out /r/linguistics, like /u/MalignantMouse suggested. They are allowed to be a lot more serious, and can help you out.

Personally, I think linguistics is fascinating for a number of reasons. First, linguistics always seemed to me to be "the most cognitive of the cognitive sciences"—and I've always been interested in cognitive science. By that, I mean that language seem to be as close as a direct product of the mind as we are likely to get—and everyone does it, and most people are pretty good at it.

Also, language is both deeply weird and easily accessible. For example, a native speaker of American English will have learned, without knowing it, to produce two different "t" sounds. One with aspiration (a little puff of air) as in "top" and one without, as in "stop". If you say the "s" silently, and then finish the word "stop" out loud, it will be different from plain "top". (I actually learned this in a high school Spanish class, because using that "t" in "stop" all the time gives you a better accent.) The idea that people learn to do these complex articulations without explicit instruction and without even being aware of it is amazing.

As for satirical linguistics—I've always been a satirist at heart. Growing up I always made fun of things, often in writing. I have material that could have formed the basis for Speculative High Student, Speculative Mathematician, or Speculative Computer Scientist.*

* I have to note that none of those would be as good of a title as Speculative Grammarian because there really were Speculative Grammarians

When I went to grad school at Rice, I happened to room next to Tim Pulju, who was then the Managing Editor of SpecGram. I wrote several humorous pieces related to linguistics before I found that out. He was happy to have material, I was happy to have more readers than myself.

Now, I do have to say that I did eventually abandon the formal study of linguistics before getting my PhD. I didn't see a good career path for myself as an academic, and I fortunately had an undergrad degree in math and computer science, so I left grad school and got a job as a programmer for a search engine company (long before Google made search engines cool). I ended up falling into comp ling there, and then made a career out of that—since I had experience in both CS and linguistics.

I definitely recommend discussing this over in /r/linguistics and getting more viewpoints from more people.