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Publishing a Book is the Final Frontier (book publishing) Many authors begin their careers intending to publish a book. Book publishing is a difficult task to accomplish. It takes many months of work and extensive preparation. A book involves intricately woven ideas. A book is a project. In that project is contained many other projects. Most people are not prepared for the intensive process that is involved in creating a full, coherent book. If book publishing is something that you are interested in trying, there are a few things you should keep in mind. First, writing a book is like nothing you have ever done before. It will take extensive and intensive work and development. It will also probably include much of everything you know, and more. Read on for more clarity. Uncharted Territory Book publishing is like a new land that has never been explored before. Of course, there are several book authors out there. They have been around for centuries. Unlike other areas of expertise though, book writing is not something that will be the same process for several different people. As you set out to write a book, you will be able to follow some basic guidelines, but getting your ideas from your head to the page will be an invention of your very own. Not only will you have to get the information onto the page, but you will have to write in a way that thousands or even millions of readers will be able to relate to and understand. Again, that will be a process that will take experimentation and trials. As you begin the process of writing your first book, as well as subsequent books, expect to work and rework. One Idea Is Not Enough Part of the reworking process is the changing of direction within the writing. Many beginning writers aspire to book publishing. They have an idea and vague plan to turn the idea into book. Picture your first grader telling you that she wants to write a book about horses. There is certainly enough information that people want to know about horses to fill several books, but the vague idea is not enough for an adult writer to create publishable work. To write a book, you will need to start with a topic. You may or may not be an expert on the subject. After you have the first vague ideas, you will need to start asking yourself questions. Answering those questions will hopefully lead you to more questions, and so on. Even if your original idea is completely unique and will lead you to write new information that the world does not yet have access to, you will need to add to that original idea for an intriguing finished product. If you are not an expert, or if you do not already know any new information, it will take even more time and effort in order to produce a unique piece of writing. Fiction is the same as non-fiction. Many stories have been told before. If you want to publish, you will need to come up with an engaging and new journey for your readers to take. Using Previously Published Work Now that we have covered the requirement for intricate and new ideas, there is also room in a book for old ideas. Your readers will need a starting place within your writing that is familiar and known. As you are putting together your ideas for a complete book, you will probably publish smaller pieces of work in magazines and newspapers. It is ok, as long as you cite yourself, to reuse some of that work. In that way, you can be publishing as you go along while still making progress towards your end goal in book publishing. After several months or even years, you will have poured out your effort and knowledge into a finally completed and whole book.

Web Hosting - Unix vs Windows-Based Hosting, Which Is Better? An operating system functions largely out of sight, or at least is supposed to. It doesn't matter to non-geeks how a file gets stored, or how memory is used, or how simultaneous processes share the limited resources available on a computer. These are among the basic functions of any operating system. Yet, you can find very passionate supporters - who offer very detailed lists of pros and cons - for every operating system. Why? Because, though the low-level functions of an operating system do their work out of sight, there are many other features that rise to visibility. Sometimes, they do so when they're not supposed to. Weighing the pros and cons objectively could consume a book. But to select a web host operating system, a manageable level of considerations apply. They can be weighed even by those who don't know a processor queue from a pool cue. Learning Curves For most web site owners, administering the site/server is just overhead. It's not something they take pleasure in doing and they have plenty of other things to worry about. Many wouldn't know how and have no interest in learning (rightly so, given their priorities). Consequently, ease of administration is paramount for such people. Whether a Unix-based site (usually Linux these days) is easier to administer than Windows depends on your current skill set and the type of tools and level of access the web hosting company provides. But in general Linux is more difficult to install and maintain than Windows and the learning curve is steeper. FTP and Control Panels Often, you don't have to care. For many, the operating system is fairly transparent. FTP file transfers to get a new web page up to a Windows server are very much like they are to a Linux-based site. The user/administrator simply doesn't see what's behind the curtain. Many companies provide other utilities that completely mask any awareness of the operating system underneath. When that's the case, the web site owner has no reason to care, until or unless they need or want to go 'inside the black box'. Performance Performance issues can be relevant in selecting which operating system host type to choose. But for the most part, that aspect is outside the web site owner's control. Overall performance can be good or bad on either system, depending on many factors that the publisher will rarely see. The issue is a wash, as far as tipping the scales is concerned. What is more likely to be seen by a web site owner, at some point in their (and their site's) development is the database product that can be used to store information. Databases Microsoft SQL Server is relatively simple to use, yet extremely powerful and can deliver great performance. But it doesn't run on Linux. At least, not without special software to emulate Windows, which usually kills performance. On the other hand, with a bit of time invested, MySQL isn't significantly more difficult to learn than MS SQL Server and there are many free installations. Cost may well outweigh other considerations for most on this issue. Programming Languages Last, but not least, there are differences in programming languages that can be (or at least typically are) used on Windows vs Unix. If you have programmers who are skilled in Visual Basic, ASP and other Microsoft technologies, then a Windows-based host will be your preferred choice. For Perl and PHP programmers, Linux is the more common platform of choice. No single factor can push you to one versus the other operating system. And, in the long run, it isn't the primary consideration, unless you just enjoy playing with operating systems.

Web Hosting - How To Select A Web Host As with many purchases, our first impulse when selecting a web hosting company is to go with the cheapest. Hey, they're all alike, why pay more? Au contraire. There are a number of objective criteria that separates one web hosting company from another and money is only one of them. And not the most important one. Selecting a company based on price alone is equivalent to selecting an auto mechanic on price alone. Sure, he may maintain or fix your car cheaper. But will the car spend all the time in the shop and none on the road? The first consideration is 'horsepower'. Do they have the capacity to carry your load and deliver decent performance? Most hosting companies will advertise that they have huge bandwidth and hundreds of servers. They're usually telling the truth. But there's a difference between existing capacity and usable capacity. If they also have thousands of sites with millions of visitors per day the available or free capacity will be much lower. A big pickup truck may be able to tow 5,000 lbs. But not if it's already carrying 4,999. Be sure to ask about available capacity, and have the prospective company back it up with reliable numbers. If you can't interpret the information they provide, find someone to help you do so. Next, and a very close second, is reliability. A lot of power is worthless if it's cut often. Outages are a normal part of business. Even Google and Microsoft go down from time to time. The difference is, it happens rarely and they have failover plans. That means, if their site/system does go down it's either up again in a flash, or you never see the outage because a backup system kicks in automatically and seamlessly. Be sure to grill the company closely about their up time. They'll often tout 99.6%, or some such figure. But, like the on-time figures of the airlines, those numbers can be shaded by adjusting the definition of 'up time'. What matters to you is whether your visitors will be able to reach your site at any time of the day or night they might want to. Find out what systems, both technical and human, they have in place to deal with failures of all sorts. Servers can go down, networks can fail, hard disks can become defective and lose data even when the other components continue to work fine. The result is YOUR site is unavailable, which is all that matters to you. The web hosting company should be able to deal with all of that and have you up again very quickly. Last, but not least, is security. With the continuing prevalence of viruses and spam, you need to know that the web hosting company you select has an array of methods for dealing with them. That means a good technical plan and staff who are knowledgeable in dealing with those issues. The old saying: 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' is more true here than anywhere else. All these issues are central to finding a web hosting company that can deliver the services you need. After those criteria are satisfied by a number of candidates, then you can start narrowing them down by price.