Brian MacDonald

49 points
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Downingtown, PA

Brian MacDonald is Managing Editor at the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Over the last 20 years in tech publishing, he's been an editor, author, and occasional speaker and trainer. He currently spends a lot of his time talking to new authors about how they can best present their ideas. You can follow him on Twitter at @bmac_editor.

Authored Comments

You're right about quality writing. Crafting a good proposal that will interest publishers and readers is just as important as finding the right publisher. Crafting the book itself is the payoff -- writing in a clear, engaging manner that conveys the right information. Fortunately, we have editors to help with that. Some of it is talent, but a lot of good writing is skills that can be taught. I covered proposals in my talk at SeaGL that I linked in the article. Good writing is a much larger topic, but I plan to write more about it in the future.