Over the last year, my company has had the good fortune to publish books on two popular trends: DITA and content strategy. I originally thought that developing publications related to new, interesting concepts would be easier than developing publications in more established subject areas. After all, to create a new introductory book on a well-traveled topic like technical writing you need to offer significant new value, which is not easy when there is established practice and good competing publications. It turns out, however, that developing books during the early stages of a new trend poses just as many challenges, though of a different nature.
The early stages of an emerging discipline are marked by lots of activity and enthusiasm, but little coherent knowledge. A few key concepts—for example, specialization and task orientation or the notion that all content needs to be considered strategically—sit at the center of activity, but everyone is still groping around trying to figure out what’s going on. In those early days, the name may be the most coherent thing about the trend.
It’s only with time and a lot of communication within the community that a trend builds into a true discipline (or fades away as a fad). Books play a critical role in this process by giving practitioners a long-form vehicle to create a framework: the vocabulary, the first principles, and the objectives. From that framework, along with a lot of experience, a set of best practices, case studies, and methodologies can emerge.
The right book can have a decisive impact on the course of a discipline. JoAnn Hackos’s Managing Your Documentation Projects and Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information are just two examples of books that have shaped their disciplines. It’s hard to find a documentation manager who hasn’t read Hackos’s book or an information architect who hasn’t been influenced by Tufte. And I would argue that while both authors are influential consultants and thought leaders, they would not have had anywhere near the same level of influence without their books.
Publishers play a significant role in this process by identifying lead practitioners, giving them a platform, and probably most important, working with them to create a framework that makes sense for the audience. Practitioners working deep in their specialties can lose perspective on what an audience needs, and a good publisher can help them focus on that audience and serve it better. In fact, while the mechanics of publishing tend to get the most attention, it may be that the most valuable contribution a publisher can make is to step back and provide perspective.
Richard L. Hamilton is the founder of XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high quality, practical publications for technical communicators, managers, content strategists, marketers, and the engineers who support their work. Richard is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, and editor of the 2nd edition of Norm Walsh’s DocBook: The Definitive Guide, published in collaboration with O’Reilly Media.