Tuesday, August 30, 2016

2016. The Year the Music Almost Stopped.

2016 was the year the music almost stopped. Quite literally. The accompanying image reflects some of the books I’ve released this year. These books need your support. Hope you’ll spread the good word about them and share because without your support the music really will stop.

The publishing industry continues to change, requiring authors to continually adapt and retune or succumb and perish. The entire industry continues to be dominated by Amazon, where staves prevail and good authors all too easily get lost amongst the bramble. In tech, the changes over the past few years have been apocalyptic. Fewer and fewer readers get their information from printed books, requiring publishers to rethink their entire business and authors to sing for their supper. Those few who do succeed in the widening sea of change and detritus do so by staying ahead of trends or making their own trends entirely.

In the early 2000’s when I started publishing electronically and using print on demand, many of those I worked with in the industry thought I was fucking nuts. When I released a serialized ebook in 2001, I was pioneering a way of doing business that others couldn’t even fathom. Ditto when I took the entire operations digital, establishing one of the first entirely digital publishers.

We did things different. Our processes were entirely digitalized. It was a new way of doing business and publishing. Like any new enterprise or methodology that challenges the establishment, it too was challenged by those who didn’t want change.

Fast forward 15 years and you’ll be hard pressed to find a publisher that isn’t publishing electronically. You’ll also find most of those who were decrying the change now make their living from it. Either that or they’ve been forced to move on from publishing. Change happens. Whether we want it to or not.

By and large, publishers are going out of business on a scale never seen before. Those that haven’t are retooling to focus on different aspects of their business. In technical publishing, those few who survive have done so by focusing on education, training and certification or such rather than traditional publishing. Others are simply zombies waiting for the end. They’ll be gone when the money runs out or they'll wake up to the inevitable change (but likely too late).

Out of this sea of change comes Stanek & Associates and Smart Brain Training. My latest publishing endeavors. I’ve been releasing technical titles since 2014 under these monikers. The earliest of these were in The Personal Trainer and Fast Start series, which were followed by my Tech Artisans and IT Pro Solutions series. Although The Personal Trainer and Fast Start books were meant to test the marketplace, the Tech Artisans and IT Pro Solutions books represent a full-scale embrace of the digital revolution.

For the Tech Artisans and IT Pro Solutions books, I hired cover designers, editorial developers and technical reviewers and also brought in a full-time contributor, my son Will. Will has been my apprentice of sorts since his freshman year of high school. He worked summers, holidays and spare time to set up my development environments and perform procedure review and final reads of every technical book I produced. No small feat of magic, as I release 6 to 10 titles a year on average and write books about every major Microsoft operating system and technology from Windows to Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server and Windows Powershell.

After eight years of support and contribution to my work, I’ve finally been able to give Will the cover credit he deserves, in books that I feel are worthy of the high esteem I hold for the work he’s done for me. And you’ll find these cover credits on current Tech Artisans and IT Pro Solutions books.

Our first true father and son effort is for an upcoming series of SQL Server books, which I hope will be ready in 2017 in time to commemorate our tenth year of working together. Will remains torn between his law studies and his passion for IT engineering and database management. I don’t know which will win out but I know Will is ready for any challenge, especially as he’s been able to work with me for nearly ten years already in one of the most demanding work environments on planet Earth.

Thanks for reading,



William Robert Stanek

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