Which cover?

My publisher has sent me 3 mock-ups of the cover for the book.  Which of them do you think will sell best?  (I know which one I like best, I think, but that is less important than how well the book will sell.)  I’ve converted their files to PNG for the blog—the real covers have much better resolution.

Peach cover

Blue cover

Brown cover

2021 Dec 28: We’re going with the blue cover.

Help needed with writing blurb

I need to write a draft blurb for my textbook as part of the “promotional questionnaire”, and that is something I’ve always been bad at.  I’ve not been able to make the book sound as good as I think it is. Can anyone provide some suggestions?

Here is what I have so far:

2. Book Information

2.1. Describe the aims and scope of the book.

This textbook is for a first course on electronics. It assumes no prior electronics experience, but does assume that students have had calculus 1 (single-variable differential calculus) and high-school physics. A key idea of the course is that students need a lot of design experience and hands-on work, rather than a lot of theory. The course is centered around the labs, which are a mix of design labs and measurement/modeling labs. The book is also intended for hobbyists and students on a limited budget to be able to learn from without a course. The inexpensive equipment needed is described in the Preface. The book is intended to take students from knowing no electronics to being able to design and build amplifier and filter circuits for connecting sensors to microcontrollers within 20 weeks.  Students design a digital thermometer, a blood-pressure meter, an optical pulse monitor, an EKG, an audio preamplifier, and a class-D power amplifier.  They also learn how to measure and characterize components, including impedance spectroscopy of a loudspeaker and of electrochemical electrodes.

2.2 Explain why the book is important in the field or market. Feel free to elaborate on the value it can provide to the readers.

Many educators have seen the need for getting engineering students to do hands-on projects early in their education, but few textbooks exist to support ambitious projects with few prerequisites—most either develop foundational math and never get to design or assume that the foundations have already been covered in a previous course.  This book was deliberately written for a design-first approach, in which the design projects are the center of the course, with just-in-time teaching of concepts as they are needed for the projects. The book focusses on three building-block concepts that are used over and over: voltage dividers, complex impedance, and negative-feedback amplifiers.  Despite the simplicity of these concepts, they provide powerful tools for doing design. The book does not shy away from non-linear components, as it has students design a log-transimpedance amplifier for the optical pulse monitor and uses FETs as switches in the class-D power amplifier. Although the book can certainly be used for teaching electrical engineering majors, it was aimed primarily at non-EE engineering majors (bioengineers).

2.3. Describe 3 key selling points of your book (e.g., how it differs from competing titles; unique treatment of certain topics; new edition/material; prominent authors or contributors).

This book is centered around the design labs, rather than using labs just to illustrate concepts, the concepts are introduced just in time to support the work of the labs. Design is started right away, rather than building a lot of foundations with the usual empty promise that they will be useful “later”. The labs are mostly centered around the small amount of analog electronics needed for connecting sensors to computers and are chosen to appeal to a wide range of  engineering students, not just electrical engineers. In fact, bioengineering students were the primary audience for the first several years, and many labs are measuring heart function (blood pressure, optical pulse measurement, and EKG). The class-D power-amp lab also introduces H-bridges, which are a major concept for motor controllers and mechatronics. Three basic concepts (voltage dividers, complex impedance, and negative-feedback amplifiers) are used over and over in different ways, encouraging students to learn engineering as creative reuse of building blocks, rather than as memorizing piles of unrelated formulas.

Contract signed with publisher!

I’ve just signed a contract with World Scientific Publishing to publish my Applied Analog Electronics textbook.  They first contacted me on 2021 Oct 7 expressing an interest in the book, we met on Zoom on Oct 20, and they had a proposed contract to me by Oct 26, and we had a few back-and-forth rounds of negotiations.  The final contract was sent to me on Nov 19, I signed Nov 21, and they signed Nov 24. So the full process took about 48 days.

Here is the contract:

karplus agreement 11-17-21Download

The most surprising thing in the contract is that they are continuing to let me sell the PDF through Leanpub (and my own web site, if I ever create one).  The royalties per book for Leanpub sales are higher than I’ll get from World Scientific Publishing, and the price will most likely be lower.

I did not use a lawyer in negotiating the contract—I contacted 4 lawyers who specialize in book contracts, but even the cheapest of them was too expensive, as I don’t really expect to make much money on this publishing deal.  I did use two online books:

• Guide to Textbook Publishing Contracts by Stephen Gillen
• Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts edited by Brianna L. Schofield & Robert Kirk Walker

Now I just have to get the 250MB of source files to the publisher and fill out the promotional questionnaire.  They may want me to make some small changes (like changing the title page).  When they are ready to publish, I’ll have to register the copyright also.

I’ll post here again when the book becomes available in paper.

Edition 1.3 released today!

I finally released the new version of the textbook Applied Analog Electronics today at https://leanpub.com/applied_analog_electronics. The book is a little longer than the previous editions:

Edition 1.1	Edition 1.2	Edition 1.3	type
659	673	691	pages
337	342	348	figures
14	14	14	tables
515	523	528	index entries
162	162	169	references

The newest edition adds a new section in the active-filters chapter, some additional explanation at the beginning of the FETs chapter, a constant-current circuit for electroplating the Ag/AgCl electrodes, and a few pieces of advice in the design report guidelines.

The chapter on design report guidelines is available free as a separate publication:
https://leanpub.com/design_report_guidelines

The minimum price is still $7.99, but I’m doing a special one-month coupon that lowers the price to $5.99, just for my loyal blog readers! One nice thing about selling through Leanpub is that purchasers get all future editions published through Leanpub as part of the price—the company is trying to encourage authors to publish book drafts through them, rather than waiting until the book is completely polished. That means that people who bought (even with free coupons) earlier versions of the book will get this release for free, and anyone who buys now will get the benefit of future releases. I will still provide coupons for free copies to instructors who are considering using the textbook for a course—contact me if you need a copy!

As before, I am still offering 25¢ rewards for the first report of each error (no matter how small) in the book.

I have recorded video lectures for the book. Playlists are at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQCrrTKnAE-97LcrJuUQ_5wKBFil8An9i for the first course and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQCrrTKnAE–khjVV52ZWU_Usc3e6KV9J for the second course. The first playlist of 122 videos runs about 27:16 and the second playlist of 50 videos runs about 12 hours, so the average video length is under 14 minutes.

There may be one or two videos added and existing ones may be updated, but the set of lectures is essentially complete. Many still have only automatic closed captioning, but the captions will (slowly) get hand edited.

Next book edition almost done

Eleven days ago, I said

Now all I have to do for the next release of the book is do the standard final checks (page breaks, spell checks, and URL checks).  This will probably take me another week.

I have now gotten the page breaks fixed and checked all the URLs (only 8 of the 215 distinct URLs needed fixing).  I last checked them about a year ago, so that is a link-rot rate of only 4%/year (a half-life of about 18 years).  In the process of fixing the page breaks, I noticed and fixed a few minor typos, as well as tightening the text in a couple of places (to improve the page breaks).  I found one instance of “the the” with my tandem-word checks (probably introduced since the last released edition).

I still have to do the spell checks.

I did release one new video last night: https://youtu.be/vLece-VKfkQ, which talks about providing a constant current for electroplating (see the post Controlling current if you don’t want to waste time watching an 11-minute video).