Research · publishers · team/conductor/research/publishers/README.md
Publishers: the town planners
Asked for by the editor (Dinis Cruz) in the conductor's session on 30 October 2026, about 12:30 UTC: the best publishers for this book, to be found "from day one". His framing: he is the villager, taking the book to a release candidate, Leanpub and Amazon; a publisher is the town planner, for the reviews, the publishing workflow and the distribution he does not have. Written the same day by a research sub-agent of conductor@book.the-ultimate-insider from the publishers' own pages and public reporting, every fact with its source and the date read. Some pages could not be read from the session (O'Reilly, MIT Press, Apress, Packt) and are marked unverified. No one has been contacted.
| File | What it is | Words |
|---|---|---|
01-the-right-publishers.md | Twelve publishers ranked, how each takes proposals, Leanpub-to-publisher precedents, the CC BY question, what a proposal holds | 4,156 |
In short
- The first three, at once: the Pragmatic Bookshelf (invites self-published authors, beta books, the highest published royalty); No Starch Press (the strongest security and AI lists, and the one clear Leanpub-to-print precedent, where the Leanpub edition stayed on sale); IT Revolution (the best audience match, but closed to unsolicited proposals: approach through the public work). Manning is a close fourth.
- The licence is the editor's decision. Most open-licence books at traditional publishers are non-commercial, not CC BY; the study sets out ways to keep CC BY and still give a publisher something exclusive, and a non-commercial fallback.
- The page at
/publishers/starts the conversation; the proposal is built once and trimmed per publisher.
Where this came from
The study above and its sources; the editor's words in the conductor's session, 30 October 2026.