From 2004, but I think the basics don't change very much.

Asking "how much should I expect to pay for editing, design, and layout" is like asking, "How much should I expect to pay for a software developer?" It depends on the expertise and experience of the person you're apt to hire, the size of the project, and a number of other factors. Not the least of which is "How awful is the text to begin with?" and "How much formatting is necessary?" and "How much of a PITA will this client be?"

That said, I'm a professional editor (as well as writer) who has bid $4,000 or so for a project that sounds similar to what you describe (though that was a full-length book). I'm an eensy bit well-known ::cough:: so I expect you can pay less; depending on the expertise of the book editor, you might need to pay more. (And I'm too busy right now, so that's not an offer of assistance -- just a ballpark number.)

That's great useful advice.

How do you promote your books? And if you're willing to share: How many have you sold?

Glad you find it helpful estherschindler.

To date, I've sold maybe 500-600 of Zero to Superhero, mostly the ebook format. I marketed Zero to Superhero through the website and blog (won't mention the urls because I'm not trying to sell anything), and answered questions on related discussion forums (I put a link to my website in my sig).

The most sucessful of these marketing vehicles was the blog. I "linkbaited' posts I thought were compelling on Digg (which was huge at the time).

Sales for Economtricks, on the other hand, have been quiet. I've sold maybe a dozen. Then again, I never marketed it in any serious way - just a landing page and some SEO.

It's like beta software. Until it ships, the best anyone can say is "It may." When it ships, then they can say, "It does."

I wrote an article last year about the "how to" of making a living writing open source: http://www.itworld.com/open-source/80180/building-your-caree... ...or, actually, a series of articles. Maybe it'll help. (Because it's not just "who's doing it" under consideration, but "how.")

thank you so much. I'm trying to explore the possibility of addressing an industry-wide problem through starting an open-source foundation.

Do you know anyone who has gone through the effort of convincing the boss not just to leverage open-source, but start such a thing from scratch?

If you read all the way to the end, you'll see that it was a common theme among those early developers.

The article isn't trying to argue the causes of the low female:male ratio. It's just setting a context for why it's necessary for there to be organizations to address the problem.

There are LOTS of articles that try to figure out the cause. This isn't one of them. It's a useful list, instead.

I once got worked up about the subject, enough to write a blog post for CIO.com, back when I still worked there (http://advice.cio.com/esther_schindler/rockstar).

These days, it's a little bit of a turnoff. At a minimum a job ad including "ninja" or "rock star" communicates to me that you can't otherwise quantify what you want, so you use a vague description that doesn't help a prospective candidate judge whether she's suited for your company.

I'd rather see a job ad that's much more explicit in what the company wants, whether that's technically ("5 years of Python"), attitude ("We want someone so passionate about chocolate websites that she'll jump up and down on the conference room table... but please, don't, it cost us a lot of money for that table"), or in visibility ("We expect to recognize your name; this is a job for someone who probably needs no introduction").

The list was compiled in response to a list of tech blogs that OMITTED women, to highlight female geeks (also) worthy of note.

Why on earth would they go out of their way to omit people because of gender, that's just plain stupid.

The demo was very good at giving me an immediate experience. Except I never could figure out how to move items around.

I wonder if you might want to include some "below the fold" stuff in the demo, or maybe as its wrapup, that gives me a hint of what else I could do, even if it's not in the demo. I.e. "we won't show you here, but you can also create fancy reports..."?

Good point, will definately look at adding some more hints/teasers of other stuff that can be done.

I'm also planning on producing some good content (articles and screencasts) on what you can do with mindmapping both in general, and with ThoughtMuse specifically.