Welcome back.

In  this post I want to share with you ideas of making a contribution.

By contribution I mean making a change that will help others and by the way may help you.

Has it happened to you to spot some obvious or not spelling, content issue in your favorite book, e-book, blog etc?

Just like this one The C++ Programming Language. Or maybe you felt the urge to mail an author of the book asking for advise? If so know that this more than possible and interesting thing to do.

I`ve found out that authors for most part are kind persons that are willing to answer your mail and even help you.

It turns out the best way to make a contribution is to propose an author a help in ‘bug reporting’ or ‘debugging’ if you will especially when this help is for free from your side.

OK. You`ve got that book you want to contribute to. Here are the steps that may help you to get to know the author, to make your contribution and even to find a friend.

1. Write the author and ask if there is any need for help. By the way it is better to deal with private authors I`ve found they are happy to get any help. But if you got courage and want to deal with publisher you can make use of errata pages just like this one Errata

2. If you got green light don’t hesitate and use this table that in a QA way will help you to distill what you want to suggest in a logical way.

Page or Link to source of issue	Actual content/ code etc.	Expected/ proposed content, code etc.	Comments
	For axample	For example	Spelling
	.		And
	.		So on

Accumulate this data at your favorite source such as Dropbox, Google Drive, One Note etc. and give it to the author for the review.

That`s it. It`s simple as that. And as one person said there is a need to be consistent and to get with this activity to the finish line or end of the book.

By the way if you want to make you own e-book for free and edit your own materials than use this free service that you may find useful Ourboox.

Till next time.