gnat's dashboard

I missed the question about choosing own animals, sorry. In theory, no. In practise, you get some input but you don't get final say. Just ask poor James Duncan Davidson who started *two* open source projects with titles specifically for the O'Reilly book (ant and tomcat) and neither book wound up with the animal on the cover!

http://www.oreilly.com/oreilly/author/ is the "So You Want To Be An O'Reilly Author" page. It shows what they want in proposals, and what the lifetime of a book is like for the author. I used to be an editor, so I can say that the proposal is where you do a lot of work to prove your concept: tell us what books your book will sell like (so we can estimate sales), which books it'll compete with (so we know whether book stores will stock it), why you know the area (so we know your book won't suck), what reader pain your book will solve (so we know you'll have an audience), and how you'll be a great marketer for your book through your blog and speaking gigs (because the author is the most effective marketer a book can have).

The cover designer, Edie Freeman, wrote an interesting article about the animals at <http://www.oreilly.com/news/ediemals_...>. The key bit:

When I was first approached by O'Reilly to propose new covers for their books, I was immersed in the VAX/VMS world of Digital Equipment Corporation. I had heard of UNIX, but I had a very hazy idea of what it was. I had never met a UNIX programmer or tried to edit a document using vi. All of the terms associated with vi, sed and awk, uucp, lex, yacc, curses, to name just a few, sounded to me like words that might come out of a popular game called "Dungeons and Dragons." I developed a mental picture of the UNIX programmer as a "Dungeons and Dragons" player. As I started to look for imagery for the book covers, I came across some wonderful wood engravings from the 19th century. The strange animals I found seemed to be a perfect match for all those strange-sounding UNIX terms, and were esoteric enough to appeal to what I believed the UNIX programmer type to be.