I blundered into writing. A few years back, an editor saw
some of my newsgroup posts, and shot off an email asking me
to write a book. At first I thought it was one of these
spam-type, "work at home", "get rich quick", etc. emails,
and I actually deleted it. Two days later, I dug it out of
my trash, and decided to at least give the supposed editor a
call. She turned out to be real, and to this day I'm really,
really glad that I didn't empty my trash during those
intervening two days<grin>.
Most of what Rachel says is correct. Writing a book takes a
lot of work, and that work consumes a lot of time. After my
first book, I swore I'd never do another. However, I had been
"bitten" by the bug, and I've worked on several since then.
If you have a book idea, you can work up a proposal and send
it to a publisher. If you're interested in writing for
O'Reilly, you can read our proposal guidelines at
http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/intro.html. If you just
want to query us to see if we're interested in an idea, you
can do that too. The general email address is
[EMAIL PROTECTED], but you can also email the oracle
editors directly: Debby Russell = [EMAIL PROTECTED], me =
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
You do need to be able to write reasonably well. In my own
experience (as an editor), I've found good organization
skills to be somewhat more important than good writing
skills. It's much easier for me to deal fixing bad sentences
than it is for me to deal with an author who can't seem to
organize material in any rational fashion. I'm currently
working with an author from Slovenia whose English is not
too good (understandable), but whose organization is supurb.
One area in which I somewhat disagree with Rachel is in the
idea that writing must consume you for a period of time.
It's actually, very important to prevent that from
happening, otherwise you'll get burned out, and you'll
resent ever having written a book in the first place. You
can work full-time and write part time. When you do that,
you have to treat the book as a part-time job. You have to
come up with some schedule that works, and do your best to
keep to it. That generally means a lot of evenings spent
writing as opposed to playing with your kids--it takes
discipline to stay inside and write on a nice summer's
evening. At the same time, you need to block out some time
to spend with your family. What works for me is that I never
take more than one day on a weekend to write. The other day
I spend w/my family. I also take off at least one evening in
the middle of the week.
It is true that a publisher can cancel your book if you fall
badly behind, but my experience is that you will need to
fall very badly behind for that to happen. My first real
success was my SQL*Plus book. I promised that book in five
months, and it took me eleven to write it. At no time did
O'Reilly ever threaten to cancel.
Best regards,
Jonathan Gennick
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * 906.387.1698
http://Gennick.com * http://MichiganWaterfalls.com * http://MetalDrums.org
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