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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> Re[2]: Serious Question (believe it or not)...
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 proposals_at_oreilly.com, but you can also email the oracle editors directly: Debby Russell = debby_at_oreilly.com, me = jgennick_at_oreilly.com.
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:jonathan_at_gennick.com * 906.387.1698
http://Gennick.com * http://MichiganWaterfalls.com * http://MetalDrums.org
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Author: Jonathan Gennick
INET: jonathan_at_gennick.com
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