Writing a book!

Back in March when I was attending the Pittcon conference in New Orleans I dropped by the Wiley booth to see what was new.

Being in a niche market developing software for instrumentation I wasn't expecting to find anything useful. To my surprise, displayed at eye level, was a book entitled Automating Science and Engineering Laboratories with Visual Basic. Ok, I've moved on from VB years ago but I started thumbing through this book to see if it was useful. My first thoughts were that the screenshots looked pretty dated, then checking the publication date I notice that it was published in 1999!

When I got back from Pittcon I got the idea that I could write a similar, updated version of this book. Since I have no contacts in the publishing world I decided to send off a email to Mark Russo, who was the author of this original book. I explained to Mark that I saw his book displayed as if it was fresh of the press. I also explained that I wanted to write a similar book and if he'd considered writing a follow up version.

Mark replied back quickly and the same day we discussed things over the phone... the result of that phone call is that we're teaming up to write the new version of this book. The current working title is Laboratory Automation with Microsoft .Net.

The nice thing about teaming up with someone that's been down the publishing path before is that all the doors seem to have been left slightly open from the last journey.

At this point we are still getting the last details sorted out in the contract. I've already started fleshing out a couple chapters for the book and I see a mountain of work in the next coming months.

I have no restrictions about blogging about the process about writing a book for Wiley so I'll try and post as much as I can to help out future authors down the road.