This is weird stuff, because I never thought I'd be writing an ASP.NET book. Late last year I was helping out my friend Walt on some coding issues he was having, and I was making the case for code reuse and a certain kind of class design for what he was doing. At about the same time, I was doing a little .NET training for a small dev shop that is transitioning out of Cold Fusion to .NET. I jokingly said to Walt, “I should write a book on this.” He said I was right.
I won't get into the focus of the book, because it seems that competition between publishers, and to a lesser degree authors, is pretty fierce. Suffice it to say that I identified a market that I don't think current books serve, so I wrote a proposal and started sending it out to publishers.
The one that wrote back is the one that, quite frankly, is doing the most exciting stuff around our platform these days, so I'll feel pretty good about landing a deal with them if it all works out. The only other response I got was from a publisher that everyone knows, and it was outright negative and not constructive. The irony there is he was ragging on my style when he couldn't spell or use correct grammar himself.
People ask me why the hell I would ever want to write a book. It's certainly not for the money. It might be for the ego, but that's only a small part of it. I think more than anything I want to give back to the community, because the community got me to where I am in only a few short years. I'm not a Jedi master, but I stand out, in no small part because of the help and direction I've had.
Another consideration is that I did actually go to school to write in the first place. I double majored in radio/TV and journalism. Aside from a couple of letters to the local paper and a few trade rag articles, I've written very little since graduating from college.
As an aside, I finished a screenplay last weekend. It's not great, but I wanted to get something done for Project Greenlight just to see what the feedback would be like. It sucks as it stands now, but I figure it'd be fun to see what all the film school types think of it. Like my ASP.NET book proposal, I think it has a good premise, it's just the execution that would make or break it.