I’ve been mentioning here over the past several months that I’d like to start working on some jQuery tutorials, however, with the time involved in other projects for clients, and personal, I seem to have put them off to the point that those tutorials were never brought to fruition.
A couple of weeks back, I was contacted by Apress on the possibility of authoring a book on the topic of jQuery. I was taken aback by being approached rather than simply submitting a proposal myself, which I’ve always considered. I always thought it’d be great to publish a tech book. I spend so much of my time at Barnes & Noble, or Borders, rifling through the shelves for a new book that I can’t live without on varying topics such as PHP, MySQL, jQuery, Photoshop, Software Development in general, and basically what might appear to be of interest at the time. Many of the titles I have bought over the last decade have either greatly impressed me, or greatly disappointed me. So many times when reading through some explanation/tutorial on a topic I would consider to myself, what was this guy thinking? Has he ever even used this programming language, or something upon those lines. I never felt the need though to spend to much time preparing a long outline or proposal to submit unsolicited to a publishing company to take my own chance. Maybe even a fear of rejection, and them saying something like the thoughts I just mentioned above.
However, after working through some initial issues on a proper jQuery topic that would suit both my creative desire, and my technical knowledge, a 7 page, 19 chapter outline was in place, and submitted along with my proposal information. To my surprise, and joy it was accepted, and I now have the go ahead to start work on the title. I’m intentionally omitting most of the details of the book including proposed title and topics for the time being until I’m a little more comfortable with the contractual details with Apress, and hey… if I gave out all the information too soon, someone else might try to write it before I get finished!!
I’m excited as can be though on the possibilities that this type of work presents. Not only can I have the potential to have my name/company associated with a published work on the topic of jQuery, but this could also be a HUGE boon to my own web development success, and help present future work from larger and larger clients.
Not sure how this may affect my blogging, but I doubt it could adversely affect it since I’ve been writing so little to begin with. It could come to be though that my blog now might have some value for me to output some of my creative roadblocks, direction on topics, or who knows… I could end up being so busy just trying to complete the manuscript that I never make it back here! I’ll hope for now that’s not the case, but we’ll just have to see how it goes.
