There's a limit to the number of times you can hear people say "you should write a book about that" before you finally decide "hey, maybe I should write a book about that".  So I decided to pull together a bunch of ideas and write a book about "that".  I haven't been keeping up with the blog posts lately -- I've been spending most of my time pulling material together for the book while simultaneously trying to learn the publishing industry.  For some strange reason I thought writing the book would be the hard part, but it turns out the hard part is everything else.  As I quickly found out, everything else includes:

• writing a book proposal that summarizes your book,
• writing a query letter that summarizes your book proposal,
• researching the market for your book,
• trying to locate an agent who:
• is interested in representing your type of book and
• thinks your book in particular is something she wants to represent

There are literally hundreds of books about how to write books, how to write proposals, how to get an agent and how to get published in general.  The few that I've picked up have been helpful, but the focus is generally for non-tech books.  For instance, Jeff Herman's 931-page magnum opus Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents 2005 lists only five agents who are interested in representing "computer" and "technology" books.  When searching for an agent, this little piece of information can save you months of waiting and hundreds of dollars in photocopying and mail fees.

Anyway, my research on this particular book is winding down and I'm going to get back into the swing of blogging, writing articles and playing with the new VS 2K5 Beta and the SQL 2K5 Sep CTP.  Ole!