Chris Anderson posted in his blog today his thoughts about writing a book. I’m guessing on Avalon. Lots of people have asked me about the process and the economics of writing so here are my observations after five years.

1. Money.
   Books are not really about making money. It is entirely possible that you will write a God book like Don’s Essential COM, David Flanagan’s Java In A Nutshell, or Pro ASP 3.0 which keep selling and selling but many don’t. Still, it isn’t all a lose lose situation. At the very least, we keep our advance for the book if it utterly bombs. Usually, this is around $5000. Regular joes like ourselves get royalties off the net profit of a book, usually starting around 10% and going up the more books we sell. The book market has been a dog since 2000 but is coming on strong this year as companies and developers are finding their way back into funding development. And that includes buying books.
   Chris has a nice bargaining chip though to get more up front and more royalties because he is essentially, the face of Avalon. Slightly less pretty than Andie MacDowell as the face of Revlon though. He is already counted as the go-to guy for this technology. That’s why his blog is in the Top 100 visited in 2003. That means he can barter because he knows and the publishers know that his name will sell books or at least generate a lot of interest in them, much like Don’s does. The best deal I heard of was a $10k advance and 17% royalty for a Linux book. It won’t make you richer than God, but it’s a start.
2. Fame \ Advancement.
   Books aren’t about fame, but you can certainly raise your profile with a few good books. Case in point: Alex Homer and Dave Sussman are probably regarded as the perennially great authors on ASP and ASP.NET. But they write and speak a few times a year and that’s it.
   Somehow, I think Chris’s blog, and his presentations at MSDN and PDC with Don have taken you up beyond where a book would go. On the other hand, neither or those two will make you any cash. A book does.
3. Education.
   If you’re going to write a book, it should be for the write (sic) reasons and in this industry, one of the best ones is because you know your subject really well and you want to share that experience and those tips and tricks you find you use every day. If you like, it’s giving something back to the community, because it has supported you.

Beyond those four ideas that Chris mentions, there are other less monetary rewards too. There’s the undoubted pleasure of seeing the whole thing in print on your doorstep fresh from the printer, seeing people buy it in Borders and once in a while, even complimenting you on it. You actually teach yourself more about the code as well - if you can’t explain to yourself what you’re doing, how will you manage it for others? While you’re writing it, there are the click moments, when you know you’ve got something written down just right (and that editor better not change it or else!!), when you finish a section or a chapter or a really cool piece of code.

If you’re looking at writing a book purely as a financial exercise I would say stop right now unless you can negotiate a really good deal. Books always take more time than you ever expect and only on very rare occasions do you ever get done everything that you want to include. As Douglas Adams said, “I love the sound of deadlines as they whoosh past.” Do it because you want to.

Personally, if Chris wanted to write a book but didn’t have the time, I’d help ghostwrite it.

So much for blogging at the PDC. Looks like the web server went tits up as soon as I left for LA. Oh well, here’s the short and curlies of it...

Landing in LA was made slightly more interesting than usual by not knowing about the bushfires that are currently enveloping swathes of California around Los Angeles. The surrounding clouds on our descent changed from the typical white to a dark, sooty orange for a few minutes and then to grey before the pilot chipped in that the burning smell was not attributable to anything connected to the plane and would people please stop panicking. Given that LA is the vacationing resort for Hell, surely the orange isn’t a massive surprise when descending towards the airport?

Sunday was pre-conf day dawning bright and cheery except for the eternal grey from the fires some 100 miles away. Sitting in the coffee lounge area, familiar faces abounded, some happy to stop and chat and other, Microsoftie ones looking a little stressed that their session partners hadn’t managed to get into LA yet, because the airport closed due to the fires. There is a very real sense that Microsoft’s first sold out PDC will be attended by only half those who have paid.

At the reception in the evening, it’s fairly obvious who the bloggers are at the conference. Black t-shirts shouting “I’m blogging this” abound. Some I even know. Don XML, Kirk Evans and Peter von Ootigen are on good form this evening.

Bill & Jim’s keynote is as good as any I’ve seen at a Microsoft conference. There’s humour, self-deprecation, forward thinking and demos enough for anyone. I doubt that the VH1 ‘Behind the Music’ homage will ever make it’s way out of Redmond for the public to see but damn it was good. Steve Ballmer making a monkey of himself is not new, but getting Sean Combs, Bill Clinton, and John Scully to guest is pretty cool. Even Bill G played it up and to great effect. Don Box and Chris Anderson came out to demo Longhorn code for Allchin’s part of it and even got him to write some as well, peering over his glasses as he typed.

Longhorn looks very cool, even if it is two or three years away. The frustrating thing about all of it - Longhorn, Aero, Avalon, WinFS and Indigo, is that it’s at the not-quite-blue-sky stage of things where you can see how the pieces will fit but not what the pieces will really look like. All the alpha bits were of the previous code milestone and have already changed. Talking to the Indigo and WinFS team, it’s plain that the object models there will be re-architected before beta 1 is even contemplated. Which means that concepts are important here and not code, even if it is split around. Don had four talks and his team ten or so depending on repeats. His were basically overviews of the technology and the rest were drill downs into its various aspects - serialization, integrating current distributed apps, security, p2p, wse, interoperability and so on. I suspect that the same was true for those following WinFS and Avalon. WinFS seems to have been well received across the board, although Avalon and its XAML markup language seems to have sparked a few flames from followers of XUL.

Shortening the timeframe, Whidbey (.NET 2.0) and Yukon (SQL Server) were also making debuts. Again still in alpha, although at a point closer to a public release than Longhorn, these technologies were well received but almost overshadowed by the ‘other Windows’ on show. PDC is always a space for previews, but it shows the mentality here that more are attending Longhorn looksees than Whidbey and Yukon, which are closer to release. Wonder what will happen in two years when Orcas (.NET 3.0 for Longhorn \ Yukon 2) shows up? Looks like both these two upcoming bits are waiting for WinXP Service Pack 2 before releasing a public beta 1 release. Given that there were a handful of SP2 talks here I think it will be fairly major, not only for the fixes but for the additions too. Security advocates start paying attention!

So many characters and personalities here. In no particular order then, I thank the following for making my PDC better

• Dave and Al - you can’t ask for better travel mates
• John, Gary and Julian - stalwarts of the Apress stand
• Neil and Amy at SAMS, even if Neil was delayed, he is the Doug Seven of the publishing world.
• Stephane, Curt and Karen at AdWes - for the party, the drinks and the general fun
• Don XML, Dave Lalande, Peter von Ootigen, Kirk Evans, and Ed Daniel
• Those who attended the birds of a feather session I haven’t mentioned already - hope you enjoyed it and sorry I kept slipping accents.

Last but not least, thanks to those of you who came to the books birds of a feather session which I hosted with Gary Cornell on Tuesday. I think it went rather well. See you in two years perhaps?