Murphy's Law of book publishing

Once the book was all proofed and the camera ready art produced, and once I had the color separation for the cover all produced I was ready to order the first run of books which was approximately 1000 copies.

NRI Schools sent me a check in advance for these books.  How can you beat that?  So I sent everything off to Whitehall Publishing and waited nervously.

A couple of weeks later several heavy boxes arrived.  So exciting!

I cracked open one of the boxes and grabbed one of the fresh books.  What a neat thing to hold the result of so much work in my hands.  This really looked just like a book that you would buy at the store.

And then... I opened the book to the first page and my heart sank.  The very page had a spelling mistake.  I misspelled the word congratulations.  :-/

It read Congradulations.   What?  How could I miss that?

Ah well, it was still a great day!  :-)

NRI Schools and my first book

About this time I received a phone call from someone at NRI Schools, McGraw-Hill Continuing Education Center which was a popular adult education company.  They told me that they were developing a new computer programming course and they wanted to base it on Liberty BASIC.  Wow!

Here's what they wanted to do.  They would write their own course, which would be a staple bound series of books that they would distribute to their students.  They also wanted an actual official Liberty BASIC manual from me for which they would prepay me.

This was to be a perfect bound book with a full color cover.  I had never done such a thing before, so I had a lot to learn.  It was very helpful that they were willing to prepay for the first 1000 copies of the book because otherwise I was not going to be able to bankroll this project.

I decided that the book would be based on the tutorial that came with Liberty BASIC.

This was going to be a lot of work, but it was very exciting!