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!  :-)

Liberty BASIC book preproduction

In addition to actually writing the Liberty BASIC book which involved developing the tutorial examples and explaining them, creating a quiz for each chapter, developing and proofreading each chapter, etc. There was the matter of producing camera ready pages.  They needed to be a certain size and they wanted crop marks on the pages.

NRI Schools also wanted a full color color, which I really didn't know how to create.  A friend of mine named Robert Gerami actually helped me with the graphic, and he even added a funny cartoon to the back of the book.  The cartoon was of a building with a sign saying "Programming School" and there was a hot dog stand outside the building.  A character with a fishing rod up on the second floor was trying to snatch a hot dog from the vendor's stand with his fish hook!  It was a humorous way to polish off the book's cover design.

There was a local company that created the acetate color separations for the cover, and all this went off to a company called Whitehall Publishing.  They charged me approximately $6 for each copy of the book when ordered in 1,000 or more.

All I needed to do now was write the check and wait...

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!