After the writing is done

Today Michael Weinhardt and I submitted the final chapters of “Windows Forms 2.0 Programming in C#” for review. Mike has worked his butt off for the last 20 months to bring this revision about, taking a fresh look at every single chapter, not only for updates to the technology, but also for story. The book is far, far better than it was without him and he deserves your love and praise when the book is released (hopefully in April of 2006).

Since this is Mike’s first book, I imagine he thinks that most of the work is done. Here’s the list of things I sent him that still needs doing:

1. Mike will make changes to the chapters based on reviewer feedback, being careful to leave in change marks so I can see what he’s changed
2. I’ll review each chapter, approving or rejecting changes and making my own edits and comments and we’ll repeat this ‘til we’re both happy
3. We’ll send everything by our post-reviewer-comment-application reviewer and apply his feedback like steps 1-2
4. I’ll update the preface after Thanksgiving, sending it by Mike and our final reviewer ‘til we’re all happy (and in the process, you’ll put in your acknowledgements)
5. We’ll each update the frontmatter.doc to include dedications
6. I’ll update the TOC.doc to match our final TOC
7. Mike will pull out all of the figures into separate bitmap files (.bmp)
8. By 12/12, we’ll upload the complete final manuscript, both Word and PDF versions, and send it off to AW
9. Hopefully AW will send it along to Betsy, my most favorite copy editor ever, and she’ll mark it up, sending Mike the marked up pages to approve or disapprove each copy edit
10. AW will drop PDF versions of each of the final chapters to us, which we’ll submit change lists for
11. We’ll ask for updated PDFs, ‘cuz the publisher traditionally only applies half of the feedback on each round, so we’ll repeat 10-11 ‘til they get them all
12. Sometime in April of 2006, we’ll each get a big box of books with our names on the front cover, which indicates that they’re on their way to the book sellers, e.g. B&N, Amazon, Borders, etc. At this point, I’ll update the web site and post the sample code while Mike updates the app that tracks errata
13. People will send us email telling us how much they like the book to butter us up before asking a technical question. We’ll answer each question to the best of our ability and ask each questioner to post a review on Amazon.com
14. Some of the questioners will submit bugs in the book, which we’ll track in the errata database
15. When a print run has been exhausted (the initial print run will be between 10K – 20K copies, with subsequent print runs between 3K – 5K copies), AW will ask us for a list of changes for the n+1th edition. For some reason, they’ll always ask for those changes less than a week before they need them
16. AW will send us each a copy of the n+1th edition, which we’ll use to check that the errata we submitted was actually applied (for some reason, publishers don’t always apply all the changes we ask for), marking errata in the database as fixed in the n+1th edition
17. Repeat 13-16 for 18-24 months ‘til everyone that wants a book on this technology has purchased it
18. Get started on “Programming Windows Forms 3.0 in C#,” repeating steps 1-17 after all of the chapters have been submitted for review

I figured Mike has had about 12 hours to enjoy being “done,” so it was high time to crush his spirit. : )