Pursuing Dreams">Pursuing Dreams

The pursuit of dreams provides meaning to life. Until I married Susan and moved to Costa Rica, dreams were nothing more than dreams. With my ex-wife, only her dreams counted, and I was to finance those dreams. After breaking my leg, I was no longer able to finance the dreams. My ex decides to divorce me, so that she could find someone who could finance her dreams.

I love writing. I love sharing my knowledge with others. I love to see others learn and grow. I prefer not to be a starving writer. The  question is what to write that earns some form of income. A corollary to this question is what media to use for publishing my writings.

I want to write about Linux. I want to make my work available at a price that is affordable to the all those who want to learn. From my experience of writing for the Prentice Hall Technical Reference division, I learned that traditional books have a very short shelf life in the fast changing world, and they cost too much. I have written courseware for instructor led seminars. It was great in the beginning, but the economy and industry changes brought an end to that pursuit. What alternative exists that provides for quick releases of changes and reaches a large audience.

Many years ago, I looked at eBooks, but circumstances, at that time, prevented me from pursuing  the media. Purchasing of the Nook Color revived my interest, and moving to Costa Rica gave me a chance to research the possibilities. After reading How a Book is Born – The Making of The Art of Fielding an eBook by Keith Kessen, I knew that the eBook was the path to pursue. This was confirmed when I saw a news article, which showed Amazon eBook sales equals traditional book sales. I then turned my research to learning how to write eBooks.

One day, I read a blog article about interaction with the audience during the writing of an eBook. When I wrote books, the interaction with others was limited. During the writing phase, I either worked by myself, or with co-authors. After submitting the book to the publisher, it was copy editors, graphic editors, and a few reviewers. The book was a closed package, with no interaction with the future reading audience. Whether it met the needs of the audience was a guessing game. I want interact with the reading audience from the beginning.

I registered TellMeAboutLinux.com and TellMeAboutLinux.net many years ago, but struggled with a direction for the sites. Now, I have a direction. Using Drupal as a CMS, I am going to use it book feature to build an interactive site. With a lot of a lot of social media promotion, I hope to build a group that comments on the book, as it is written. While similar approaches exist for novels, I do not know of one for a technical book. It will be an interesting experiment.

Once the book is ready for packing, I will package it in the ever growing number of eBook formats. Then comes the part of selecting distribution channels, and marketing. It is going to be a lot of work, but my experience as an author is going to help.