"My name is Newton Sequeira and I am an Author Relationship Executive at Packt Publishing. Packt recently green lit a book on Oracle 11g R2 RAC Administration Cookbook and we are now searching for an author to develop the book.
I was reading through your blog and wondered whether you might be interested in this project?
Thanks for considering this proposal. I would appreciate if you could please let me know your views."
This simply scares me. Do publishers really approach potential authors this way? Believe you me, I am the very last person any publisher would want to be writing this particular book. Even if I were to complete such an ambitious project, I would be the laughing stock of the Oracle community. For at least a year. And based on what little I know of author-publisher relationships, the author endures crushing timelines and relentless editors and enjoys a very small fraction of the royalties. Yeah, awesome incentive there.
If you see my name on this book, don't buy it. Please.
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7 comments:
Startling honesty! You made me laugh out loud.
Perhaps they think that they'd get some people looking for the latest 'Peanuts' book. Okay, spelling is slightly different, but I can really see Charlie Brown as a DBA
If any of my children ever came home and claimed they wanted to be a "Author Relationship Executive" when they grew up, I'd kill myself...
I wonder if this means anything: he doesn't want you to "write" the book, just "develop" it...
Can't say I have been approached to do any illustrations. I do a mean stick figure representation.
Noons, I think I would hunt down whomever attempted to plant that insidious seed in the first place and just kill him.
I just realized I have to fill in the CAPTCHA for my own blog. lol.
On a serious note .... how about "self publishing" ?
(you could ask your "friendly neighbourhood OCM/OCP/ACE to be a the 'Technical Reviewer' if you want one !).
Hemant
Hemant, amen to that!! We have an extensive, diverse, deep and very capable user community. No reason not to tap into that! :)
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