Meet my partners in crime, the people who are going to coauthor the book on SQL Server internals:
- Christian Bolton – he’s the Director and Database Architect at COEO and SQL Server MVP. He’s ChristianBolton on Twitter.
- Justin Langford – another SQL guru at COEO, a Principal Consultant, formerly a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Christian and Justin also helped write Professional SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning.
- Cindy Gross – a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer who wrote a chapter in the book SQL Server 2005 Practical Troubleshooting: The Database Engine. She’s CindyGross on Twitter, and she’s got links galore – SQLWomen.com, Cinister’s Thoughts, and a blog at SQLCommunity.
Our chapter outlines are due in the next week, and I’m already excited, because working with these folks is forcing me to become a better writer. I bounced the first draft of outlines off them and Christian had a lot of good ideas on things to add. The collaborative process of writing a book – working with other authors, editors, reviewers – forces you to focus more and work harder. Call me a glutton for punishment, but I can’t wait to see the first set of edits come back.
That list above is how the list of authors is going to show on the cover and in the credits. Isn’t it interesting that when it’s time for me to write a book, somehow the world conspired to pair me up with three people whose last names all start before the letter O?!? What the heck is that all about?!?
No, as it turns out, even if my partners were Zimmerman, Zanzibar and Zoolander, I still wouldn’t be first on the cover. (And I couldn’t care less, but I was curious about how these things work.) The order of the author list is determined first by the number of chapters each author writes, and then alphabetically by last name. Christian & Justin are writing a lot more chapters, and Cindy & I are each penning two. Since G comes before O, I’m dead last. That’s where nice guys finish, though, I keep telling myself that.
The payment process works basically the same way as the author order: the advances (and later, the royalties) are distributed by who’s writing the most chapters. Since I’m only writing two chapters, I’m earning proportionally less money. I found that nicely democratic.
You won’t see me buying that 911 Targa I’ve always wanted, though: the technical book process isn’t about the bucks, at least not in the low-end two-chapter-writing gig like this one. It’s more for the love than the money. But yes, I’m still browsing through the Porsche site on a regular basis, building my own 911. <sigh>
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Think of it this way; when I used to write academic papers, the order of the author names was very important. First position was always the most prized, because that’s the name that became most associated with the work, but last position was called the anchor position, and was usually reserver for the senior “expert” author. 🙂