READER'S ROCK LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE VOL 2 ISSUE 4 NOVEMBER 2014 Vol. 1 Issue 5 November 2013 | Page 7

one publisher, but I
did. I expected it
would be months
before I got a
response. I focused
on completing my
courses so I could
graduate from my
Master’s program.
Unexpectedly, I got a
response from the
editor almost
immediately. A
phone call, received
by my wife, that I
was to return. Within
days of that call I
had a contract in my
hand and a week
later I was writing a

submitting my work for
possible publication, I also
started looking at new areas to
write and how I could tie in the
career path I had chosen in
Computer Science. I
completed my Bachelor’s of
Science in Computer Science
degree program in 1994, and
was working to complete my
Master of Science degree
program. In my job in the
military I was working deep in
mainframes, Unix computing
and this thing called the World
Wide Web. The Web was new
at the time and relatively few
outside the military and
academia had ever used it.
On a whim, I drafted an outline
for a book about publishing on
the World Wide Web. I found
the name of an editor at a
publisher called Macmillan and
sent the outline along with a
query. I’m not sure why I
picked that one editor at that

“little” book called Electronic
Publishing Unleashed.
Originally, I was supposed to
just be a contributor to the
book but the publisher liked my
work so much I ended up as
the lead writer, writing about
800 pages of the 1050 pages.
The book was written and
published to a break-neck
schedule. I started in
December finished by May and
the book was published in
September. Before I had even
finished, the publisher signed
me to a second book, Web
Publishing Unleashed—a 950page monster. I wrote right
through graduation and into
the fall, finishing about 750