Author's adive

Could any of your authors out there give someone who is interested in becoming one some advice? What are good ways to get ones feet wet? I have been developing professionally for over four years. Would it be best start doing technical reviews? Any advice at all is appreciated.
Thanks,
Tom

I am a college instructor that has gotten the opportunity to co-author a programming text.
I have inquired about Java most big companies say the Java text/reference market is hard to get into- it is "saturated"
My advice is:
1. Find an established author that is willing to try something with there original ideas.
2. Find smaller publishing companies.
3. Think broad- look at other ideas other than Java.
As for reviewers:
1. I have reviewed 6 books: 4 java, 2 C++ and 1 C#
2. This year I have refereed/reviewed through ACM
3. Ask around /find contacts- I know the ACM is always looking for people to help review articles.
If you what to know more, let me know
I am new at this- I do not mind helping others.

I think the two keys are passion and filling a need. I'm not so sure you have to have a "writing resume" before you can get started - I had none and Kathy had very little.

Here's what we did:

- We found something we were passionate about. (In our case we got to do two things at once that we were passionate about - Java and learning theory.)

- We did some research to see what the competition was like. We wanted to make sure of two things:

1 - that there was competition - we wanted to make sure that our book didn't "fill a much needed gap"

2 - that we had something to offer that the competition didn't

- We put together the best possible sample chapter we knew how to make. (I mean we slaved over that baby!)

We got REALLY lucky, and our favorite publisher (O'Reilly) said yes to our proposal. (BTW, in O'Reilly's case they publish on their website a detailed description of how to submit a proposal to them, and we paid attention to that!)

I think that if you've done the first steps correctly, the odds are good that someone will publish your book.

Now the hard part:

Kathy and I are at the point now where we're making a living doing this. We have been incredibly lucky, O'Reilly has been generous, and it STILL took over a year for the advances and royalties to kick in enough for us to be stable just being authors. I'd say a few authors get rich, some authors make a living, and most technical authors can't quit their day jobs.

:roll:

Good luck, let us know how it's going!

-Bert