Writing for Pleasure and Profit

I've enjoyed writing since I was about 6 years old. The first book I can remember writing was a collection of dodges, inspired by the "Roger the Dodger" character in the English comic The Beano. I started spending so much time on writing dodges that in the end I burnt the book to end my obsession. I bet a psychiatrist would have fun with that little episode. Later on, I wrote a Dungeons and Dragons book to accompany the original boxed set. In my late teens, I started used my writing experience to develop user guides for software I developed. My first user guide was for CompuClinic, a product suite I wrote in BASIC for a local doctor that generated enough cash to pay for my first electronic keyboard. The guide was written with a regular typewriter, not a word processor, and I still have the originals for posterity. I only started making money regularly from writing when I was teaching computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas. My salary was just $27K/year, so every bit of extra cash I could make was a big deal. For each class I taught, I wrote a set of course notes. I bound each set of notes at the local Kinkos and sold them to my students as the recommended course materials. Each book made me about $15 of profit, and I had about 200 students, so this scheme brought in about $3000/semester additional cash. The fun part started when I submitted my course books to various publishers for their consideration. One of the publishers, Prentice Hall, contacted me a few weeks later and offered me a contract for my course book on UNIX. I signed the contract and subsequently rewrote the notes several times until it blossomed into a 700 page tome that's now in its 3rd edition. The latest version was co-authored with a guy called King Ables who is now in charge of the book's evolution. Over the last 10 years, the book has brought in an average of $20K/year in royalties, which ends up being a pretty nice sum. I've written two other books since then for Prentice Hall, but neither of them has done financially as well as the UNIX book.

Comments

[Daris A Nevil]

Hey Graham,

I was one of those students you taught at UTD. I took your first semester of C++ and Smalltalk. They were probably the best classes of my carerr at UTD, and yes, the manuals were superb.