I haven’t been posting much the past couple of weeks because I’ve been working night and day on my “Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL” book. The deadline for me to turn it all in was August 31st, but I’ve got just a little bit of leeway. I should be wrapping the first draft within the next few days and I’m about halfway through the second draft. To explain…
Basically I write a chapter at a time in Word, passing each along to the editor. The chapters go through a line editor (who looks at word choice, clarity, and style) and a tech editor (who looks at the code and such), then come back to me. At that point I do what’s called an author rewrite (AR), addressing the issues raised by the editors and correcting any thing that I later realized would be a problem (especially on a book like this, where chapters build on each other, it’s common to find when writing Ch 7 that something needs to be said or done in Ch 6). After the AR, the chapter gets turned into a PDF, laid out as it will be in the printed book.
So right now, I’m just about to complete Ch 10 (first draft) and do the AR of Ch 6. The plan is for the book to go to the printer on Sept. 23rd, making it available in stores in October.
In my next couple of posts (soon!), I’ll talk about my selection of Authorize.net as the second payment processor and provide the final table of contents. Thanks to everyone for their interest in the book!
