Fire away with your book ideas and proposals for late 2009 publication
Right now I am looking for authors and book ideas to publish in late 2009. I plan to publish 8-10 books in Q4, and would like to hear from potential authors and people with book ideas. If you are interested, please contact me.
Here are some areas I'm especially interested in at the moment:- Books that complement Packt's existing line up in Drupal, Moodle, WordPress, Joomla!, jQuery, Ext JS, CakePHP, etc. We've already published books in these area. What else might readers of these books want? If you know these tools and are keen to write, get in touch with me anyway. We can discuss specific book ideas.
- Open source web tools are where it's at: CMSs, blog platforms, JavaScript libraries, server side programming, and so on.
- Targetted, specialized titles on major topic areas: PHP, Rails, Python, ASP.NET. There are already plenty of general books on these topics -- what specific avenues are unexplored?
- Web 2.0 tools, guerilla marketing online, recession proof IT strategies and ideas.
- The sweet spot for Packt is 250-350 pages, with price ranges of $40-$60. This equates to 10-12 chapters of 25-30 pages each.
- Think about the knowledge, skills and experience you already have. Writing about things you have done, telling success stories, sharing experiences are all valuable in computer books. They don't all have to read like comprehensive technical manuals.
- Think niche: look for a narrow target audience, a specific need, and develop a book idea that will satisfy it.
If you're interested in writing, Packt pays a competitive royalty (15% of revenues on printed sales, 25% on ebooks). You don't need to write a full book proposal. Short pitches are more likely to get my attention: a quick summary of what the book is about, a description of the target audience, and some key selling points. It need not take more than a few minutes to capture the essence of your idea and send it to me. Email davidb@packtpub.com.
Comments [0]