Books

Part 2 of the two-part excerpt from Take Control of Mac OS X Backups is now available on the Macworld Web site. (Also see Part 1.)

Last week Adam Engst sent me an email in which he mentioned that Macworld magazine was going to have an excerpt from my latest ebook, Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, on their Web site. Apparently there had been some discussion about putting it in the printed magazine, but for a variety of uninteresting reasons everyone agreed that it made more sense just to put it on the Web site. I was not part of those discussions, and I really didn’t think about it much. I’ve had articles published in the print edition of Macworld, and excerpts from all my ebooks have been made available in many different forms. This didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I didn’t even bother to visit the Macworld site or ask which portion of the ebook had been excerpted.

A few days ago, I began noticing that sales of the ebook were up significantly, and I also started getting email messages from folks who had read the article. These are both normal occurrences anytime I have something new published, so again, I didn’t really think about it. Then I got a message from a company whose software I’d referred to in passing; they felt that perhaps I’d given their product short shrift. Before I could reply I had to go over to the Macworld site to see exactly which portion of the text they’d published. And there, to my surprise, was my article at the very top of their home page—the equivalent of front-page news in the Macintosh world.

On the one hand, I was delighted: publicity is always good, and the extra sales don’t hurt. On the other hand, I was a bit embarrassed—I hadn’t updated this blog in a long time, and readers have been checking it out. D’oh! It’s like having company on a day your house is a mess. Oh well. I guess that’ll get me typing. It’s not as though I have a shortage of things to write about, only a shortage of time.

I’m happy to report that my fourth ebook, Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, is now shipping.

When I began writing, I fully expected it to be a quick, easy, 50-page book. Many weeks later, I found I had to leave out a fair bit of interesting material just to keep it under 100 pages. But I’m pleased with the result; it’s the only reference of its kind for Mac OS X. My goal was to cut through all the confusion and marketing hype about backup software and hardware, giving readers sane, helpful, and comprehensible advice on how to keep their data safe. If you’re a Mac OS X user, I think you’ll find the book extremely useful—and a bargain, too, at $10.

Although writing Take Control ebooks sometimes requires me to put in long hours and late nights, I find this writing some of the most enjoyable and rewarding work I do. Compared to my other current sources of income, these ebooks generate the best ratio of reward to effort. I’m looking forward to doing several more in 2005, most notably a Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) edition of my Take Control of Upgrading title, which was extremely popular around the time Mac OS X 10.3 Panther was released.