MrDave's (David Yack) CRM Blog!

For those of you who missed it, we launched a new CRM Developer Book last week.  You can read the details here.

I thought I would share a little behind the scenes perspective on what it takes to get a book out the door.  It’s always easy to look at the cover of a book and say oh “Joe Author” did all the work.  While it’s true that “Joe Author” did the writing, there’s a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes to make this all work.  Like a stage performance, the stage crew makes things happens silently behind the scenes, the same is true of the book publishing team.  Unfortunately, like the stage crew the all the people involved in getting the book out the door also don’t get their fare share of credit.   To that end,  it’s important to know this book would have never got out the door without their hard work.

I would like to express my thanks to the countless people who helped and inspired me to get this far with the book.  Without the encouragement, I probably would have been willing to just stop and put the book on the shelf to collect dust.  Like a runner in a marathon, nothing is worse than feeling like your almost done, but realizing your only half way to the end.

Having gone down the traditional publisher route before, this time I wanted more control of the whole process.  The only way I saw that happening was self publishing.  Looking back, we now have a clearer picture of what that really involves and there’s a lot we don’t think about when working with a traditional publisher.  The fact that we decided to explore self-publishing required a lot of extra work that would typically be done by an outside publisher.  For that, I thank Julie Yack my partner and wife that really stepped up and jumped in to take on many of the traditional publisher roles.  From editing to managing the review process, to figuring out how the logistics of getting the book into distribution, her contribution was critical. I’m not sure I even know all the magic she performed to figure out how all this worked because unlike other things there’s no cheat sheet that you can rely on.  Not to mention at the same time while doing this book, she was technical editor on IT girl’s guide to becoming an Excel Diva and contributed to the writing on Voices of Change. 

Cathy Hardman, one our developers, also spent endless hours helping to package up some of the code samples and enduring my crazy requests like “How about we include a Silverlight 2 example”.  Her patience and attention to detail made a definite impact on the amount of samples included in the book.  Not to mention her effort in reading through and providing feedback on all the chapters.

As the final content was completed it was time to conduct a final book review.  I put out a call for help in doing the reviews to Microsoft and the CRM MVPs.   The support offered amazed me and realized what a great group they were to help out.  Within about 20 minutes I had a bunch of people offering to review and provide feedback on the book chapters.  I would like to thank each of the following people for taking the time to help with the final push.  The feedback and catching of my errors by each of you will clearly make a difference.

Ayaz Ahmad, Marco Amoedo, Nythya Balasubramanian , Jim Daly, , Aaron Elder, Humberto Lezama Guadarrama, Michael Hohne,  uMar Khan ,Amy Langlois, Darren Liu, Ronald Lemmen , Larry Lentz, , David Jennaway,, Matt Parks, , Guy Riddle, Praveen Upadhyay, Jeffry van de Vuurst , Mahesh Vijayaraghavan, Matt Wittemann

Throughout the process Philip Richardson who at the time was a Sr PM on the CRM team always had the answers to my questions or knew who to find to get me answers.  My next book may have to involve Cloud Computing since that’s the new group Philip joined!

Through publishing my blog, conducting training classes around the world and attending conferences were I got to meet a lot of people doing CRM development your thoughts and comments helped to shape each chapter.  I could not possibly list each of you here, but to each I extend my thanks.