Keyvan Nayyeri

We're very close to the final release date for my Professional Visual Studio Extensibility book. I expect it to be ready on Wiley and Wrox sites in less than a month and on Amazon and other online booksellers two or three weeks after Wiley (that is probably sometime at the end of March).

Earlier this week, Katie Mohr sent me the initial draft of the new cover for the book including the new front cover with my new author photo and back cover with the book description. Although this cover isn't finalized yet and I have returned my comments on it but it doesn't seem to need any change for front cover so I put its photo here!

Last month I decided to take a new author photo for my book because I didn't like the photo that I had taken for Professional Community Server last year. I was very serious about the author photo guidelines and couldn't end up with something very appropriate and friendly last year.

You already know that book covers play an important role in sales and marketing and can attract more readers to the books. Wrox uses a very special format for its covers and prints the author photos on front cover and this is due to their philosophy that I'll describe in a moment.

After asking from some buddies about the previous cover and getting their feedbacks on it, I believed that the cover isn't very good for the new book and can affect our sales and marketing. In general, I'm not a good guy in photos and don't know why but there is no doubt that the photo on the previous cover was one of the worst photos that I have taken in my life!

The story may be interesting for all regular Wrox readers so let me waste your time with a few paragraphs about it.

Wrox has a registered trademark for all its books that you see on front and back covers at the top and that is "Wrox Programmer to Programmer". All the Wrox books are written by programmers and their audience are programmers. This is their slogan and seriously follow that in all their works. They even say that we don't expect our authors to be real experienced authors. They get programmers and help them to become technical authors.

Beside this slogan, Wrox follows some marketing strategies and one of them is printing the author photos on covers. There is no doubt that almost all developers around the world have seen Wrox books and know how they look like!

But what's their goal? Wrox hasn't written anything about this publicly or at least I couldn't find any resource that describes their reasons. But there is an internal document as author photo guidelines that outlines the reasons and philosophy behind this.

Wrox prints author photos to put a bridge between readers and authors and let the reader imagine the author's face when he or she is reading the book. This way, reader can find a better communication between himself or herself and the author. One of the several guidelines for author photos is to take friendly photos to help this communication.

Like some other guys I didn't like this idea when I was reading my first Wrox books and I thought this is a very amateur idea but after a while I found that I was completely wrong and this has had a great effect on my reading experience.

Just to understand the effect of these author photos let me describe my own experience. I never met Scott Hanselman in person and I never seen his photos and videos before reading Professional ASP.NET 2.0 just in a few weeks after its release (I was a kid then!). But his friendly and smiley face on the book cover is always in my mind and forms my imagination of this cool guy. I even took my Professional ASP.NET 2.0 book to the photographer and showed him the photo as the best example of what Wrox wants to receive from its authors.

Everything can go wrong in our world without good rules to control it and put it in the right direction. So Wrox has its own guidelines for author photos and will reject photos if they're not appropriate for their needs. I don't want to step in details about these guidelines but can tell you that Wrox expects authors to take a few photos in different poses with different orientations and with casual clothing. One of the important points is having a friendly photo which is the hard part of the work!

Last year I was very explicit about the guidelines and this yield to take a photo that I didn't like it myself! This year and for Professional Visual Studio Extensibility I tried to give my photographer more freedom to take a better photo and I think the new photo is better than the previous one.

The other important thing in sales and marketing for a book is its back cover description which is often what you see on online booksellers as the description for a book and it makes your understanding of the content. Unfortunately my book was using the description for a canceled title with a different content for a long while but fortunately Wrox changed the description recently and is using a temporary short description for the book which is more appropriate. The final description for the book is something excellent and I'm ok with that but it will be public in a few weeks after finalizing the cover.

All in all, the sweet part of the book writing process is gone for me and that is the writing, itself, but the book will be out in a short while so others can see what I've done with that! Right now I'm writing a few chapters of a book as a guest author (will write about this shortly) and want to stay away from writing stuff for a while. I had some book ideas but found that I can't handle them at this position. I need to spend more time on coding and reading rather than writing. Lately I found that I write a lot and this is stopping me from other interests because I have a very limited time at service.