Becoming an Author - My Experience
About-Updates ·Becoming an Author - My Experience
Over the past 12 months, I have had the privilege of working on two certification guides for Packt Publishing.
The books that I have been authoring are the Microsoft Identity and Access Administrator Associate (SC-300) exam preparation guide and the Microsoft Security Compliance and Identity Fundamentals (SC-900) exam preparation guide.
My experience started with a LinkedIn message from Packt asking if I’d be interested in authoring the SC-300 book. I have long wanted to author a book, so this was something that I definitely wanted to agree to and accomplish. Shortly after agreeing to the SC-300 authoring schedule, I was asked whether I knew of anyone interested in authoring the SC-900 book. The overall topics of the SC-900 are something that I am very interested in and I volunteered myself for the second book. Packt explained to me that they generally, as a rule, do not allow authors to work on two books simultaneously. I pushed that I could accomplish these tasks simultaneously because I very much wanted to author these two books. Packt agreed, using a 2 for 1 chapter schedule to accelerate the SC-300 book.
I began my journey in April 2021 with my first chapter. I have written before work, after work, and on weekends every week since. The Packt team has been amazing to work with and the reviews of content for structure and content, and technical reviews have been consistent throughout. I have had the benefit of the same team project managing and completing editor reviews for both books. The consistency has been very helpful as we have all learned what to expect from each other.
I completed the SC-300 book before the December 2021 holiday, and final reviews were complete shortly after the first of the year. Currently, I am two-thirds of the way through the SC-900 book. The completed PDF of the SC-300 was complete in early February and will be published on March 31, 2022. The pre-ordering on Amazon has already ranked the book in a number of areas. SC-900 authoring should be complete in early April, with a tentative release date of June or July 2022.
Authoring a book (or books in my case) requires a commitment and personal time management skills. I find that it is much more of a challenge than creating presentation content and scripting video presentations, though my experience in authoring this type of content along with authoring lab content was very helpful. Those skills were expanded upon as an author. As an author, you need to be able to think about potential questions that a reader may have while reading the book and performing the exercises without having direct access to me as their instructor.
As stated, my experience writing these books has been extremely positive and I thank the Packt team for being great team to work with on this journey. I definitely hope to author more books in the future after SC-900 is complete. We will see what that may be. If anyone is thinking of authoring a book and has any questions, feel free to reach out for any questions or comments. I am happy to share. In my next post, I will spend some more time on the SC-300 Identity and Access Administrator Associate exam guide book.