Sigh. I wonder if I’m meant to write a book. I’ve had four book proposals accepted since 1998 and, for different reasons, none of the books have made it into print. Jerry Lawson and I recently pulled the plug on a book based on our Internet Roundtable columns with Brenda Howard. I am biased, but those columns are the best things ever written about how lawyers can use websites for marketing and other purposes. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the book to work in a new format that the publishers wanted and blogs and RSS were causing so many changes that we would have had to do a complete rewrite.
I would have liked to have done the Internet Roundtable book as an e-Book and I might still try to talk Jerry and Brenda into releasing it as a free eBook in its unrevised form.
I wrote four or five book chapters for other books last year. None of the books are out yet. The lag time on books is amazingly long. I have a hard time understanding the current trend of bloggers writing books – talk about delayed gratification.
I’d rather do electronic publishing and have collected many of my articles in two different eBooks. I want to do some more things along those lines, especially in the form of eBooklets and some Print on Demand booklets.
Ironically, in 1998, I had a contract to write a book called “The Fully Connected Law Firm,” but the publisher went out of publishing business before I finished it. I’ve made parts of it available in different places. It still surprises me on occasion when someone launches into a great new idea that I developed in the draft of that book almost seven years ago. The material in that book still interests me and the subject is even more real now. I don’t have the time and I’m not in a place now to think about a book, but I can see returning to that book one of these days.
I’ve also toyed with the idea of writing a multiple-author book on legal blogging and RSS with the obvious collaborators. That’s always a possibility.
I have carte blanche, more or less, with a publisher to develop a book on Client-driven Technology. That has a lot of appeal, but I’m not in a place where I want to take on a book. I might be willing to try it with a very energetic and detail-oriented co-author, but I still struggle with the long lag time until publication.
I just don’t have an enthusiastic response when I hear this question.