{"id":28203,"date":"2007-01-31T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2007-01-31T10:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/01\/31\/if-you-ask-an-author-to-sign-a-book-you-have-to-tell-himher-what-to-write\/"},"modified":"2007-01-31T10:00:12","modified_gmt":"2007-01-31T10:00:12","slug":"if-you-ask-an-author-to-sign-a-book-you-have-to-tell-himher-what-to-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20070131-12\/?p=28203","title":{"rendered":"If you ask an author to sign a book, you have to tell him\/her what to write"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you happen to catch me, say by stopping by my office if you happen to work at Microsoft, I’d be happy to sign your copy of my book. (There’s no need to set up a formal book signing appearance in building 9<\/a>; just stop by my office any time.) One of the things you don’t realize as a fan waiting in line at a book signing<\/a> is that when you get to the front of the line, you have to tell the author what to write.\n It’s obvious once you think about it. The author doesn’t know anything about you. You’re just one person out of hundreds they’re going to sign for today. How should they know what to write?\n So don’t make the same mistake Michael Kaplan did<\/a>. (I’m just teasing, Michael!) When you stop by to ask me to sign your copy of the book, give me some idea what you want me to write. I’m happy to do it, but you have to give me something to work with.<\/p>\n

In other book news: The publishers are working on getting the bonus chapters onto the book web site<\/a>. Your patience is appreciated. And I’m seeing book reviews coming from all over, like this one from Tom Duff<\/a> (who even posted the review to the book’s Amazon page<\/a>), and a surprise one from Martin Heller<\/a>. (The surprise that Martin Heller wrote a review of my book at all, not that the review is full of surprises. I don’t know if that makes sense.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you happen to catch me, say by stopping by my office if you happen to work at Microsoft, I’d be happy to sign your copy of my book. (There’s no need to set up a formal book signing appearance in building 9; just stop by my office any time.) One of the things you don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-28203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

If you happen to catch me, say by stopping by my office if you happen to work at Microsoft, I’d be happy to sign your copy of my book. (There’s no need to set up a formal book signing appearance in building 9; just stop by my office any time.) One of the things you don’t […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}