A little about myself?
Hmm... Not much to tell really...
I've written a couple of books in the past, but these books are the first that I self-published... It's more of a 'for the fun of it' endeavour than a 'for profit' one, although ultimately I think it's the kind of thing I'd like to do full-time
Unfortunately, the money's really not in it, so it remains a hobby.
Anyway, a little history: I started out with a ZX81, moved to the Spectrum for a few years, and then ended up with an Amiga (after a brief dalliance with the ST). Aside from the Spectrum, the Amiga was my favourite computer, and I'd like to give it the same treatment as I did the Spectrum with the ZX Spectrum book (assuming I can get enough support from the community.)
I have to admit, the Amiga community is a bit of an enigma to me as it seems to be more fractured than the Speccy community, which mainly revolves around the one site: World of Spectrum, so I'm a little concerned about reaching the necessary audience to make the book a success. Hopefully with you guys' help, we can get this thing done
The model I used for the ZX Spectrum book (and the C64 book) was to put up a pre-order page and a progress blog with the understanding that the book would be printed if the number of pre-orders reached a high enough threshold (about 80% of the estimated printing costs) within a specified time limit. If not, the money would be refunded. So far though, this hasn't been a problem as the threshold has been reached for the first two.
The format of the book is as follows:
There is a chapter for each year of the computer's commercial lifetime. Each chapter has a summary page at the beginning detailing the main events of the year, and then is followed by a number of pages detailing information about the most interesting (not necessarily the best!) games from that year. This information on this page is split into three sections. The first section is a little bit of background about the release of the game, for example, information on the company that released it, the programmers, or anything else of general interest. The second section is some interesting trivia about the game, such as any controversy it generated, or other interesting (and little known) information. The third section is a brief description of the game, and this is accompanied by several representative screen-shots and a box-shot.
So far, the two existing books have been very well received, and if I say so myself, they do look pretty good
Andrew