After the trip to Hyderabad for the Visio MVP Conference, as described in my previous post, my wife and I went to Bangalore, Vadodara, and Mumbai. This gave me the chance to drop-in on Packt Publishing because this is the week that my new book is published ( see http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-visio-2013-business-process-diagramming-and-validation/book ). The book’s title is Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation, and, although this is an update to my 2010 book (with an extra chapter for integration with Office365 and SharePoint 2013), it should resonate with a wider audience because Microsoft decided to merge the Premium and Professional editions into one Professional edition for Visio 2013, so that it now includes Visio Services and Validation. This means that there are millions more Visio users who can take advantage of validation rules to ensure that they have well-constructed diagrams in Visio. I would also like to stress that validation rules can be applied to all types of diagrams, not just process diagrams, and I will demonstrate this over the next few months here.
Meeting with the editorial team in Mumbai was very interesting … there are teams of well-educated youngsters (compared to me!), going through editing and formatting multiple books … and it seems that most commute between 1 and 2 hours each way per day to get to the office. Below are pictures of Mrunmayee, Edwin and Vinodhan (who actually worked on my 2010 book!), at the older office.
They then took us to their new office deeper in Mumbai, which they are gradually moving into, where Monica looked after us, and we had a discussion about the release of the new book.
Even though I have been to Goa, I must admit that the use of western names (and dress) there still leaves me a little confused at first, but meeting with the individuals that I had only seen in email signatures for months, cleared this confusion.
It is exciting writing a book about something you really enjoy, but then the editing process can be a little frustrating because you always think that you got it right first time, but each round of edits improved the content as it was scrutinised by these editors, and also by several fellow MVPs that they sent the drafts to for checking!
I won’t get rich from sales of this book, but I feel that I have been enriched by writing the book and meeting with the guys and gals at Packt Publishing.