Interview: April Hodge Silver, co-author of Wordpress 2.7 Complete 2nd Edition

April Hodge Silver is the co-author of Wordpress 2.7 Complete 2nd Edition, which helps you create your own complete blog or web site from scratch with WordPress.

Packt: Please tell us something about yourself.
April: I have been designing and developing new web sites from scratch since 1999, just before my graduation from Columbia University. Early in my career, I worked for several web companies and startups, including DoubleClick and About.com. Since 2004, I have been self-employed through my company Springthistle Design and have worked with a staggering variety of companies, non-profits, and individuals to realize their website dreams. In my professional work, my focus is always on usability, efficiency, flexibility, clean design, and client happiness. WordPress is the best solution for many of Springthistle's Clients, though I also develop custom web applications, often with CakePHP, but almost always within LAMP (along with Javascript and advanced CSS).

More details about my professional work can be seen at http://springthistle.com

In my free time, I enjoy developing recipes in the kitchen, bicycling, reading, and relaxing with my daughter, dog, and darlin' wife.

Packt: Now that your book has been around for quite sometime, what benefits do you think did writing a book bring to your specialist area?
April: This is something that I can't really measure, but there are two things I know for sure. The first is that my knowledge of WordPress increased as a result of researching and writing the book. The second is that there is one client that I acquired this past year that I know for sure was a direct result of having written the book. The way it happened was this: After the book was published, I posted a link to it on my facebook profile. A new person that I had recently met socially happened to see the post, and wrote to me through facebook that her employer was looking for a contractor to do a WordPress website. Without the book, she wouldn't have known that I am a WordPress programmer and she wouldn't have necessarily had the necessary confidence in my skills. There may be other people who have come across my website and decided to contact me partly because of my book authorship, but I have no way of really knowing.

Packt: During the writing process, did you come across any issues/ difficulties that affected your writing and how did you overcome these?
April: Not really.

Packt: Whilst writing your book, did you find that it overshadowed personal life in any way? How did you deal with this?
April: I did not find that working on the book overshadowed my personal life. This is partly because I set aside very specific hours of my day to work on the book and stuck to them strictly so that I could prevent the book-writing time from expanding in uncontrolled ways into my personal life.

Plus, as it happens, my wife is also an author for Packt and is also accomplished at working with WordPress. This was great because we could discuss whichever chapter I was working on while we were cooking dinner, walking the dog, etc. Also, I enjoyed telling people that I know, non-technical friends and family, that I was writing a book. They were all impressed!

Packt: Was there anything interesting that happened during the writing of the book?
April: Well, WordPress, the open-source software that I was writing about, released a new version half-way through the writing process that changed the software dramatically! A lot of back-end functionality changed as did the entire design of the back-end. This meant that, when I was more than half-done with the first draft of the book, I had to go back and re-take all my back-end screenshots, as well as re-write some areas of the book, like how to use widgets and what's on the dashboard. This is one of the hazards of writing about a dynamic piece of opensource software!

Packt: How did our Acquisition Editors help you - what kind of things did they help you with and how did they support you throughout the writing process?
April: David Barnes was very helpful in running interference between me and one of my editors. There were a few points where an editor and I disagreed about a convention or a naming decision, and David always backed me up.

Packt: Packt: Our authors usually have full-time jobs whilst writing for us. Was this the case for you and how did you approach managing your time?
April: Yes, I do have a full-time job, but luckily it is working for myself. I decided to look at this book-writing project as partly a marketing project for my company. My company's business plan suggests that some of my time be spent marketing for the company, even though that time is not client-time paid by-hour or -project. Once I thought about the book project this way, it helped me to get motivated to set aside book-time, even though it is not paid time the way that client-time is. I made sure to set aside small 2- to 3-hour blocks of time during my workday to work on the book (and occasionally blocks on evenings and weekends) so that I would work on it regularly and never get to a point where I'd have so much book-work piled up to do that I'd have to completely neglect my clients. It worked out pretty well.

Packt: Do you have any tips for other authors, or tricks that you learnt whilst writing, that you'd like to share?
April: Yes, I do!

1. Having an outline written for each chapter before starting on the chapter is really helpful.
2. Take a lot of screenshots, and have a good way of organizing them.
3. Set aside many small blocks of time to work on the book. If you put it off, you will regret it.
4. Stay in communication with your Packt contacts. If you are falling behind, need more time, or have a question, contact them right away so they know where you are at.

Packt: Do you have any advice for other authors who may be interested in writing for Packt, but are still unsure?
April:You have to know that it will take more time that you think it will take. Be prepared to set aside the time you need. Also, don't think of the book as a project that you get paid for. It has to have more meaning than that for you, or it won't be worth it to work on because it takes a lot of personal commitment to make a good book.

Packt: What projects, if any, are you working on at the moment?
April: I am always working on a lot of projects! This past summer I launched 4 or 5 new websites for clients, and most of them are WordPress-driven. I also got really involved in writing shortcodes for my WordPress websites. Finally, I redesigned and re-launched my own website in October 2009. It was long overdue for an overhaul - which isn't surprising. There is an old saying that the cobbler's children go barefoot. Because I make websites, I always work on other people's websites first, and my own gets neglected! Now, however, it's brand-new and much more functional than before, since I applied about 3 years of WordPress and programming advances to the new site.

Packt: How did you find the overall experience of writing your book for Packt?
April: Well, most of the work I did on my own, of course, which was fine. Where Packt came into the process was when it came to editing. One of my editors offered really helpful feedback when it came to finding bugs in my code or inconsistencies in my explanations. The rest of the editing process I found to be somewhat frustrating because sometimes my editors, whose grasp of English seemed to be weaker than mine, introduced grammatical errors or changed the meaning of my text in places. I had to be very sharp during the part of the process called Pre-Finals, because that was my last chance to catch the late errors, which I often didn't get to see earlier. Aside from that, the process went pretty smoothly. Packt provided me with templates that I used in OpenOffice to create my chapters, and there was always someone emailing me very politely to make sure I knew what was due next and when there were new drafts for me to review.

Would you like to be an author yourself? Contact Packt's editorial team here.