MY MEMORIES

Charles Glenn Petersen

1983 - Mississippi Years

Mississippi State University (continued)

During this whole mess, Nancy decided to write a textbook for an area of her expertise, File Processing. Two other faculty decided to try textbook authorship and applied for and got one quarter release time from teaching to do their writing, Nancy got no release time. The crowning glory for Nancy was that her book was accepted for publication and the other two could not get theirs published. Also, Nancy’s book sold well and several other schools started using it, including our former Computer Science Department at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Nancy made some real money from royalties on her book.

I tried my hand ay textbook writing as well. The first book was, at the last minute, decided by the publisher to not publish my book, they decided the potential clientele was not big enough. I self published it in a small run and sold about half of them, breaking even on the publishing cost. My next book was co-authored with a professor from University of California San Diego. He had written a successful introduction to Computer Science book using the Pascal programming language. I adapted his book to using the Ada programming language. The same publisher then asked me to finish a book they wanted to publish but the original author had backed away from. The same publisher asked me to adapt Nancy's textbook for the Ada language. I made some royalty money, probably enough so I was paid maybe minimum wage for my efforts. I then wrote a genealogy book centered around my Danish grandparents. I sold enough copies to recoup my printing costs.