Adventures in Internet Marketing

Book Publishing Ain’t What It Used To Be

It’s a lot easier. I just published the Second Edition of my book, Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0. I used the “self-publishing” site, www.Lulu.com, and although I’m happy to report that the publishing part is a lot easier nowadays, the part about writing good content is as difficult as ever! I think my book turned out well, however, and I recommend you buy it and give me your feedback. In the rest of this article I’ll talk about why I wrote it and what I was going for, as well as a few tidbits about lulu.com I thought you might find interesting.

But if you want to go straight to the checkout counter, here you go:

Why I Wrote a Book on Dynamics CRM Workflows

It wouldn’t take more than a visit or two to my blog to realize I’m very interested in Dynamics CRM 4.0 workflows. I’ve been using, consulting and training on CRM 4 since before it came out, on CRM 3 before that, and I think the improvements to workflows are the single biggest area of improvement from the previous release to the current one.

As I was learning how to do workflows in CRM 4.0 I had to rely on a mish-mash of learning materials: blog posts, msdn articles, the CRM 4 SDK…and most of all, trial by error. There were no good books dedicated to the topic (or even bad ones, for that matter), so I had to take this brute force approach to learning it.

In my experience the brute force approach is often effective, but not very efficient, and my learning of Dynamics CRM 4 workflows was no exception to this rule. That is, I ended up learning the topic (very well, I think!), but it could have been done in a lot less time.

That’s why I wrote a book all about Dynamics CRM workflows: so you can learn more efficiently how to build, maintain and troubleshoot them.

Why I Published on www.Lulu.com

If you want to publish a book, www.Lulu.com is a good place to do it. It’s a self-publishing site, with all of the tools you’d expect to make the publishing process easier: a wizard to walk you through uploading your content, selecting from different printing options, creating your cover, and so forth. But what makes it more interesting is its online marketplace — not only can you publish your book there but you can market and sell it as well.

I published a first edition of my Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0 in October 2008, and just released a brand new and improved Second Edition.    

If you need to learn about Dynamics CRM 4.0 workflows, I recommend you purchase my book. Along with a book purchase, you get a free subscription to the online version of the book, which contains the downloadable (and frequently updated) content, plus all of the workflows so you can download them, import them into your CRM organization and modify them to suit your business requirements.   

How to Find it and Buy it

Here’s my “storefront” on lulu.com: http://stores.lulu.com/richardknudson

If you visit the storefront you’ll notice the book is even available in an “ebook” format! So in case you’re an avid Kindle reader, you can at long last curl up with a good digital workflow read.