Book News

The timeline of the book

A running history of how DJing for Dummies came to exist, and what's happened since — kept as a timeline mostly so I don't forget the details myself.

• August 1996 — Graham Joyce sells me his decks and records.
• August 1996 — Feeling out of my depth with no one to teach me, I start writing down everything I'm figuring out, just to keep track of it.
• September 1996 — I get online with 15MB of free webspace, and turn those notes into a basic webpage so I can check them whenever I want.
• November 1996 — People start finding the site; watching the hit counter rise, I rework the writing to be more reader-friendly.
• March 1997 — With more hits and more questions coming in, I write a lot more, research things I didn't know, and create the "Recess" alter-ego to keep my contact details out of it.
• July 1997 — The site relaunches under a Recess domain, and I start spending real time helping new DJs — genuinely surprised people were asking, and happy to research anything I didn't already know.
• July 1997 – August 2005 — Recess.co.uk goes through several redesigns, grows steadily, and gets a mention in DJ Mag as one of the better places to learn to DJ. Over the same period I build up my own DJing career, moving from bars to clubs and building a solid fanbase.
• August 2005 — Having just read Final Cut Pro for Dummies, I wonder whether the Dummies series has a DJing title. It doesn't, so I get in touch with Wiley cold, with no contacts or connections.
• September 2005 — Someone at Wiley gets back to me, apologising for the delay — caused, it turns out, by how much interest the idea had generated internally. Jason, who becomes the book's executive editor, spends a lot of time on the phone talking through what the book could be.
• October 2005 — Briefly explore splitting the book into two: music creation, and DJ performance. Wiley decides against it — partly because 200 pages isn't enough to do music software justice, and partly because 400 pages purely on DJing gives the book room to go deeper than competing titles.
• January 2006 — After a couple of false starts, I sign the contract on 21 January. Then I have to actually write a book.
• March 2006 — Deliver the first six chapters to my editor, Rachael, at Wiley.
• May 2006 — Six more chapters delivered.
• June 2006 — Another six chapters delivered.
• August 2006 — The last chapters go in, and I head to Ibiza to decompress — and, genuinely, to do a bit of research, catching up with a few DJs (including Judge Jules) and thinking through what the book still needed.
• August 2006 — A long-held ambition gets realised: back in 1996, a Sasha radio mix from Ibiza was what first made me want to DJ. Getting a guest-list pass to see him play at Pacha, all those years later, was something else.
• August 2006 — Our beach bag gets stolen while we're swimming — two iPods, a camera, a watch, sunglasses, my wallet, and (most painfully) the notebook I'd been using to jot down every idea for the book. It later turns up dumped in a bush, stripped of everything valuable — except, oddly, the notebook itself, still there.
• August 2006 — Home from Ibiza to a inbox full of reviewed chapters needing revisions.
• September 2006 — Finish the revisions, then spend a while genuinely unsure what my role in the book even is any more.
• October 2006 — One last proofing pass to catch anything glaring. Fortunately, not much turns up.
• October–December 2006 — Mostly just waiting, and worrying.
• December 2006 — The book is released in the UK. People are actually buying it, which is a genuinely strange feeling. A reader named Al Harris leaves a review on Amazon.co.uk that I still can't read without smiling:

"Having run a free DJ tutorial site for the best part of 10 years, it was a refreshing change to see recess.co.uk finally hit the book shelf. A great, easy-to-understand read which covers everything — whether you're a new starter or trying to get some help on beatmatching, this is a great place to start."

• December 2006 — Asked by the publisher to check the book once more for anything major before the next print run — and, with some embarrassment, I find a few real errors. See the Updates page for what was wrong.
• January 2007 — Someone on a DJ forum takes the book's release badly, accusing me of abandoning beginner DJs to sell a book. I post a reply; they don't respond.
• January 2007 — The local paper runs a piece on the book's release, photo and all.
• January 2007 — The book gets an early US release through Amazon (originally planned for February).
• February 2007 — Proper US release.
• February 2007 — A thread on the TranceAddict forums discusses the book, with comments including: "I was at Barnes & Noble last night looking for a book on Ableton Live and I came across this one — DJing for Dummies. I skimmed through it and what I read was really good... If you're an up-and-coming DJ, you should definitely give this book a read."
• February 2007 — A full site rewrite and redesign, promising to fill in the remaining gaps — which brings the story up to that point.

This timeline stops around the 2007 redesign; the book has since gone through a second and third edition, with a lot more content added on digital DJing — see the Digital DJing page for that side of the story.