I never thought I'd write any books. In fact, I hated reading when I was a kid. But then something happened when I was 19 that changed my views.
I accidentally came across a post in the forum where an editor from Wrox Publishing, one of the largest book publishers focusing on software engineering, was looking for someone to contribute to a new book on Visual Basic web development. This subject was fairly new, so it was hard to find someone who knew the subject and even harder to find someone who can write. Since this happened before the dot-com boom when very few people had any sort of internet connectivity, this task proved to be impossible. I answered the message in the forum. One thing led to another and I became a co-author of Professional Visual Basic 6 Web Programming. Of course I was 19, so when the call came in to send my photo in so they can publish it on the cover of the book, I chickened out and didn't submit it. Thus, you can find my name but not my photo. Of course 20 years later I re-read what I wrote in the book and realized how terrible I was. But the ego of the 19-year-old went up at the time and help me build my business, so it's all good. Later that year I toyed around with writing more books but decided that the money wasn't there to make it interesting.
A few years later I was lucky enough to participate in the birth of the SAAS (software as a service) industry. I saw many startups struggle as they didn't know how to turn SAAS into a real business or how to measure their performance. I decided to write a book that answers some common questions I heard from startups. These answers were very high level. My intent wasn't to prescribe the exact answer but to get people to start thinking in terms of metrics and develop management science around SAAS. I wrote a book called Saasonomics 101. Of course I meant Saasonomics to be a term people would use. While it was used by some people and this book sold a decent number of copies, it didn't become an earth-shattering bestseller.
In early 2000s, I had my own consulting organization called Hanna Concern. While working with customers, I found a number of common management problems that had no solutions and no books published about them. So I decided to help. The first problem I decided to address is firing and laying off people. I saw so many instances of terminations gone wrong that I thought I could help by educating the world. I wrote a book called Firing and Laying off, which was then re-published by Business Expert Press under the title of Letting People Go. I saw two other problems at the time that I wanted to write about. One was about in-effectiveness of organizational learning, which I thought people could improve if they became aware of good practices. The other was the fact that people make too many decisions using biases rather than facts. I started working on both books but stopped before they were finished because I had to focus on running my business.
Around 2010 I decided to try myself in something new - writing a fiction book. I wanted to write a story in which a scientist uncovers secrets of the catholic church and these secrets are breath-taking. To write this book, I did some research and found that catholic church hasn't been hiding its sins. Popes were engaged in everything you can imagine, from murder and money laundering to rape and orgy. So I decided to write a fiction book based on true facts and my Church Secrets book was born. Of course this was shortly after Dan Brown's book came out and he received death threats for content that was as controversial as mine. So, I decided to publish this book under the name of Fabian Nordstrom.
I tried myself in a fun project. I wrote a small book called Sun Tzu - The Art of Leadership. The idea was to continue Sun Tzu's "Art of War" book and talk about leadership in the same way Sun Tzu talked about strategy. Surprisingly, this was my highest selling book ever.