The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (2001) was written by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow

Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books...

 and Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder is an award-winning Canadian science fiction author. His novels present far-future speculations on topics such as nanotechnology, terraforming, augmented reality and interstellar travel, and have a deeply philosophical streak...

 and published as part of The Complete Idiot's Guide series of non-fiction manuals by Alpha Books

Alpha Books

Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group, is an American publisher best known for their Complete Idiot's Guides series. It began as a division of Macmillan. Pearson Education acquired Macmillan General Reference from Simon & Schuster in 1999...

Description

Written by a major proponent of the genre, the purpose of the book is to assist readers to understand the basics of becoming a science fiction author. It describes the various sub-genres, writing techniques, and what is entailed with authoring such a piece. Then it describes the publishing business starting with agents, contracts and publishers.