Believe it or not, but Marjan Bace (Manning's Publisher) actually did call me last night. I was surprised, I must admit, because I expected that they wouldn't call me this week. But we talked about it, he apologised for the way they've been treating me so far and I said I will pretend it never happened, so we're starting from scratch now.
He had some sensible things to say about my proposal. Fact is that if you're writing a book about 4 topics, the buyer will only be buying it if he does not know yet which of the 4 he is going to use. If he chooses Tk in the end, he'll only use 25% of the book, while Manning has a more concise Perl/Tk book coming up, so the buyer won't have much value for money.
So we decided -like Simon Cozens already suggested- to restructure the idea and start with more general stuff about GUI Programming with Perl, and discuss the things all GUI Toolkits have in common, and at the end of the book have a chapter about each Toolkit in particular, discussing them in more detail. That way you'll have some 50-60% of the book useful no matter what GUI you're going to choose in the end, plus an extra chapter about the GUI you want.
So back to the drawing board for me and re-write my proposal. Which I will probably do by this weekend.
And Marjan promised to get back to me shortly after that :)
