I did a book a couple of years back. Motivations were: - I have been working in a particular speciality long enough that I felt I had something worth sharing w

I did a book a couple of years back. Motivations were: - I have been working in a particular speciality long enough that I felt I had something worth sharing with others, and was also lucky enough to be in a company that allowed me to write about the work we had done. - Just having done it, being able to see a book with your name on it on the shelf, give it away to friends and family etc. Some observations: - I did the book with co-authors. I have other colleagues who are attempting to write books by themselves, and are struggling with motivation under the sheer enormity of the task. If you have coauthors you not only cut the per-person workload down, but also get the benefit of peer pressure to keep things moving along. Being the lead author, I also learned a lot about managing and organizing a distributed group with strong opinions and different approaches, which was an education in itself. - You mentioned you have existing technical articles. Having a starting point is a great leg up versus a blank page. Our book came out of a conference presentation for which we had to write up detailed notes. So we effectively had about 30% of the raw material ready before we started on the actual book. - As others have said, it is a lot of work. Hofstadter's Law definitely applies. - It forces you to really know your stuff, and to double and triple check things before committing them to immortality. - The first royalty check is surprisingly decent, I believe due to initial sales to libraries etc, but it quickly drops off. As others have said, you are almost certainly not going to be doing this for the money. - Publisher quality varies of course, but don't necessarily expect too much from them. In terms of editing, they will pick up on some typos, but not much else. We did everything in latex so there wasn't really much extra to do. But if you calculate how much money they make from the book, it is not surprising they do not allocate a lot of resource. - You will get completely sick of reading and rereading the text, while still finding more errors. If I was to do it again I think I would go the self-publishing route, just to try it, since I honestly don't think the publisher did much for us in terms of marketing or editing.