4 ms·

cool! congrats on the book would you mind writing about how you came about getting a book deal? were you active in the rails community? Did wrox approach you?

• edwardbenson 18y ago
  @utnick - Thanks! As to your questions: - I've been a lurker in the Rails community ever since it was first released. So no, not active. I guess in that sense I'm doing things backwards. I hope to be active now that I'm not spending all my free time writing and am polishing up an acts_as_rdf plugin for ActiveRecord that I hope will help the semantic web-minded folks. - I had co-authored another book for Wrox before, so had been emailing back and forth with them afterwards about how important Rails was. That email thread turned into a book proposal. I can only speak for my own book writing experience with Wiley/Wrox, but it is likely similar across the tech industry. You don't have to write the book up front or get an agent. Instead you submit a proposal to the publisher that is essentially your pitch: it includes a potential table of contents, your own market analysis, and why you think the book is a necessary addition to the existing set of published knowledge. If all goes well, the proposal turns into a contract, which is basically a 15 page way of saying that you split the copyright, get a royalty advance, and get X% of sales, where X seems to be around 10% for the big publishers. (Pragmatic gives 50%!!). Then you start the writing process, which took about a year both times for me, divided into ~8 months of writing, ~2 months of editing, and ~1.5 month of last-minute bug fixing and waiting for the book to print. All in all, it's been simultaneously the hardest and most rewarding thing I've done in my (admittedly short) professional life. If you're interested in more details about how to get your foot in the door, feel free to shoot me an email (edward [dot] benson [at] gmail [dot] com).
• petercooper 18y ago
  Just in case you're asking this to get a wider picture / lots of data points, I wrote "Beginning Ruby" published by Apress and was approached by the publisher, we came up with the idea together, and then got started. There was no real proposal at any point. It is now one of the best selling Ruby books (almost 6000 copies to date - but this is an incredibly tiny niche).