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Writing a book in public
- r_c_a_d 8y agoWriting the book is the easy part. Getting more than a handful of people to read it is hard. Good luck!
- basilesamel 8y agoI'm 24 and this would be my first book. Let me learn my lessons. Thanks for the warning though!
- h0p3 8y agoWrite the book to yourself. You will always have a reader that cares. Someone might sit down on the bench next to you anyway to read it with you. https://philosopher.life/ https://philosopher.life/
- O1111OOO 8y ago> Getting more than a handful of people to read it is hard. 1. advertise book (HN) 2. develope following (Social media) 3. write book 4. Profit? :-)
- Tade0 8y agoThis is a full-time job, but it did not prevent me from writing at least 200 words daily for over a month now. The author would be surprised to note that many people do that already via forum comments. I practice my english this way and made it a part of my daily routine years ago.
- basilesamel 8y agoYeah. Do they publish comment books though?
- Tade0 8y agoTo me this looks way more like a series of blog posts than a book.
- basilesamel 8y agoYou are 100% right. The website is 3 weeks old and the "book editing" feature is not released yet.
- distant_hat 8y agoYou'd have to take editing into account. By any reasonable account, I saw a page that discussed it once, to have 100 readable words, you'd need to write 500-1000 words. Which means the time required goes to 5-10x. On the other hand, 200 words per day is pretty low, you could easily get up to 500-1000 words per day once you really get going.
- basilesamel 8y agoThanks for the insight!
- Rainymood 8y agoI think the idea behind the 200 words is that it is achieveable, once you hit the 200 you're already in the zone, the ball is rolling, you can easily continue. But getting there is the hard part.
- basilesamel 8y agoThank you! Exactly what I'm describing in the article: 200 words give you momentum. I end up with double this word count in average.
- louhike 8y ago200 words is great for people doing it on the side of a full-time job so I think it really depends on your situation.
- 0xferruccio 8y agoLove the platform, how long have you been working on this?
- basilesamel 8y ago3 weeks today lol MVP in two days, MLP in one week
- franze 8y agoI wrote a book[1] - well - i wrote the same book 4 times again and again, writing, learning, throwing away, writing, iterrating, editing, rearranging, throwing away, starting new, iterrating, ... . Some learnings: I) just write first attemp i made a super fancy setup - google chrome book with custom linux installed that automatically transformed markdown via pandoc into a custom styled PDF everytime i saved. was fun to create this setup, but i wasted time not writting the actual book. II) don't wittgenstein i wanted to be absolutely correct, so i started with defining word, what do i mean with website, domain, webproperty, webpage, page, link, external duplicate content, internal duplicate content, ... or any other technical term. wittgensteining is yak shaving for authors. don't do it. just write. III) a manuscript is not a book after you are finished, the real work start. a manuscript does not have the same feeling, read-feeling, read flow as a real book. get a professional editor, work with him/her. fire him/her if not the right match, find the right match, start again. the right editor is as much a factor for the success of the book as the author. IV) live with the law of strawberry jam the further you spread knowledge/jam the thinner it gets. yes, in a 1:1 talk, in a 1:12 people workshop you can communicate more knowledge than you can with a book. talk, interaction, any form of communication with exchange, has direct feedback - something unbelievable important for information communication. a book is a one way street with - if at all - delayed feedback. you can always continue writting, pack in more knowledge, more details, more clarificaiton, more scenarios, but then the book will never finish. at one point you have to stop. V) cut away go through your book again, and question every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter. if the word, the sentence doesn't ad substential value, get rid of it. your book will be better. it's not about quantitiy of words, it's about what you want to say. VI) let go & publish, just do it. [1] "Understanding SEO - A Systematic Approach to Search Engine Optimization" https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/b/understanding-seo https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/b/understanding-seo ISBN: 978-3-200-05426-4
- basilesamel 8y agoThis is awesome! Love those advices. I will consider them carefully while I'm doing this. Thank you so much!
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- sh4rk 8y agoI like the website, its simple and fast. Also love the idea.
- basilesamel 8y agoThank you! I'm trying to improve it daily so if you have any suggestion I would love to hear it.
- sh4rk 8y agodo you have data on the hashtags? Wonder how useful it is.
- basilesamel 8y agoSearch feature coming up this week hopefully!
- clemParis 8y agoThanks for the work, I enjoyed trying it and loved the fact that indeed, 200 words is really achievable. I even did it twice ;) Do you have any plan for the possibility to publish "privately"? I'd like to write, but I don't want/feel the need to be read. I guess we could consider the drafts are private, but they seem like second-class citizens regarding streaks and so on.
- basilesamel 8y agoYes the private posts will be a thing very soon: https://trello.com/c/s0Hho8LS/30-later-an-user-should-be-able-to-decide-if-he-she-wants-his-writing-to-remain-private-or-not https://trello.com/c/s0Hho8LS/30-later-an-user-should-be-abl...
- rayalez 8y agoI have built an app that helps people to write every day and track their progress: https://writingstreak.io/ https://writingstreak.io/ I think you might find it useful (it's still in active development, I'm currently working on completing v1). I really hope your project takes off, there's never enough writing tools and communities!
- basilesamel 8y agoI already have my home made app and it's called https://200wordsaday.com https://200wordsaday.com :P
- littlehuman 8y agoNice interface. It's also a plus to see that I don't have to create an account to use the service. Good job.
- rajasimon 8y agoWow... I really like the streak concept and private stuff with streak public. I will give it a try.
- always_good 8y agoI thought it was bad form to advertise your own product on somebody else's Show HN. It's like proposing at someone's wedding: yes, it's a relevant time to do it, but it's specifically someone else's special day, not yours.
- yesprabhu 8y agoIsn't there a "Forgot my password" option? I had one account created but unable to recall the password used.
- Xophmeister 8y agoThis is very similar to NaNoWriMo[1], which originally stood for "National Novel Writing Month" (I say "originally" because the "National" bit no longer applies), whereby you sign up to try to write 50,000 words of a novel in November. It has similar word tracking features and a community of other users whom you can interact with (IIRC; the last time I signed up was 2012). The only real difference is that the words/day is more explicit here (200 vs. an implied average of over 8x that) and that you're not constrained by time. While it is pretty hard to maintain the level required to achieve the goal set by NaNoWriMo -- 200 words/day is trivial, in comparison -- the time constraint certainly helped focus. [1] https://nanowrimo.org/ https://nanowrimo.org/
- basilesamel 8y agoThis is intriguing. It reminds me of 750words.com as well. I think what I really want to show with the 200 words objective is that it is reachable by anyone. 1600 words per day is way too much for a regular worker who just started writing.
- ghaff 8y ago>1600 words per day is way too much for a regular worker who just started writing. I write a lot for work that's interspersed with a fair number of other activities as well. However, even on days when I'm more or less full-time writing with maybe a bit of add-on research and color for a topic I'm already familiar with, 1600 words is a lot. And I say that as someone who has written books. Personally, I'm more in the 800 words or so per full "production" day average. I can probably hit 1600 but that's assuming I already know what I'm writing about and even have some existing material I can adapt and fold in--and I've really cleared the decks. 200 words/day should be pretty achievable for many although that's not enough for a typical post and you may find breaking things up like that (rather than, say, spending one day per week writing 1000 words) isn't very efficient. It partially depends how much control you have over carving up your time and whether you need to really get in the flow of writing vs. banging off a few paragraphs here and there.
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- superasn 8y agoNice idea. Is there a way to see the list of books currently being written?
- basilesamel 8y agoSome people PMed me about it. I think we are going to tag our posts with #publicbook and those will be drafts that will probably be integrated into our books.
- zabana 8y agoWow ! I absolutely love the concept and the website is straightforward to use, no fuss or unnecessary feature, just write and save. Brilliant. It's funny because I'm struggling with my writing skills and I wanted a way to practice, this is the perfect solution for me. Hope you continue working on it. Unrelated question: what technologies is it built with ? I'm just curious to know !
- basilesamel 8y agoThis is becoming my life work :D I work full-time on it! I'm using Symfony 4 (PHP) and some basic JQuery. Nothing fancy but it allows me to ship faster as I'm starting to know it well. Here is an article I wrote detailing my stack: https://medium.com/@basilesamel/how-i-am-building-my-minimum-viable-products-46e5bd103758 https://medium.com/@basilesamel/how-i-am-building-my-minimum...
- paulpauper 8y agoThe hardest part is organization. it means that the stuff written on day 40 has to some how be connected with or relevant to the stuff on day 7.
- basilesamel 8y agoYes you are right. But isn't it nice as well to digress a bit sometimes :)? Still, a goal feature would be nice.
- wraithdroplets 8y agoTangential, I did some sort of in spirit of Agile terminology a "mob" writing of a Common Source book (this vocabulary word seems to be deficient in my "W" sense of cyber-net). This was a promise to someone else's deceased parent in the Dead Fathers Club that I would write a book in their honour (spelling susp.). So I would hear quiet words of top elf herders when I made mistakes. I won't link to it, since I wanted to include some words that have become as copyright to claim. (That is, in common style of old singular sense of farmers almanacs, people would write in their own book of learnings (spelling susp.). This home notebook (paper) would then record of personally significant captures of word passages learned, this then being the definition of a Common Source book with also lookup to cite reference. However people such as Emerson (many "mistooks") or Ursula K LeGuin, Lathe of Heaven (the "mistook" being a grant of charter to her wisdom), or as in common error of translation of Sufi mysticism to secular preachings of Universalist atheists, you know the one it's in the Nonviolent Communication Training Course). Be well.
- GunjanKarun 8y agoThis is a very interesting idea. I started with something more humble "Just 50 Words" a day and the objective was to write articles instead of a book. I also created a simple writing tool https://just50words.com https://just50words.com to help me focus and write.
- basilesamel 8y agoThis is nice Gunjan. Post your words in our community, we love to read those! Originally 200wordsaday is still about writing short articles daily. Writing a book is a personal goal of mine. The members have many different goals: just get better at writing, releasing their ideas for the world to read etc.
- nickjj 8y agoI'm currently 203,027 words into planning out my next technical video course. I like to write things out before I say them because it helps organize my thoughts. It's similar to writing a book suppose. But if you're interested in writing any type of book, just remember your goals will be different depending on what you're writing. Writing a fiction novel is a lot different than a book on some technical topic. You're on a strict time deadline with technical books because the content can get outdated. On days where I don't have freelance work or other activities planned, getting down 3,000 "production ready" words is very possible in about 6-8 hours. That includes writing, rewriting, iterating, proof reading it multiple times, maybe doing research if needed, etc..
- Tharna 8y agoAlmost two years ago I started writing my short posts on a similar premise on my blog https://arcticloon.fi https://arcticloon.fi. In fact, as of today, I'm four days short of writing every day for two whole years. And all this time I have been writing alone, mostly for myself. I do have a few loyal followers and I see some random readers every now and then. I think a community of other writers would be a great next step for me, so maybe I'll join in. But I'm not sure if I'd like to switch my writing and publishing platform just yet. Hope it's ok for me to keep writing on my own site and copy the texts over. Who knows, maybe in time I'll switch over. Or even better start writing on both places every day, doubling my output.
- basilesamel 8y agoThis is not a problem at all! Your writings belong to you. Always.
- jzig 8y agoNice job on the app! I'm reminded of https://750words.com/ https://750words.com/ that I discovered years ago.
- swlkr 8y ago750words is amazing
- swlkr 8y agoI also came up with something like this: https://streaking.app https://streaking.app
- greenpizza13 8y agoAm I the only one turned off by the very poor grammar on a post about writing a book? Are you writing the book in English?
- munificent 8y agoIn the post, the author notes English is not their first language.
- bartcobain 8y agoJust wrote my first 200 words. I really like two major things about this site: 1. It's really simple UI/UX so you go straight to the point. 2. The Github like counter for your post. I will definitely use the site more and more.
- basilesamel 8y agoThank you! Don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have any suggestion or improvement point to share. I would love to hear them!
- cableshaft 8y agoI like this idea and plan to give it a go, although I think you could be doing more to entice people to read each person's contributions besides just saying 'they wrote x words today, and it's called this, and it has these tags". At the very least I think a super short blurb could be included, like a line or two (can be as short as a tweet or even shorter, you can take it from the beginning probably, just let the writer's own words attract people). Like it's either just the first sentence, or even the first half of a sentence, just something that has an opportunity to attract the end user. I'd even consider a different emphasis. The title and the words are more important and should be more prominent than the author. The "@piotr wrote Strzelnica" makes it sound like they wrote a full piece, even though I think you should consider it to be more like a serial (i.e. 200 words in an ongoing work), and includes a redundant word "wrote" for each entry that's the assumed activity on your site. I'd probably do something more like "Strzelnica 10" (10 being the number in the series), in larger and in bold, then the next few lines "Lorem ipsum...." the brief excerpt of text. Then at the bottom of that text, real small, the author's name, number of likes/feedbacks (one or the other), maybe a single tag, maybe the word count. But keep most of the other information on the entry itself. Maybe not even include the profile image. If you really want the other information I recommend hiding it, because right now it all blends together and I don't get anything too interesting when I scan down the list of entries. Anyway, my main concern is it looks too much like an engineer decided to include as much information as possible on these things, stuff that they would find interesting but most readers aren't really going to care about when scrolling through this and scanning for something to catch their eye, and I think more than anything the author's own words should catch the eye, not the 'info'. But I'll still give it a try and hopefully it does well.
- Kratisto 8y agoWell this was over 200 words, so congrats! One day down.
- basilesamel 8y agoThank you for taking the time to write this! I need more time to consider your points. One thing I am sure of though, is that this is a writing community, not a list of publications like the ones you can find on Medium. Empowering the writers matters more to me. The content is important obviously, but what I really want is for them to just write. Anything. And be seen/heard.