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That was a good read. I wrote 10 books for conventional publishers (Springer-Verlag, McGraw Hill, Morgan Kaufman, J Riley) but burned out on writing. What made
by mark_l_watson 8y ago
That was a good read.
I wrote 10 books for conventional publishers (Springer-Verlag, McGraw Hill, Morgan Kaufman, J Riley) but burned out on writing. What made writing new and fresh for me was a few years later starting to self publish. I sell far fewer books but I find it much more satisfying writing exactly what I want, not what publishers’ market research dictates.
I stopped publishing physical books, via the excellent Lulu service, because a physical book freezes what I can do with the content. I use leanpub now to publish eBooks and I can effortlessly fix small errors, add examples, and sometimes declare a new edition by adding material and removing out of date material. The platform lets readers get the updates for free. I also started releasing my eBooks with a Creative Commons share with no modifications or commercial reuse license - I encourage readers to share my books with their friends.
The author of this article makes a good case for using an email newsletter. I generally only spend about two hours a day writing and I am not sure if I want to spend some of that time on a newsletter.
- mettamage 8y agoHa! Your story fits neatly within the self-determination theory of motivation [1]. You clearly tweaked your autonomy to be higher. I'm a big fan of the theory, but I almost never see clear cut examples like this in the wild. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory
- Bartweiss 8y agoHuh, nice observation! I usually shrug at that sort of theory because the terms are too fuzzy to put to a test, but this is a very nice example of the idea.
- theNJR 8y agoIs writing your primary source of income? What sort of things do you write?
- mark_l_watson 8y agoWriting is a very minor part of my income. I have done work for SAIC, Capital One, Google, Disney, etc. - I write mostly because I meet interesting people and I enjoy the process a lot.
- pfd1986 8y agoThis is great! Looking fwd to your book on graph database ML. In case you've been using Graph Convolutions, this might be interesting / useful for you: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.00067 https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.00067] arxiv.org/abs/1905.00067
- criddell 8y ago> I also started releasing my eBooks with a Creative Commons share with no modifications or commercial reuse license - I encourage readers to share my books with their friends. Thank you! Over the years I've benefited as much from writers that have generously shared their work as I have from open source. I'm thinking of people like Mark Pilgrim, Robert Nystrom, Michael Hartl, Cory Doctorow, and so many others. I just bought Introduction to Cognitive Computing and can't wait to dive in.
- mark_l_watson 8y agoThank you. BTW, I wrote that book three years ago but have updates that I will finish and push when I am done writing my new book. You get an email from leanpub when new versions are available.