8 ms·
Tips for Writing a Technical Book
- crdotson 7y agoAnother O’Reilly author here and this article is spot on — particularly about blocking out specific times to write.
- mfrisbie 7y agoFantastic article! I would add that it is quite impossible to hold the contents of an entire book in your head at once. I rely heavily on Trello and OneNote for mental organization of topics. It's also critical to form a topic pipeline as you go about writing. Unfailingly, writers will come across articles or blog posts that contain something new they'd like to include in their text. Efficiently taking raw content, boiling it down into its essence, and composing that concept into a book section is important for keeping your book content fresh and relevant.
- asplake 7y agoNot sure about some of this. If you can’t keep a good enough mental model of your book in your head, your readers might struggle to follow it. I do recognise the issue of nearing the end of writing a book and being torn on whether to include new stuff. In the end you just have to draw the line somewhere. It’s less of an issue if you have an outlet for new stuff - blog, community, etc.
- rmason 7y agoI've been a technical editor on a few programming titles. I don't think the average developer realizes that for the authors writing a book is a passion project. Not only won't you get rich, you will be extremely lucky to make minimum wage. Most if not all the marketing is on your shoulders. Even though it's a hits driven business the publishers do all right though.
- Silhouette 7y agoWhat puzzles me is why most people writing book-length technical work in 2019 should use a traditional publisher at all. The premise that a publisher deserves to keep the vast majority of sales revenue because of the value they add seems like it belongs in another time. In the modern digital and online market, the idea of publisher as some sort of gatekeeper with established channels through distribution networks and into bricks and mortar bookstores is largely obsolete. And what publisher today provides a new author with enough technical editing resources or marketing power or administrative support to justify taking the rights and keeping most of the revenue? Maybe someone has already done this, but it seems to me there's an obvious opportunity for some sort of small-scale broker service that connects authors with independent professionals who can offer the necessary skills in editing, design, illustration, ecommerce, printing and distribution if physical copies are wanted, and so on.
- ghaff 7y agoBecause the money involved is often not much and there’s still some cred associated with traditional publishers.
- drongoking 7y agoSpeaking as another O'Reilly author, I'd agree with this and add that for tech books the publisher is even less necessary. If you've written papers with Latex/MD/asciidoc, and drawn figures and tables, you're already doing most of what you'd do with your publisher's toolchain anyway. Hook up with Amazon's on-demand publishing service and (except for the nice cover) you've got it almost end-to-end. [I assume you can write and organize thoughts decently well, and have some people who can proofread for you. If not, a publisher really won't help too much with that anyway.] So what does a publisher provide? Marketing, promotion, distribution, reputation. No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will. They can arrange promotions through conferences and email distribution that you probably can't. I wouldn't underestimate this, but I also wouldn't necessarily think it's worth their 80%-90% cut either.
- 7y ago
- Ozzie_osman 7y agoI haven't written a traditional book, but I'm currently working on writing Holloway's Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/about https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/about). Writing is hard but my experience so far feels a lot more positive than the process described here. I had a ton of editorial support and we were able to get contribution (through interviews, reviews and edits, and even written contributions from a bunch of subject matter experts). In any case, it's still not an easy feat and I have a ton of respect for anyone who embarks on (let alone finishes) the task of writing a book.
- nbaksalyar 7y agoThank you, this is very timely: recently I got a cold email from an acquisition editor too and been researching this fascinating topic of writing tech books. :) Some more helpful resources I found: - Advice to Prospective Book Authors from Scott Meyers (of Effective C++ fame): https://www.aristeia.com/authorAdvice.html https://www.aristeia.com/authorAdvice.html - "I wrote a book" by Tryggvi Björgvinsson: https://dev.to/trickvi/i-wrote-a-book-lfg https://dev.to/trickvi/i-wrote-a-book-lfg - "Writing a technical book" by Ian Miell: https://zwischenzugs.com/2016/05/15/writing-a-technical-book/ https://zwischenzugs.com/2016/05/15/writing-a-technical-book... - Then there are some good discussion about this topic on HN. You can try searching by keywords like "ask hn + writing a book", e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14300932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14300932
- raboukhalil 7y agoIn case it helps you decide whether to go with a publisher or self-publish, I wrote down some thoughts about the self-publishing avenue: https://medium.com/@robaboukhalil/how-i-wrote-a-technical-book-in-under-200-hours-911d5e4f9e8c?source=friends_link&sk=13c5b15048cf1c8676d6e208181462b7 https://medium.com/@robaboukhalil/how-i-wrote-a-technical-bo... :)
- timClicks 7y agoReally curious how self-publishers market their material. Do you actively advertise?
- zrail 7y agoBuild an email list and sell into that list. Build the list by writing relevant helpful things and post them for free with a signup link.
- ghaff 7y agoIt may be worth noting that, while there's some built in marketing/advertising by going through a publisher, you probably shouldn't overestimate how much. You're still going to be doing most of the marketing, whether self-published or through a publisher. With me, plugging the book at conferences. Trying to get people I know who read it to put reviews on Amazon. (In my experience, lots more people say they will than actually do it.) I was able to arrange a book signing at one event. Email list/newsletter if you have one. Social media. Website/blog. Etc.
- lone_haxx0r 7y ago> Why’d I write the book? Non-native English speaker here. Does this mean why would I write the book or why did I write the book?
- jcalabro 7y agoI think from the context it means "why did I write the book".
- mxcrossb 7y ago> When editing, print out your manuscript and edit it with a red pen. I also do this for all of my papers and find it extremely helpful. Though I’d be curious if any of you have found a good digital process.
- sytelus 7y agoHow about tools like Grammerly? Sentence rewriting, spell & grammar check be electronic and automated.
- hopscotch 7y agoOnly a partial substitute.
- antisemiotic 7y agoTablet with a digital pen? Not many seem to offer pens with the same high precision technology as graphic tablets, though. (I have a Samsung Tab S3 and the pen is great, though the USB socket barely connects after a year, I hope the repair will be covered by the warranty)
- tapirl 7y agoI wrote my book (Go 101) as a hobby. When I solved a confusion in using Go, I wrote one blog article. In the end, I wrote about 25 articles. Then I write some basic chapters to finish the book. I have never a plan to publish it as paper books.
- asicsp 7y agoGood list of tips and congrats on finishing the book, 1.5 years is a lot! >Pad the timeline yup, despite finishing two books, I naively thought I'd take about a month for the third (I already had most of the stuff as a tutorial on GitHub) and it ended up taking 2.5 months (granted some were unexpected delays, but still) >forgot to give context for something that's been a worrying consistent one among the few critical feedback I've got, but as I'm self-publishing ebooks, at least I have the option of addressing them quickly (this also ties with points in the article about getting early feedback, especially those who are experts in the fields)
- perlgeek 7y agoAnother one: If you are fine writing blog posts, but have trouble writing for a book because you think suddenly things need to be perfect (and run into writer's blog)... Then start with blog posts. Ask your publishers if you can publish them. If not, write them as if you'd publish them on your blog. Then take the blog posts, and turn them into chapters of your book. A blog post tends to be a bit more self-contained than a book chapter, but even for a book chapter, people appreciate it if they can read it separately. Other things: * don't expect to get rich. Writing usually pays way less than programming. * no many how many passes you have made, you'll always find spelling and grammar errors (even after a professional copy editor went over it). Try to get them fixed, but also accept it as a fact of life that things won't end. * Making good illustrations takes quite some time. * Expect illustrations to be printed black and white, with grays being butchered, unless you have negotiated otherwise your publisher. * The publisher has a project manager for you. Keep them updated. They'll be more lenient with delays if you tell them early. Communicate as much as you'd do with a project manager at your job, even if they don't ask you every week or month (because they don't want to be pushy). * Keep a list of contributors, where you add names and email addresses as soon as somebody helped you. After half a year, you would forget at least a few contributors. List people by name in a "Thank you" section. Everybody likes to read their own name in a book :-) * Keep a list of people + email addresses who expressed interest in your project. The publisher likely will send out ebook copies to people, in the hope that they will review your book on amazon. Be prepared for that.
- ghaff 7y agoOne of the things that this post highlights is the difficulty of getting others to do things to help you whether copyediting, technical editing, contributions, or (in particular) co-authoring. It's understandable. People are busy and way more open to helping out in principle than in practice. But getting reviewers is really tough and usually takes a lot of nagging. And, unless the publisher is covering it for you, figure on paying a copy-editor; it's unlikely someone reading the manuscript over as a favor will be thorough (and skilled) enough.
- blueboo 7y agoI don’t understand why anyone would choose to do this. If you have the knowledge to write a book that has demand, you could earn way more money and be treated better by putting those skills into practice in an engineering team. And if you feel the need to write, sharing knowledge on a blog or open source project only accelerate your career and improves your earning outlook. I guess the answer to this riddle in 2019 is that this dynamic just isn’t the case outside of developed countries
- PixelPaul 7y agoHow does someone self publish to amazon books?