5 ms·

Writing a technical book: from idea to print

181 points by sararob 6y ago

gregdoesit 6y ago
This is a nice summary, and shows the benefit of working with a publisher, when you are writing a book that is similar to ones they have published already. You get a lot of support, and will definitely benefit distribution-wise later as well. Congratulations to the author - especially on publishing relatively quickly, in 10 months from the idea! And it's very nice to read that all royalties are going to Girls Who Code. I've worked with O'Reilly and a few other publishers on a proposal that was slightly different to what they usually publish. I went through the same submission process, working with an acquisitions editor, similar to how it happened in this case. In my case, O'Reilly rejected the proposal after a month and half. The feedback in my case was that the book competes with another project, which project got priority. Sure enough, I took the proposal without any changes to another publisher, worked with the acquisitions editor there, had the proposal accepted and we went ahead with the writing process with a development editor. In the end, working with the other publisher did not work out for me. They did not publish the type of book I was writing, and the feedback from the editors kept nudging me to "shape" the book into the type of book this publisher knew would sell, and would sell well. Unfortunately, it didn't feel like the type of book I was excited to write. A year and some time later, I'm still writing the book -The Software Engineer's Guidebook[1] - and if all goes according to plan, I'll publish it early next year. What I've learned with working with a book publisher, is just how involved the process is. Now, instead of taking a $5,000 royalty upon completion of the manuscript, I'm budgeting to spend around $5,000 out of pocket on development/copy editing, cover design and production editing. The things that the publisher would have otherwise paid for. It's a bit simpler to hire professionals these days for these areas thanks to sites like Reedsy[2], which I do recommend for fellow authors self-publishing in finding support on various publishing tasks. [1] https://www.engguidebook.com/ https://www.engguidebook.com/ [2] https://reedsy.com/ https://reedsy.com/
- ghaff 6y ago
  I've had mixed feelings about publishers in the past. There is probably still some cachet in a name brand publisher. And they do some things for you which would otherwise take time. On the other hand, for better or worse, editing was pretty lightweight and more errors crept through copy-editing than should have. I did go ahead with a v2 of one book but I probably wouldn't actively pursue a publisher if I do another book at some point. The summary makes it sound as if the co-authors worked together pretty well although I'm sure it wasn't completely friction-free. It's very easy to end up with a co-author who likes the idea of having written a book more than they like the act of writing it.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  I've been working on my first book with Manning (should be out in the next few months). Without the structure a publisher provides it's likely I would not have come even vaguely close to finishing. The marketing is icing, really.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Deadlines are definitely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can be really inconvenient if something takes longer, other priorities pop up, you just feel you need to release a chapter even though you're not really happy with it, etc. On the other hand, in the absence of deadlines, it's easy to put things to the side for a "week" that turns into a month or two.
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      There are deadlines, and they helped, but a lot of it was about having someone I "owed" something to. Another thing I did was plot my word count per commit. Once per week I would post it to an internal channel at work and add a sentence or two summarising my week. The most interesting thing is that while my output could fluctuate a lot per week, the overall trend was fairly stable.
  - petr25102018 6y ago
    Even though I wouldn't want the publisher to make the outline of my book for me, I have to say that Manning books were some of my favourites. Their structure is pretty good.
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      Manning have a fair amount of docs and support for preparing a TOC, including soliciting opinions from outside experts. I imagine it's similar for other publishers. I didn't feel like I was being made to follow a template. In fact the TOC changed a lot over the course of writing.
      - 6y ago
- dd82 6y ago
  Signed up for the notification when the book is published. I really liked your article about the product minded engineer, and follow your blog. Given the timeline you refer here, I wonder if the project O'Reilly was referring to was Software Engineering at Google[1]. Given the book contents summary on your site, the contents do seem to overlap in some areas, except I don't expect that you're making numerous references to Google in your text :-D [1] https://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-Programming/dp/1492082791 https://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-P...
petr25102018 6y ago
I am also now writing my first book (https://efficientdeveloper.com/ https://efficientdeveloper.com/) and it is really difficult, especially during Covid times (my original idea of writing this book was writing it on a transatlantic cruise... ) What you realise when writing a book is that every sentence gets rewritten 3 times, even before you start caring about proofreading. With all the research and decision making, publishing etc. it takes much more time than it looks.
- ghaff 6y ago
  It really is. I've been going through a fairly significant book revision the past few months. Of course it's been more work than I thought--even though I should have known better. However, even though I'm making quite a few changes/additions including a new chapter, it's a lot easier to patch something that exists than starting with a blank page. The fact that I don't need to churn out a huge number of words lets me focus on the new material and refactoring as needed. When I was an industry analyst, I used to joke that the effort to write something went up by something like the square of the page count. There are counter-examples but mostly I think it's at least somewhat true given that you need to sort of keep your head around the whole project.
  - petr25102018 6y ago
    I think that's true. If larger software projects need more time and resources than small ones (when comparing effort per LOC), I am pretty sure that with books it is the same. And I agree with the blank page... The more of the book is written, the easier it gets (I think).
- dkarlovi 6y ago
  > It took an hour to read, I thought it would take an hour to write.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    Also, "If I had more time, I would have made it shorter"
pjam 6y ago
This is great and really useful to me! I am also, like others here, in the process of writing my first "book": https://redis.pjam.me/ https://redis.pjam.me/. Mainly inspired by https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/ https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/, rebuilding Redis, instead of git, in Ruby. > For my first few sections I wrote the code as I wrote the sections, but then Lak made the suggestion that it would probably be easier to write the code first and then write the chapter I can echo this a thousand times, I've written the last three chapters this way and this has made a huge difference, wish I had known that earlier! I will also add that it really made me learn so much because even though I thought I knew quite a bit about Ruby (I knew early on that I didn't know much about Redis). So many times I found myself trying to explain something and realizing that I didn't actually know how it worked and ended up spending hours (days?) researching the inner workings of said thing PS: Using quotes around book mostly because that's the imposter syndrome kicking in, I was calling it "a series of blog post" for a while, to kinda downplay it
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  > So many times I found myself trying to explain something and realizing that either I didn't actually know how it worked and ended up spending hours (days?) researching the inner workings of said thing This has been, by far, the best thing about writing. It is also, by far, the worst thing about writing. The constant terror that I am full of shit.
- __mharrison__ 6y ago
  This is a good tip. If you are writing a project/code heavy book, write the code first. They re-write the code taking intensive notes along the way. There's your outline.
forrestbrazeal 6y ago
Having recently released a "technical" book with a large traditional publisher (Wiley) [0], here are a few of my learnings: - Expect nothing from the publisher in terms of marketing support. In fact, a good nonfiction book proposal is going to spend most of its length explaining to the publisher how you will sell the book for them through your connections and credibility - not the other way around. It's all on you. - Don't do it for the money. You're going to make 10-15% of a pretty small pie. If you want to write info products as a moneymaking side gig and you have any following at all, self publish! So why go with a traditional publisher? I don't feel this is fully articulated in the OP, but here was my reasoning: - The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people, so if you care about maximizing readership and you don't have a stupid-large online following, their network effects through bookstores, library sales, etc will help you sell more copies than you could on your own (though again, you'll see very little of the money!) - There's still some social proof involved with traditional publishing, and it's a nice thing to do once - just so you know in the back of your head that you "can" - In my case, I was producing a highly graphic book that really doesn't work except in print and in full color, and I needed the resources of a traditional publishing house to make it not look terrible. The Wiley experience was overall positive for me and I don't regret it, but if I ever produce a text-based info product in future it's hard to look away from the ROI advantages of self-publishing. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/1119677629/ https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/...
- ghaff 6y ago
  >The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people, Maybe. On the other hand, the publisher sets the price which may be higher than you'd want to set it to maximize readership. For that matter, if you really don't care about bringing money in, you can even make a digital version (or a subset of one) available for free--which I've done in the past.
  - forrestbrazeal 6y ago
    well, yes and no. On the one hand, if maximizing eyeballs is really the only reason you want to write a book, maybe it should just be a blog post. On the other hand, the publisher can and does negotiate price to do volume deals with retailers. Barnes and Noble buys in bulk at a price we can assume is optimal for them.
Mageek 6y ago
Thank you for sharing your experience! It is really insightful.
__mharrison__ 6y ago
This is a great post mirroring much of my OReilly process. Writing a book can be a wonderful process. After authoring over a dozen books, I'm making an end-to-end authoring course[0] for those interested in self-publishing. I interview a dozen authoring folks that are known around these parts to get their wisdom as well. 0 - https://mattharrison.podia.com/effective-authoring https://mattharrison.podia.com/effective-authoring
HerculesMull 6y ago
This is a valuable guide through the entire process. Thanks for sharing.
kumarvvr 6y ago
As a curious 'outsider' (Developer, not a writer), is it worth the time and effort to publish a book on Self-Publish platforms like Amazon Kindle? What I am basically looking for is to create a strong resume and some bit of passive income.
- ghaff 6y ago
  From your description, probably not if you're just curious. - Writing a book is a lot of writing--even if you do a shorter one. At a minimum, I'd start blogging on the topic before tackling a book. - "create a strong resume" Under the right circumstances, the right book can add to a strong resume but it's not going to create one by itself. And books from name publishers in the space will have more effect--fairly or not. - "some bit of passive income" Don't count on it. There are outliers but you're going to have to pay up-front for services like editing and probably design. (And these aren't really optional.) You may or may not earn the cost of those back. I've written books and they've been useful reputationally. They're also a lot of work, I've been able to write them partially on company time, and they're a direct fit with my day job.

181 points by sararob 6y ago

This is a nice summary, and shows the benefit of working with a publisher, when you are writing a book that is similar to ones they have published already. You get a lot of support, and will definitely benefit distribution-wise later as well. Congratulations to the author - especially on publishing relatively quickly, in 10 months from the idea! And it's very nice to read that all royalties are going to Girls Who Code. I've worked with O'Reilly and a few other publishers on a proposal that was slightly different to what they usually publish. I went through the same submission process, working with an acquisitions editor, similar to how it happened in this case. In my case, O'Reilly rejected the proposal after a month and half. The feedback in my case was that the book competes with another project, which project got priority. Sure enough, I took the proposal without any changes to another publisher, worked with the acquisitions editor there, had the proposal accepted and we went ahead with the writing process with a development editor. In the end, working with the other publisher did not work out for me. They did not publish the type of book I was writing, and the feedback from the editors kept nudging me to "shape" the book into the type of book this publisher knew would sell, and would sell well. Unfortunately, it didn't feel like the type of book I was excited to write. A year and some time later, I'm still writing the book -The Software Engineer's Guidebook[1] - and if all goes according to plan, I'll publish it early next year. What I've learned with working with a book publisher, is just how involved the process is. Now, instead of taking a $5,000 royalty upon completion of the manuscript, I'm budgeting to spend around $5,000 out of pocket on development/copy editing, cover design and production editing. The things that the publisher would have otherwise paid for. It's a bit simpler to hire professionals these days for these areas thanks to sites like Reedsy[2], which I do recommend for fellow authors self-publishing in finding support on various publishing tasks. [1] https://www.engguidebook.com/ https://www.engguidebook.com/ [2] https://reedsy.com/ https://reedsy.com/

ghaff 6y ago
I've had mixed feelings about publishers in the past. There is probably still some cachet in a name brand publisher. And they do some things for you which would otherwise take time. On the other hand, for better or worse, editing was pretty lightweight and more errors crept through copy-editing than should have. I did go ahead with a v2 of one book but I probably wouldn't actively pursue a publisher if I do another book at some point. The summary makes it sound as if the co-authors worked together pretty well although I'm sure it wasn't completely friction-free. It's very easy to end up with a co-author who likes the idea of having written a book more than they like the act of writing it.
jacques_chester 6y ago
I've been working on my first book with Manning (should be out in the next few months). Without the structure a publisher provides it's likely I would not have come even vaguely close to finishing. The marketing is icing, really.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Deadlines are definitely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can be really inconvenient if something takes longer, other priorities pop up, you just feel you need to release a chapter even though you're not really happy with it, etc. On the other hand, in the absence of deadlines, it's easy to put things to the side for a "week" that turns into a month or two.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    There are deadlines, and they helped, but a lot of it was about having someone I "owed" something to. Another thing I did was plot my word count per commit. Once per week I would post it to an internal channel at work and add a sentence or two summarising my week. The most interesting thing is that while my output could fluctuate a lot per week, the overall trend was fairly stable.
- petr25102018 6y ago
  Even though I wouldn't want the publisher to make the outline of my book for me, I have to say that Manning books were some of my favourites. Their structure is pretty good.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    Manning have a fair amount of docs and support for preparing a TOC, including soliciting opinions from outside experts. I imagine it's similar for other publishers. I didn't feel like I was being made to follow a template. In fact the TOC changed a lot over the course of writing.
    - 6y ago
dd82 6y ago
Signed up for the notification when the book is published. I really liked your article about the product minded engineer, and follow your blog. Given the timeline you refer here, I wonder if the project O'Reilly was referring to was Software Engineering at Google[1]. Given the book contents summary on your site, the contents do seem to overlap in some areas, except I don't expect that you're making numerous references to Google in your text :-D [1] https://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-Programming/dp/1492082791 https://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-P...

petr25102018 6y ago

I am also now writing my first book (https://efficientdeveloper.com/ https://efficientdeveloper.com/) and it is really difficult, especially during Covid times (my original idea of writing this book was writing it on a transatlantic cruise... ) What you realise when writing a book is that every sentence gets rewritten 3 times, even before you start caring about proofreading. With all the research and decision making, publishing etc. it takes much more time than it looks.

ghaff 6y ago
It really is. I've been going through a fairly significant book revision the past few months. Of course it's been more work than I thought--even though I should have known better. However, even though I'm making quite a few changes/additions including a new chapter, it's a lot easier to patch something that exists than starting with a blank page. The fact that I don't need to churn out a huge number of words lets me focus on the new material and refactoring as needed. When I was an industry analyst, I used to joke that the effort to write something went up by something like the square of the page count. There are counter-examples but mostly I think it's at least somewhat true given that you need to sort of keep your head around the whole project.
- petr25102018 6y ago
  I think that's true. If larger software projects need more time and resources than small ones (when comparing effort per LOC), I am pretty sure that with books it is the same. And I agree with the blank page... The more of the book is written, the easier it gets (I think).
dkarlovi 6y ago
> It took an hour to read, I thought it would take an hour to write.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  Also, "If I had more time, I would have made it shorter"

pjam 6y ago

This is great and really useful to me! I am also, like others here, in the process of writing my first "book": https://redis.pjam.me/ https://redis.pjam.me/. Mainly inspired by https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/ https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/, rebuilding Redis, instead of git, in Ruby. > For my first few sections I wrote the code as I wrote the sections, but then Lak made the suggestion that it would probably be easier to write the code first and then write the chapter I can echo this a thousand times, I've written the last three chapters this way and this has made a huge difference, wish I had known that earlier! I will also add that it really made me learn so much because even though I thought I knew quite a bit about Ruby (I knew early on that I didn't know much about Redis). So many times I found myself trying to explain something and realizing that I didn't actually know how it worked and ended up spending hours (days?) researching the inner workings of said thing PS: Using quotes around book mostly because that's the imposter syndrome kicking in, I was calling it "a series of blog post" for a while, to kinda downplay it

jacques_chester 6y ago
> So many times I found myself trying to explain something and realizing that either I didn't actually know how it worked and ended up spending hours (days?) researching the inner workings of said thing This has been, by far, the best thing about writing. It is also, by far, the worst thing about writing. The constant terror that I am full of shit.
__mharrison__ 6y ago
This is a good tip. If you are writing a project/code heavy book, write the code first. They re-write the code taking intensive notes along the way. There's your outline.

forrestbrazeal 6y ago

Having recently released a "technical" book with a large traditional publisher (Wiley) [0], here are a few of my learnings: - Expect nothing from the publisher in terms of marketing support. In fact, a good nonfiction book proposal is going to spend most of its length explaining to the publisher how you will sell the book for them through your connections and credibility - not the other way around. It's all on you. - Don't do it for the money. You're going to make 10-15% of a pretty small pie. If you want to write info products as a moneymaking side gig and you have any following at all, self publish! So why go with a traditional publisher? I don't feel this is fully articulated in the OP, but here was my reasoning: - The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people, so if you care about maximizing readership and you don't have a stupid-large online following, their network effects through bookstores, library sales, etc will help you sell more copies than you could on your own (though again, you'll see very little of the money!) - There's still some social proof involved with traditional publishing, and it's a nice thing to do once - just so you know in the back of your head that you "can" - In my case, I was producing a highly graphic book that really doesn't work except in print and in full color, and I needed the resources of a traditional publishing house to make it not look terrible. The Wiley experience was overall positive for me and I don't regret it, but if I ever produce a text-based info product in future it's hard to look away from the ROI advantages of self-publishing. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/1119677629/ https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/...

ghaff 6y ago
>The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people, Maybe. On the other hand, the publisher sets the price which may be higher than you'd want to set it to maximize readership. For that matter, if you really don't care about bringing money in, you can even make a digital version (or a subset of one) available for free--which I've done in the past.
- forrestbrazeal 6y ago
  well, yes and no. On the one hand, if maximizing eyeballs is really the only reason you want to write a book, maybe it should just be a blog post. On the other hand, the publisher can and does negotiate price to do volume deals with retailers. Barnes and Noble buys in bulk at a price we can assume is optimal for them.

Mageek 6y ago

Thank you for sharing your experience! It is really insightful.

__mharrison__ 6y ago

This is a great post mirroring much of my OReilly process. Writing a book can be a wonderful process. After authoring over a dozen books, I'm making an end-to-end authoring course[0] for those interested in self-publishing. I interview a dozen authoring folks that are known around these parts to get their wisdom as well. 0 - https://mattharrison.podia.com/effective-authoring https://mattharrison.podia.com/effective-authoring

HerculesMull 6y ago

This is a valuable guide through the entire process. Thanks for sharing.

kumarvvr 6y ago

As a curious 'outsider' (Developer, not a writer), is it worth the time and effort to publish a book on Self-Publish platforms like Amazon Kindle? What I am basically looking for is to create a strong resume and some bit of passive income.

ghaff 6y ago
From your description, probably not if you're just curious. - Writing a book is a lot of writing--even if you do a shorter one. At a minimum, I'd start blogging on the topic before tackling a book. - "create a strong resume" Under the right circumstances, the right book can add to a strong resume but it's not going to create one by itself. And books from name publishers in the space will have more effect--fairly or not. - "some bit of passive income" Don't count on it. There are outliers but you're going to have to pay up-front for services like editing and probably design. (And these aren't really optional.) You may or may not earn the cost of those back. I've written books and they've been useful reputationally. They're also a lot of work, I've been able to write them partially on company time, and they're a direct fit with my day job.