4 ms·

I hope for it to be around ~500 pages Too long. It takes more work, but try to make it shorter. The best value I've gotten from books is being able to avoid

I hope for it to be around ~500 pages Too long. It takes more work, but try to make it shorter. The best value I've gotten from books is being able to avoid the slew of occasionally useful factoids and be told what stuff I should really care about. The endless details I can find on the Web if I need them; the problem a tech author should solve is in helping the reader know what to care about and when.

Toph 14y ago
Not sure if this is still true but I heard some publishers had a minimum pages requirement.
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  I've written for Wrox (the first edition, the one that went bankrupt :)) When I was one of two co-authors of a book I don't recall being told to hit a specific page count, but there was a push for a certain degree of "thoroughness." This typically meant going into possibly tangential details to avoid sending someone off to another resource. (Though if the other resources was another Wrox book then allowances we made.) For example, in a book about XML (Pro VB 6 & XML[0]) there was a need to go through the XML specification. A whole chapter. I ended up using this as an opportunity to explain the spec and build some helper libraries that would make interacting with a DOM easier later on, so not a total loss, but it had a feeling of busy-work to me. That was sort of a best-case scenario; two authors splitting book. I also worked on assorted individual chapters for other books and there I had an incentive to bolster the word count because in some cases it affected the pay. In my experience writing a single chapter meant either a flat amount or a per-word rate. Writing multiple chapters opened up the option of royalties instead. I took royalties on the VB book and did OK. Sadly this gave me a false impression of tech writing as a profession. Many Wrox books were more a collection of padded chapters than coherent, well-planned, guides. OTOH I think many people plunked down $40-50 just to get specific chapters that would get them past some problem. [0]: As the Velvet Underground sang, "Those were different times." :)
thedeuce 14y ago
Exactly, all the best books are in 250-300 pages IMO. If you can't teach me html5 in that amount of pages, you wont be able to in 500. Please don't make one of those books that are like a reference(that becomes out dated quickly) where I can almost find your whole book verbatim on an html5 website. Good luck! We told you what you shouldn't do, now if you want $$ you need to figure out what you SHOULD do. :)
dsawler 14y ago
Seconded. Read "On Writing Well" -- write something, cut it in half, then cut that in half, and then once again cut that in half.
- horsehead 14y ago
  When writing for publication, I enjoy pondering this quote: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." From S. Shchukin, Memoirs That is to say, if you're going to write something, every word has to have potency. This gets at the cut in half, cut in half, cut in half advice. In short, good writing is concise.
  - jamesbritt 14y ago
    At some techie user group someone had a copy of a pretty brief O'Reilly Rails book. I observed that the book price seemed the same as what O'Reilly charged for "full-length" books. A friend then said he would be happy to pay even twice as much if the author could have made it half-again as short. BTW, I could have sworn that quote was from Chekov. Either way, on the money.
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      Yeah, it's Chekhov's gun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun
    - horsehead 14y ago
      Yeah, I think it's a variation of the Chekov quote (I pulled it from the chekov's gun's wiki. That was the quote that stuck out to me the most from my classes in Uni).

Toph 14y ago

Not sure if this is still true but I heard some publishers had a minimum pages requirement.

jamesbritt 14y ago
I've written for Wrox (the first edition, the one that went bankrupt :)) When I was one of two co-authors of a book I don't recall being told to hit a specific page count, but there was a push for a certain degree of "thoroughness." This typically meant going into possibly tangential details to avoid sending someone off to another resource. (Though if the other resources was another Wrox book then allowances we made.) For example, in a book about XML (Pro VB 6 & XML[0]) there was a need to go through the XML specification. A whole chapter. I ended up using this as an opportunity to explain the spec and build some helper libraries that would make interacting with a DOM easier later on, so not a total loss, but it had a feeling of busy-work to me. That was sort of a best-case scenario; two authors splitting book. I also worked on assorted individual chapters for other books and there I had an incentive to bolster the word count because in some cases it affected the pay. In my experience writing a single chapter meant either a flat amount or a per-word rate. Writing multiple chapters opened up the option of royalties instead. I took royalties on the VB book and did OK. Sadly this gave me a false impression of tech writing as a profession. Many Wrox books were more a collection of padded chapters than coherent, well-planned, guides. OTOH I think many people plunked down $40-50 just to get specific chapters that would get them past some problem. [0]: As the Velvet Underground sang, "Those were different times." :)

thedeuce 14y ago

Exactly, all the best books are in 250-300 pages IMO. If you can't teach me html5 in that amount of pages, you wont be able to in 500. Please don't make one of those books that are like a reference(that becomes out dated quickly) where I can almost find your whole book verbatim on an html5 website. Good luck! We told you what you shouldn't do, now if you want $$ you need to figure out what you SHOULD do. :)

dsawler 14y ago

Seconded. Read "On Writing Well" -- write something, cut it in half, then cut that in half, and then once again cut that in half.

horsehead 14y ago
When writing for publication, I enjoy pondering this quote: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." From S. Shchukin, Memoirs That is to say, if you're going to write something, every word has to have potency. This gets at the cut in half, cut in half, cut in half advice. In short, good writing is concise.
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  At some techie user group someone had a copy of a pretty brief O'Reilly Rails book. I observed that the book price seemed the same as what O'Reilly charged for "full-length" books. A friend then said he would be happy to pay even twice as much if the author could have made it half-again as short. BTW, I could have sworn that quote was from Chekov. Either way, on the money.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Yeah, it's Chekhov's gun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun
  - horsehead 14y ago
    Yeah, I think it's a variation of the Chekov quote (I pulled it from the chekov's gun's wiki. That was the quote that stuck out to me the most from my classes in Uni).