Tips for Writing a Technical Book
performancejs.com
performancejs.com
Some more helpful resources I found:
- Advice to Prospective Book Authors from Scott Meyers (of Effective C++ fame): https://www.aristeia.com/authorAdvice.html
- "I wrote a book" by Tryggvi Björgvinsson: 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...
- 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
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.
I don't think Packt is bad publisher but I have no experience in book publishing and have no idea how much publisher really matter. I have used some excellent books from Packt and some not so. Almost all authors who have written for Packt who I found online have had good experience writing for Packt however few do consider them as "second tier" along with Apress while Manning sits in 1st tier [1]. Again I have no idea what this really means.
[1] http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog/books/technology/2018_0207_p...
The top tier publishers pay an advance - which you probably won't ever make back, so you may as well consider it final payment for the book. O'Reilly like to pay nothing up front, so all you ever see are royalties. This can work well for a popular and timely topic. Niche titles won't pay much, although they can still be a good thing to have on a resume.
The really big money used to be in the mainstream - how to use Windows, how to set up an iPhone - but that's less of a thing now that a lot of people Google for help.
Sales figures for hardcore developer titles can be very low. Five figures for a developer title is a solid success. Six figures would be a wildly unexpected best seller, and seven figures a complete unicorn. Four figures are more typical, and high three figures can happen.
The catch with royalties is whether they're a percentage of the cover price or the publisher income. Publisher income can be 50% or less of the cover price, so that's a thing to consider when working out if a book project is worth the time.
With self-publishing, you keep a much higher proportion of the earnings. Anyone who is thinking about this should work some numbers through a spreadsheet. You'll find you can make the same money a publisher would pay with far fewer sales, and if you can get four or five figure sales - unlikely and very difficult, but not impossible - it's a nice alternative income stream.
If you already have any kind of following, it's a no-brainer. If you don't, it's a huge marketing effort, but you still get to have final say on the timing of updates and revisions, which can keep a title earning longer than a publisher would keep it alive.
And then there are typesetters, copywriters, graphists, reviewers, marketers and distribution platforms that do a lot of the work of making a book successful. Sure, writing is critical, but bringing a high quality book to readers requires a lot of work that you have to do yourself when self-publishing.
After a bunch of hunt we moved to what is called a first tier publisher. And the difference is so massive. We are now restructuring and rewriting all chapters. Our reviewers think it can be a landmark book. None of it could have happened with Packt.
I come from a startup world, and was partially able to stomach Packt at the start. But my co-authors have worked at Microsoft Research and Google AI. They just hated dealing with them. And in the end all of us decided we would rather self publish than go with them.
From a 1st tier publisher. ;) But I concur with another comment, it's hard to justify not going with self-publishing in 2019. More so if you're not doing this for money. I would prefer to publish a completely free ebook (like Pro Git, etc.), but it's hard to negotiate this with traditional publishers.
In our case, we authors have been publishing papers for over a decade. And together we have almost 1000 citations for our papers.
And yet, we were not able to think over and improve on certain aspects of a book that we discovered only after talking to our current publisher.
Maybe if you are completely clear on what your book is about and how will readers react to it, a publisher might not matter. But for us, it seems it was not the case.
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.
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.
[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.
Perhaps, but as they say, credibility doesn't pay the rent. What matters in commercial terms of how much money the book ends up putting in your pocket.
If a publisher is keeping 90% of the revenue, the services they offer had better generate at least an order of magnitude more sales to break even, less anything it would have cost you to obtain any other relevant services they provided directly instead. Does anyone here believe that this is in fact the case with the level of marketing that a typical tech publisher will do for a new work from a previously unknown author?
The goal is not to write a book that directly makes money. The goal is to write a book that gets the author hired or promoted, or to land consulting gigs, or to get VC backing.
So, yes, credibility does pay the rent.
Agree on the minimum wage comment, though. I did it for career progression, personal life goals, and passive income.
As for your last remark, most technical publishers are already nimble operations that connect professionals and designers. It just happens that these small companies are owned by large corporations in order to benefit from the access to market channels.
So, unless you're willing to make this a full time job, I don't think it is such a great deal to self-publish your technical books.
You can hire people to do all that -- if you expect to sell your self-published book, and still make more profits than with a publisher.
Or you just ask someone who know, and whose books you like, which ones they use...
Sure, but you could hire independent specialists with exactly the skills you need rather than relying on your publisher's choices, and still retain overall control of your work and the process of distributing it yourself.
If a publisher provides some degree of overall project management as well then evidently there is also a space for professionals to offer that service independently to those authors who don't wish to get involved in such matters themselves.
Even if you have the patience to do this part, most probably the book design will look amateurish.
Perhaps, but the bookshelf next to me clearly demonstrates that big name publishers are capable of producing poorly designed, crudely illustrated, naively typeset, negligibly edited rubbish too.
And you're going to be doing most of the marketing yourself in any case.
For most people, writing a book is an investment whether you go through a publisher or not. Unless it's just a passion project, you're presumably doing it for your career/brand/etc., not to make a meaningful amount of money. If you are evaluating how to go about a book project based on pure financial ROI, the short answer is you should probably do something else.
- As someone else noted, you can put free eBooks online. If you're writing a book for visibility, being able to distribute free copies (or customized versions of free copies) might be a benefit.
- You don't need to conform to publishing industry length standards. If 75 pages cover the topic, you get most of the benefit of publishing "a regular book" for a lot less effort.
- You're on no one's deadline but your own. This has pros and cons but does let you better work a book around life, work, and other projects.
- The style, format, etc. is all up to you. Again, pros and cons.
I have made (a bit) more money with publishers than self-publishing. I'm also not sure if I'd go with a publisher again barring a strong reason to do so.
- Toolkits and tutorials for inexperienced writers. If you never written a book, you probably don't know first thing you should write is outline. You probably also don't have good templates with typography and layouts that gets instantly recognized as good modern book.
- Taskmaster that keeps nudging you: This is super important role. Book writing is tremendously taxing job for most people and its very easy to get in writer's block, put off things and distracted.
- Regular advances: Almost all publishers would deposit money in your bank account at specific intervals during book writing. This keeps you obligated, at least morally, to keep going.
- Book reviews, editing: Various services like cover design, proof reading, recruiting technical reviewers etc.
- Marketing: Almost all publishers would buy sponsored spots on Amazon as well as Google. Some top-tier publishers would have journalists do book reviews, podcasters invite you for interviews. Some very top-tier publishers would have you do book tours at their expense. However, 90% of the authors will end up doing virtually all promotions themselves.
- Brand recognition: Publishing from very top-tier organizations like MIT Press has huge brand recognition due to their stringent selection process.
I think the future of writing is not even book-size publishing but probably series of posts published as chapters online.
Discl.: founder here.
marvin@bubblin.io
Edit: I understand the issue now. Thanks!
Write in Markdown, click a button, get a book (PDF, EPUB, MOBI). Click a different button and your book is for sale with an attractive landing page, etc. You can even create a MOOC with one click, again based on Markdown...
(disclosure: cofounder)
- You can open source the book. This can help you gain much more audience and career recognition.
- You are not bound by having to fit in to publisher's specific series, its style of writing
- You can chose your own title. Most publishers in technical books arena will force you to have title that is consistent with their series.
- You do things in your own time without pressure, may be even open sourcing book from day 1
- You are not bound by page limit. Most publishers would force you to have 250-400 pages, no matter what. My personal philosophy is that the most useful books are the shortest and personally I would prefer to write books that are as little as just 50 pages.
The build pipeline looks like:
.md --> .tex --> .pdf/.html/.epub/.mobi/.html
.tex --> .pdf/.html/.epub/.mobi/.html
If you can cope on your own without either of these, sure, self publish.
It is a hard slog, and as others say here, it's unlikely to earn you a reasonable wage - but it's hugely satisfying to see it through knowing how much discipline it takes.
That's a lot of free time. You could:
- Learn a musical instrument pretty well. - Learn a sport and get pretty good at it. - Become a major committer on a large open source project. - Pick up a foreign language and achieve proficiency. - Make a lot of money on the side. - Go back to school and get a degree. - Concentrate on your social life. - Write a book.
If after considering these, you decide that writing a book is the best use of your time, go for it. Think of the money as a nice bonus.
On the flip side, once you've published the book being a noted author may present you with certain kinds of opportunities that may not have been available before. That perhaps is more valuable than the revenue generated from the book.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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)
Non-native English speaker here. Does this mean why would I write the book or why did I write the book?
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.
I have never a plan to publish it as paper books.
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.
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