Writing a technical book: from idea to print
sararobinson.dev
sararobinson.dev
- 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/...
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.
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.
I'm not sure how important physical books are outside of Amazon at this point.
But YMMV of course. I'm in a situation where my books are about gaining credibility and visibility. The money is very incidental.
Other than putting ink on paper, absolutely nothing.
People have various reasons for publishing. Will a publisher get you in front of the most eyes? Maybe, I've talked to a few self-published authors (some who have sold $1Mil+) of their book. Arguably some books do better as self-published works for both distribution and $.
Admittedly, there is social proof for having a book with an animal on the cover.
Congrats again on your work! I love innovative creations. (Have thought about making a Python book for toddlers...)
For the second edition, which I'm working on now, I had serious second thoughts about going with O'Reilly again. Ultimately, I decided that I would, mostly because I knew O'Reilly would be able to spread the word a lot further than I would. I've got a decent network, but not an amazing one.
The reasoning was that I'm a consultant, and the cachet, reach, and resulting leads I'll get from publishing through a known publisher are much more valuable than the theoretical profits I'm missing out on. That was certainly true for the first edition.
Having made that decision, I'm glad that I did. O'Reilly's provided a lot more support with the second edition than they did with the first. My production editor has been fantastic; heavily involved with reviewing draft chapters and very supportive. I also managed to swing a better royalty deal (but still far less than minimum wage) and we've had some great conversations about co-marketing the book.
[1] The Art of Agile Development (2007). I'm writing the second edition in the open; you can find it here: https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/books/aoad2
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.
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.
And I agree with the blank page... The more of the book is written, the easier it gets (I think).
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.
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.
Without the structure a publisher provides it's likely I would not have come even vaguely close to finishing.
The marketing is icing, really.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-P...
> 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
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.
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.
What I am basically looking for is to create a strong resume and some bit of passive income.
- 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.