How to Write a Technical Book
serhack.me
serhack.me
For me, the best way is just to start writing it. I've written a book about a Java library last year named "Practical Vavr" [1], I had the idea since some weeks/months and with the COVID situation having time at home, just told to myself now is the time.
Didn't thought a lot about anything, except for how the book should be laid out, I thought the process was interesting so I went full on it, discovered leanpub and other websites that makes the process easy as just writing some Markdown.
I think that the hardest thing is the marketing around the book, how to tell the world you wrote it and why they should be interested in reading it (and buying it). I just posted it here and there on the web (reddit, twitter mainly), didn't made a lot of fuss about it, I don't know how anyway.
In the end it was more about the experience of writing one and finishing it, than making big money (even if I was able to reach almost 100 people totally unknown people who were kind enough to trust that the content would be good and buy it).
Writing a technical book is a nice experience if you feel confident. If you have the passion and dedication to write, it'll be a journey with the "side-effect" of earning exposure and if you're lucky, also money. But you should not write a technical book for money (set as the first goal).
Marketing a book, especially a technical one, is difficult and requires time. Since most of the times it's suitable for a niche, you have to look for people and to explain why reading your book would be worth it. Does it contain any special feature that makes it unique? A particular focus? A well-written introduction?
I'd like to discuss about the points you marked. "The best way to start a book is writing". When you have the inspiration of writing, it seems "you do not have to think too much about details, a possible outline". It's partially correct and wrong. On one hand, to publish a book, you need content and what's the best way to create content? Yes, it's writing! On the other hand, people are not looking at your book for "content", BUT for highly quality content. Thus, not only you have to write the content, you have also to think about the structure, the outline, the key-points, and many others element that keeps the reader "on" your book.
I'm in the midst (about 18k words in) of writing a book about publishing specifically for technical people. I do talk about traditional publishing and self-publishing, with most of the words focused on actionable advice to avoid common pitfalls when self-publishing.
I've been previewing some of the information (not in the form in the book, but just some of the topics) on my newsletter:
Is that a request to see your credentials in paper form? I believe I could write books that would make Rudin's analysis books or CLRS' algo book more accessible[0] to a lay person without losing rigor. But I lack a PhD certificate in either math or compsci. Can I simply write a sample chapter and send it to their (say, Manning) technical team for evaluation?
[0] For example, just the act of stepping through/expanding the given algos/functions in the style of Scheme/Discrete math textbooks would already make CLRS more approachable, not to mention breaking down the existing math into maximally explicit bits.