You too can write a book | Hacker News Reader

You too can write a book

parentheticallyspeaking.org

213 pointsazhenley76 comments

I agree. I DID write a book! https://howtoopensource.dev/

My biggest tip is this: Don’t skip getting beta readers. High quality feedback is really hard to come by. I changed my tool chain to add a google form at the end of each chapter and got strong buy in from a handful of people with the finished first draft in a beta state. In the end some bailed but one left amazing feedback resulting in massive structural changes.

The process of writing a book is two things (to me). The most obvious is sharing information. The second, often overlooked, but biggest benefit IMHO is how you will grow and learn the source material even better than you already do. Even if you don’t ever publish it, it’s still worthwhile to putting in the effort to write a book. GLHF.

What kind of software did you use to write your book?

It was a mix of markdown, liquid, scss and ruby scripts via a Rakefile to tie it together to generate html.

I bought a prince XML license for PDF generation. It was a hodgepodge of stuff.

Check out https://typst.app/ if you're looking to write a book yourself.

https://hypermedia.systems/ was written with it.

edit: the github page directly includes an example of PDF output, so maybe the site is just out of date.

----

I'm a bit confused; the site claims HTML and PDF outputs are "Coming soon"

what export formats are supported? HTML and PDF seem very significant to me, and are how I'd likely share most documents with non-tech inclined people.

I started using it a few days ago, but I've been under the impression that PDF has been possible in Typst since mid-2023 at least.

As of 0.4.0, Typst supports PDF, SVG and PNG outputs. The Typst team seem to be rapidly adding features, but I don't think HTML support is coming soon.

There is currently work done to support basic HTML support. PDF is supported since day one of the public release in march 2023 (before v0.1). The roadmap mentions tagged PDF which is mainly needed for accessibility.

I'm writing my book in Markdown files in IntelliJ and pushing it to GitHub. Use the tools you know.

For very long documents Word can be very difficult to maintain. Anything that requires you first write in simple text and then compiles is preferred. I tried Skrivenr, but found it old, clunky, buggy and poorly designed. I was far more productive in LaTex, but encountered problems when converting to Word (which most publishers prefer). Sure I tried Pandoc, but maintaining flow between versions of my book was a small hell.

In the end, I believe that there is no easy solution.

Typst has excellent collaboration tools. Both Typst and Overleaf do not support Doc export, but pdf to doc is relatively easy.

For beta ebook publishing I can't help but recommend my friends at https://leanpub.com where my latest book is currently at the top of the charts.

I've been publishing with them since they launched (a long time ago) and have made nearly six figures lifetime revenue. Plus they give you one-button push to publish to print versions at Amazon.

As someone that has bought your books in the past, it's because of your personality and the quality of your writing more than the platform.

+1 for Leanpub, a great platform run by amazing people.

looks great, thanks for this!

The challenge is not writing a book, but letting it go.

I wrote Understanding SEO https://fullstackoptimizatio.gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo...

4 times. Each time it took me a year. The last time together with an editor. And I could have gone on, over every word, every sentence again. In the end my editor forces me. In the end you just have to publish it, otherwise it does not exist.

Still think I did good, even after more than 7 years I still sell a few paper and some more e copies per month just by WOM, so yeah, must be some value in there.

I know what you mean. Writing a book takes 2x discipline than any other thing:

1x to actually write it + 1x to call it done.

The blog post should more accurately be titled “You too can write a textbook”

This is a good observation. I was hoping to read a blog that wasn't so narrowly focused to just text book publishing.

Here’s here I wrote and self published books about my adventures around the world, print and ebook.

I also have a hardcover photography book.

Happy to help if you have questions.

http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professiona...

Thanks for that excellent write-up!

The main counter-argument to this I have read is "you should just publish blog posts instead." This is, among other reasons, because

- The bar to releasing the first thing to the public is lower,

- The regular cadence builds an organic following,

- You can iterate on subjects in the open,

- You have more freedom to organise content non-linearly.

The main drawback I can think of is you cannot call yourself "author of book X". Are there any other reasons not to blog instead of book?

I started with a blog to get into the habit of writing and get better at it, Then I published books.

The main reason to do so is that I get paid for book sales, but not for the blog.

I agree with this take. Blogging is a the first step towards writing a book.

However, through blogging I've realized just how impressive book writing is. I work really hard to build coherent blog posts, I cannot begin to imagine scaling that to a book.

It's kind of like software in a way. Anyone can code a toy, not everyone can build a product.

I usually participates in question/answer communities to answer things, I almost never ask my own questions.

As a result, I have various sources of notes I've figured out and get high use/reuse from.

I also do a lot of technical training at work, for both beginners and advanced users, so have a wealth of tried and tested content there.

I've often contemplated writing an eBook on each topic and selling them on Leanpub/Amazon/Google for 5 or 10 bucks each.

The idea of limiting myself to 6 pages per topic is appealing. That would force an economy of writing and density of content which appeals to me.

Write a book! +1 you all can do it

Here are some of my tips from when I wrote Debugging Your Brain.

How I developed my ideas for the book (discussions, conference talks) https://www.caseywatts.com/blog/casey-s-writing-process/

How I got feedback from beta readers https://docs.google.com/document/d/13EwX8L6RCUbiu86Lik1xZ8eX...

How I wrote and typeset my book from markdown to an eBook and print book, via pandoc/latex https://gist.github.com/caseywatts/3d8150fe04e0d8462cfc4d51b...

As a university lecturer, I have interviewed many people… academics and admins. I have taught in many S E Asian universities and multi-lingualism is the norm, with English assumed to be the ‘Lingua franca’. Almost everyone I interview claims to have ‘excellent’ skills in written and spoken English. Almost none of them could produce so much as a single paragraph of English that did not burn my eyes.

Prior to starting writing my first book, I had already accumulated some experience in academic writing. I thought it would be a doddle. I can honestly say that it was one of the most demanding experiences of my life.

The worst thing is the degree to which I was blind to my own shortcomings… just like all those people I interviewed.

Moral of the story… "writing is easy; you just stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead" (Gene Fowler).

Yeah, my thought while reading this was that this is why I am so often disappointed by books.

Gwern recently wrote an article on why not to write a book: https://gwern.net/book-writing

Most of these reasons appear to be tied to commercial publishers. But there is no need to involve a commercial publisher.

You can write a book, but odds are it won't be good or get traction. I think you're better off with video. Videos can remain indexed and accumulate traffic on youtube for years, whereas most books are forgotten/ignored. I have seen plenty of videos from 10+ years ago that still gets lots of comments and traffic.

You can make a video, but odds are it won’t be good or get traction. I think you’re better off with a book. Books can remain indexed and accumulate readers for centuries, whereas most videos are forgotten/ignored. I’ve read plenty of books from decades ago that still get lots of comments and discussion.

not the same thing...billions of people use youtube. There is no library equivalent of youtube. how many use Google Books? Even then, you need an ISBN or a publisher.

Your audience isn't a billion people

When people want to find something or learn about something, they go to YouYube. That is where or how the majority of people find and consume content these days. There is also Google search, but again, these are not books. If your audience is limited, then target niche keywords. Same principle applies. Videos about even the most esoteric of topics still get traffic due to YouTube's popularity.

Per the Lindy Effect, a published book has a higher likelihood of still being readable centuries from now, than a Youtube video.

Youtube is completely owned by Google and their content can't be indexed as easily. "Books" also doesn't mean having an ISBN number, I think plain text should would count as well: blogs, comments, mailing lists, lecture notes, etc. One day Google will decide to scrub all the videos or it will be pushed into irrelevance and will become the Altavista of today. All the videos will disappear too.

unless you get the book in the LOC, it will probably be forgotten or have no trace of its existence. why would google scrub all the videos? that makes no sense. Youtube is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

They can't make money off of them? It will get split up and youtube spun off and they'll have to cut costs. Some maybe deemed inappropriate in the future. We had Geocities, Usenet and other sites and companies which held content then disappeared. Archiving them might be nice? But what's easier to archive and index videos or text form?

One the other hand, books published over a hundred years are still here even though the authors and publishers may long be gone.

The solution is to write follow-up books.

Improve your writing and refine your perspective and gain traction through the friction attributed to this process until you stumble upon a successful iteration of the idea that you are trying to communicate or the principles that your are trying to remind others of and someone else takes notice and writes an article about it on their Substack, where prolific link distributor paulpauper will share it on Hacker News.

> I have seen plenty of videos from 10+ years ago that still gets lots of comments and traffic

Sounds like survivor bias to me

Sheesh, I think we are stuck with the literature we have now forever, and can never get new good books, now that you have published this comment...

Seriously, if no one ever tries, then no one can ever succeed.

What I remember from college is that the instructors who wrote their own books had terrible books.

They used their own books because it was theirs, not because it was good.

Most people do not write well, but the people who can become a standard textbook do. The vast majority of people write worse than this. Usually much worse.

> Most people do not write well…

This very much needs to be said. Also… as we are ‘most people’ we all need to be reminded of this of our own writing.

I agree with the post :)

Writing a book was very personally fulfilling.

I wrote about my self published book earnings a couple years ago.

https://on-systems.tech/blog/130-2022-self-published-book-ea...

This quote got me pretty excited, and I since yesterday I started sketching out some ideas for other books ;p

"First, simply: you believe strongly in your view of the world, and you’re pursuing it with intensity. Right now nobody else is really able to download your brain. Your book becomes how others can download it."

I did this too... As a Covid project I took what I used to do live on a class whiteboard and wrote it up. The second one went from a workshop talk I used to give that kept getting developed more and more. Key for me was keeping to topics and content that won't need to be updated frequently. Figuring out the "Why Now" question: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Now-Timing-Makes-Products/dp/B0CY... Figuring out your startups unit economics: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GJVV8RJ/

I'm in the process of writing a book, Beginning CI/CD, primarily because I have a strange way of learning things, and hoping others might find my teaching style useful. I also struggled with CI/CD and still have those struggles fresh in my mind.

While the author of the article is against commercial publishers, I don't think I'll have the same impact if I were to go with the self-publishing route. Either way it's super unlikely I'll make a profit so it might be better to use it as leverage; also, getting a publisher to publish it shows that there is at least some commercial viability.

Looking for beta readers--if interested, feel free to reply or email me (email on profile.)

Great article, but on Mobile Safari, at least on an IPhone 12 Mini (old, I know, but not that old) this loads with a massive left margin / padding, with all the text overflowing the right side of the screen.

Same on an iPhone 15. Reader mode worked great, though.

Same in Firefox Android.

I started writing a book along side of every video course I make. (I make educational software videos, and discovered that some really enjoy the written version apposed to video - even for software!)

I just use LaTeX with some fancy packages:

https://github.com/princefishthrower/dev-book-template

I too think there can always be more long format literature out there, in a world seemingly dominated by short articles and tweets

I feel there is not enough Satire IT book. Someone ought to take the shit, and by that I mean realistically picture the industry.

So, repackage the energy of https://ludic.mataroa.blog/ into a novel?

I have recently been thinking about fleshing out a story about a completely incompetent agile-type scrumlord, an unlikeable opportunist who is, tragically, unable to better himself in the institutionally broken system that is IT right now.

Oh and also he's sad about WFH because he has a poorly controlled fetish about smelling the air under people's desks.

I meant something along the line of non-fiction. Actual IT book. In your example I'd name it Agile in the real world, with a perfect legit cover, and as you go through the chapters, it starts descending into a complete circus and the joke that it can be.

I did some backend and devops stuff for a while and it can be insane.

On the one hand, I went to college for many years and spent so much time getting certifications to build my resume.

Then when I finally became a sysadmin in a mid/large company, for me to update a linux server I had to ask permission from the cloud group to do so, which took 8 weeks and required 3 rounds of project planning, time estimation, writing dozens of emails and ultimately an escalation over the cloud teams head to the division CIO to ultimately coerce them to provision a new linux server rather than give me appropriate sudo permissions on one I was already "supposed" to manage.

Ultimately I ended up getting the job done.

And then, other than a couple of intense temporary redeployments as a sharepoint frontend developer, which sucked, 90% of my job was to promptly respond to emails, attend 2-5 30 minute to 1 hour meetings a week where I was asked and said very little, and other than that about 20 minutes of work a day.

Playing with my home lab was more intellectually challenging and tech related than my actual tech job, and I probably spent more actual time doing that than actual time doing actual work in my real job.

Leunig cartoon on your "inner book"

https://scontent.fmel18-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/461606...

Bad URL hash?

https://consumer.licensing-publishing.nine.com.au/Assets/V2/...

https://imgur.com/a/Z2iAB7Y

As an author of free online books and POD books, I wholeheartedly second everything in this post.

It's very inspiring indeed

Is it intentionally ironic that there's a grammar mistake in the second sentence of the article?

That would be nice. Problem is rather more simple: the author can't proof-read.

When I proof my own work, I read what I thought I wrote, not what I actually wrote.

100%. We all fall prey to this. Two tricks that help more than you might expect:

1. Read it in a different font than what you write it in.

2. Read it out loud.

Two other effective techniques:

1. Read your sentences or paragraphs in reverse order.

(In other words, if you have sentences or paragraphs 1–5, read them in the order 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.)

2. Have Siri read it out loud to you in an accent as you follow along. (I like hearing it in an Indian accent — it makes me pay closer attention.) The app Voice Dream Reader (iOS/macOS) is great for this.

The general principle is to review the writing in an unfamiliar way.

proof reading one's own work is hard. it's why editors exist

For people missing the point: The person who made the above remark is the author.

What is the mistake? I see none.

Grammarly is a godsend for authors (and anyone who communicates). I wish it worked in mobile...

Having said that, you can have beta readers, editors, and grammarly, and stuff still gets through. I've published with two different publishers and have also written multiple self published books. Errors happen.

Oh hey, this person! The 'Books as software' post has made the rounds on here a few times since its publication in 2006, if I recall correctly, and it's always a controversial+fascinating conversation. They're certainly not a conventional soul:

  We will include mistakes, not because I don’t know the answer, but because this is the best way for you to learn. Including mistakes makes it impossible for you to read passively: you must instead engage with the material, because you can never be sure of the veracity of what you’re reading.

I've never seen this post, though. Speaking as someone who's currently closing in on self-pub after ~18 months of work (lots of research, tbf):

I. As another comment mentions, this is for technical books, and seemingly specifically textbooks (AKA lessons, as opposed to the other three quadrants of technical documentation, references, instructions, and tutorials). In case anyone here is considering writing a fiction book, please do not ever expect to make any money at all. The odds are downright absurd these days.

II. I absolutely agree that it's a sometimes-underappreciated and potentially very lucrative career move if you have real expertise to share and are a good writer. Especially in the vaguely post-blog era.

III. Writing a book but not expecting to make any money from it is... bold. I'm very glad it worked for this person, and if you're looking to use it as a credential to land contracts or appointments, then that's very smart and kind. But I think I speak for many authors when I say that writing a book is very time consuming, and you need to eat somehow. Not all of us are just publishing cleaned-up lecture notes, after all.

I initially shared this person's "offer a print copy as a tip jar" concept, but have gradually moved towards "only publish free snippets" as I consider long term financial feasibility. This applies even more so if, like me, you're writing a prose book that has a 1% chance to be truly popular among laypeople, rather than more realistic textbook-centric goals.

IV. PoD is indeed incredible. For those not in the know, this allows you to sell your book without any significant upfront investment, and have them manage shipping. There's definitely room for profit via many sites; Lulu, for example, will print a 250 page "Digest" (normal) paperback in B&W for $7.56/ea.

I'm also planning on going with http://lulu.com . Arguably it's <50% likely to beat Amazon's uber-popular PoD service on overall sales+profits, but it has some notable advantages:

1. If you're thinking about a publishing a "premium" book, which some textbooks might be, they have some gorgeous options -- both in terms of color printing and cover material. https://www.lulu.com/pricing

2. If you're a web-dev comfortable setting up a Shopify portal on your own site, you can hook it up to Lulu and get "100%" (after PoD costs) of your profit. Obviously, this is potentially a huge deal -- the trick is of course getting Amazon-like numbers of eyeballs on your own site. https://www.lulu.com/sell/sell-on-your-site You can even order copies via API, which seems goofy but potentially fun.

3. They're targeted at DIY authors, and as such offer a nice little knowledge base on formatting and such: https://www.lulu.com/publishing-toolkit I haven't printed any yet, but they're templates are nice to work with.

4. They're not only "not Amazon", they're a B-Corp. Which, hey, we all gotta do what we can when we can, no matter how small.

...I swear I'm just a biased fanboy, not a shill!

V. The cover art space is fucking wild these days, AI has absolutely upended it. Scroll through /r/writers for lots of horror stories. I would be cautious about hiring any freelancers to help you without serious vetting. Plus, Inkscape is free and technical books don't need realistic art!

P.S. Does the author know they're invoking a antisemitic trope with the "(((Parenthetically Speaking)))" title? It seems to be in obvious good faith, but that did draw my attention for a short moment. Maybe just one set of parentheses could do the trick ;)

Replying to your post-scriptum: maybe it’s used to normalise/re-appropriate[1] the triple parentheses?

[1]: https://money.cnn.com/2016/06/03/technology/google-racist-ch...

It has indeed been used by many people to re-appropriate/confuse/normalize. But none of that was the intent here — sometimes a parenthesis is just a … parenthesis, especially since there's no name inside the parens. But this isn't the kind of thing one usefully "discusses"; given that I am indeed not trying to send any messages, I've changed the logo.

Thanks for the PS. That was (obvioulsy) not the intent; it had never occurred to me that it could be read that way, since the bits inside the parentheses are not a proper name. But, to avoid any doubts, I have modified the masthead image to get rid of two pairs of parens.

And yes, that same person.

But why should i? Many excellent books covering every aspect vave been written. Time's better spend elsewhere.

If you become truly an expert at something that has sufficient depth, or is sufficiently obscure, or is sufficiently underestimated, I think you will see, that not every aspect has been covered. Sometimes books also convey a personal opinion of the author of how to approach things. Or they are autobiographies. So many reason to write a book. Or some other textform.

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