Here's what it's like to start writing a book

This is exactly how I see these new ebooks, not so much as actual competitors to the oreilly kind of books (because they are more concise), but as longer form thinking than blogs. There's a lot of enthusiasm on self-publishing books, and maybe it will be short-lived, but I hope that in the long term we'll have more and more experts in our community who will share their knowledge on niche topics in the long, self-contained and polished form that books are!

That's a very good point. These 1000 words often get replaced or deleted. I guess that in many creative activities it's painful to edit down, but it usually pays off. Sometimes you don't just delete what you wrote but you rephrase it. I find it much easier to formulate a complex idea when I already have a first version in front of me (even if it's terrible), than to start from nothing.

If you don't fear deleting words you wrote, it's unlikely you'll be able to finish writing a good book. You're either be too paralyzed to write anything, or you'll write garbage (because all first drafts are garbage) and then be unwilling to revise it.

I don't think prose maps neatly to programming. With code, the endless abstraction features of the language make the ratio of LOC/# features very fungible and gaming the former often doesn't help the latter.

With prose, sure, the structure and outline of your book will affect its size, but my experience (60k words into a ~90k book) is that a certain amount of material takes a certain amount of words and you just have to work to get through them.

Writing is a marathon and it helps to have some mile markers.

Here's what it's like to be an authority ;)