Writing Technical Books 101

So you’re an expert programmer and decided to write a technical book? Think twice. Why do you want to write it? These are possible answers:

1. All these years I’ve been using the IT knowledge so generously shared by other people, and it’s time to give back to the community. Great answer! But does it have to be a book? Have you tried answering other people’s questions on StackOverflow? Have you’ve written a couple of dozen of blogs that people read and like? If the answer is no to any of these questions, start there because writing a book is harder.

2. I want to become a published author. This will give me better recognition in the industry and will look good on my resume. I hear you. This is true unless the book you’ll write will suck. If your book will get mostly negative reviews, you’ll remove it from your resume. But you can’t remove it from the Internet, can you?

3. I want to earn some extra cash in the form of royalties. This is the worst possible reason for writing a technical book, because the money is not there. This is not to say that there are no people making a good living just by writing technical books, but the chances that you’ll become one of them are similar to a fiction book writer becoming the next J.K. Rolling.

I’ll give you some of my numbers. My most financially successful technical book so far is the first edition of Java 24-Hour trainer, which brought me $40K in royalties over four years. Apparently the publisher considered this book a financial success as well, because they offered me to write a second edition of this book. So consider making $10K a year in royalties a good result for your book.

Still want to write your book? Now let me ask you some questions.

1. Do you have a discipline to write every day to meet the schedule? You may be surprised, but the publisher will request your manuscripts to be submitted by the certain dates. The editors will be contacting you asking about the status of your chapters, because they also have their deadlines to meet.

The most common mistake the rookie writers can make is not writing daily. You can’t just live your regular life and write something once in a while. You need to think about your book all the time. Missing a day of writing is a slippery slope, which will require more time and discipline to continue where you left off.

2. Are you ready to listening to valid complaints of your spouse/girlfried/boyfriend that you’re stealing the time from your family, kids, and other fun things you could have done together? And they are right. You are going to be stealing their time.

3. Are you ready to seeing your book illegally distributed for free on all these torrent repos as soon as it hits the book stores? How come? After all this dedication and time spent to make the world a better place they what your content for free? Yes they do. Have you ever downloaded a movie or a song for free without paying for it? You are the same as all these people downloading your book for free. No complains here, but try to turn negative into positive. These free downloads make your name recognizable in the industry, which may be a good thing when negotiating salary or offering training classes.

4. Are you ready to be called an idiot for a typo in the code samples? Actually, I need to give a compliment to my American readers here. They are more polite than the rest of the world , and in most cases will try to give you a constructive criticism.

Still want to write after reading all this? I’m really happy for you! Because I also continue writing despite all these cons. After every completed book project I say to myself, “Never again”, and then start working on a new book.

To summarize, these are some rules I can share with you based on my book writing experience.

1. Never try to make the draft of your chapter perfect before submitting it to the publisher. They’ll modify the text anyway unless you have a college degree in writing, which most software developers don’t. Push the chapter our of the door quickly. Fail fast! Get the feedback as soon as possible to have more time for fixing it.

2. Write every day. Even if it’s just one or two paragraphs. The process has to be continuous. Even the writer-alchoholic Henry Chinaski forced himself to write every day. So booze, gym, or other time-consuming hobbies are not excuses for not writing daily.

3. Don’t write in MS Word or a similar word processor. Use any plain text editor and the Asciidoc markup language with future generation of the code in HTML/PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats. I’m writing my third book with Asciidoc and am pretty happy with it.

4. Store all your drafts on GitHub even if you’re the only author of your book. GitHub also has a very nice feature called GitHib Pages that allows to publish your drafts online. For example, this is how my free book Java For Kids looks at GitHub pages. If you don’t want to make your drafts publicly available, either buy a private repository on GitHub
or create it for free on BitBucket.

P.S. Most likely, you’ll find grammar errors in the text of this blog. It’s OK. I need to push it out the door ASAP to get your feedback sooner. Please leave comments and I’ll fix the mistakes later.

P.S.S. I’ve stolen the time allocated for writing a chapter for my next book on Angular 2 and wrote this blog instead. Stupid me.

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4 thoughts on “Writing Technical Books 101

  1. Is there a public GitHub repository for your next book on Angular 2?
    Have you started recording videos for the second edition of Java 24-Hour Trainer?
    I’ve started learning Russian and I’d love to practice while listening to your Java lessons.
    P.S. Thank you for stealing time for writing and teaching!

    1. This time there is no public repository for the book. Manning has an early access program MEAP and the first hundred pages will be published there at the end of July.

      No plans for any new videos this summer.

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