I liked the information in Andre's post. Aspiring writers would do well to heed his thoughts on outlining. He also states that writing is the easy part and editing is the hard part, and I completely agree.
I wrote a diary during the almost two years I spent writing and revising a book for Manning Publications. I muse about the trad pub process and my feelings on the great slog that is writing a technical book.
>writing is the easy part and editing is the hard part, and I completely agree.
I don't necessarily disagree but a lot of writing (and often graphics/figures) is needed to fill a typical book. You're looking at say 60 to 70 thousand words for a 250 page book. I write a lot and people think of me as being pretty fast--though I certainly know journalists who are faster--but my typical daily output is about 1,000 words assuming I'm spending most of a day on it. Do the math (especially if it's a part-time thing).
>Self-publishing ... PRO: You have full control over all the process really.
This is one of the best things I like about self publishing. I am not restricted by guidelines set by a publisher regarding chapter structure, images, exercises, etc. I can give away free copies, put up free web versions, share source code, etc. And recently I've tried sharing content chapter wise as I write the books.
>Traditional publishing ... PRO: You have professional editors looking over your draft.
I miss this aspect of traditional publishing the most. Also applies to quality of the ebook (formatting, cover, etc) produced.
>The hard part is editing and revising it so that your draft becomes something that is good enough to share.
I actually like the editing and revising part. It's somewhat like bug hunting and feels good to squash them. Creating the first draft has been more difficult for me, since it takes time to organize my thoughts about what I should put in, reading documents, researching ideas etc. When I'm editing, most things are already in place and easier to keep myself occupied with smaller list of tasks.
>Traditional publishing ... PRO: You have professional editors looking over your draft.
Honestly, this is probably overstated. My experience is that, yes, you have professional editors but it's mostly about pushing the book into a certain house style. I'm admittedly an experienced writer but there weren't really a lot substantive changes/restructuring in my case. To be clear, the edits were helpful and things were certainly caught but it's nothing you can't hire for on your own.
IMO, perhaps the biggest benefit is that going with a known tech publisher provides, fairly or not, a certain "gravitas" that a self-published book doesn't.
> I miss this aspect of traditional publishing the most. Also applies to quality of the ebook (formatting, cover, etc) produced.
Genuine question from someone not experienced in the field of publishing: is hiring a freelance/contract editor not an option? In this gig economy world with traditional publishing facing so many challenges, I would think that such editors would be more easily available for specific projects on contract basis, right?
>is hiring a freelance/contract editor not an option?
That is an option for sure and I've read a few self published authors mentioning that in their experiences too.
Not for me though for various reasons. I'm happy with what I've earned so far (which only works because of where and how I live, to be put it roughly I need about $150 per month). Last year was good but less than average so far this year. If I consistently get good earnings, I'll look into getting better covers, etc.
Good reading! I did learn a lot regarding tools I didn't knew and I will definitely check Reedsy and Scrivener, I did use leanpub which was really good, doing almost everything for me.
The hardest part is about marketing for me, and I am happy that I first wrote the book for me and see the completion as an achievement, I talked with a lot of people who thought it was kind of easy to get rich just writing books, I don't think so, not easily.
Also, it's really tough to promote a book without feeling like you're over-trying to do it, and regarding an IT book, except for a reddit community, or twitter I wouldn't know where to start.
I have even been invited to online conferences, people seemed to be interested (don't think they were faking it), but it generated zero sales :)
I really like Scrivener for putting together a book from scratch. The downside is that it's mostly a "just you" tool. Once you get into collaboration/outside editing/etc. I find you need to switch to something else. IMO, it's still worth it but I find it's something I use to get to a rough/first draft and then I switch.
Scrivener is the bomb. If it had vim bindings I'd be in heaven. And it's nice to support a small company making a product entirely focused on just being GOOD.
Thanks for a fantastic post. I've actually wrote a single tech book in my life, and found Pandoc to be really indispensable.
For example, while writing a book about Vim* I simply used markdown and Pandoc would allow me to translate it to all the different e book formats.
Pandoc supports syntax highlighting out of the box. Unfortunately, there wasn't one for VimL, so I had to implement it myself, but Pandcon would allow me to extend it.
I wonder if that's possible with Scrivener? Does it even support syntax highlighting?
I don't think it does, but you can use scrivener in markdown mode and it's built so that it's smart about how it saves so you can pop back and forth between Scrivener and Vim (or whatever) pretty smoothly, synching files and using git. As far as polished pretty end user apps go, they've put a lot of thought into making it play well with others.
I'm writing an online book right now, the advice to build your samples as you outline is really good. I've stumbled to that conclusion myself. Nothing like writing a series of samples to make you figure out what should or should not have been covered yet, and in what order you should introduce concepts (which for me is the hardest part of outlining).
I wrote a diary during the almost two years I spent writing and revising a book for Manning Publications. I muse about the trad pub process and my feelings on the great slog that is writing a technical book.
http://www.gitmol.com/blog/