Having recently released a "technical" book with a large traditional publisher (Wiley) [0], here are a few of my learnings:
- Expect nothing from the publisher in terms of marketing support. In fact, a good nonfiction book proposal is going to spend most of its length explaining to the publisher how you will sell the book for them through your connections and credibility - not the other way around. It's all on you.
- Don't do it for the money. You're going to make 10-15% of a pretty small pie. If you want to write info products as a moneymaking side gig and you have any following at all, self publish!
So why go with a traditional publisher? I don't feel this is fully articulated in the OP, but here was my reasoning:
- The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people, so if you care about maximizing readership and you don't have a stupid-large online following, their network effects through bookstores, library sales, etc will help you sell more copies than you could on your own (though again, you'll see very little of the money!)
- There's still some social proof involved with traditional publishing, and it's a nice thing to do once - just so you know in the back of your head that you "can"
- In my case, I was producing a highly graphic book that really doesn't work except in print and in full color, and I needed the resources of a traditional publishing house to make it not look terrible.
The Wiley experience was overall positive for me and I don't regret it, but if I ever produce a text-based info product in future it's hard to look away from the ROI advantages of self-publishing.
I agree with this. I published the first edition of my book [1] through O'Reilly and had much of the same experiences. I would add, though, that their expertise in publishing was useful. They took care of copyediting, an ISBN, printing, redrawing my hand-sketched figures, etc. All stuff I could theoretically do or hire out on my own, but have zero interest in managing.
For the second edition, which I'm working on now, I had serious second thoughts about going with O'Reilly again. Ultimately, I decided that I would, mostly because I knew O'Reilly would be able to spread the word a lot further than I would. I've got a decent network, but not an amazing one.
The reasoning was that I'm a consultant, and the cachet, reach, and resulting leads I'll get from publishing through a known publisher are much more valuable than the theoretical profits I'm missing out on. That was certainly true for the first edition.
Having made that decision, I'm glad that I did. O'Reilly's provided a lot more support with the second edition than they did with the first. My production editor has been fantastic; heavily involved with reviewing draft chapters and very supportive. I also managed to swing a better royalty deal (but still far less than minimum wage) and we've had some great conversations about co-marketing the book.
That's really cool. I would think that for your "non-traditional" book, having a publisher help you would be useful. I haven't seen many "highly graphic" self-published books.
People have various reasons for publishing. Will a publisher get you in front of the most eyes? Maybe, I've talked to a few self-published authors (some who have sold $1Mil+) of their book. Arguably some books do better as self-published works for both distribution and $.
Admittedly, there is social proof for having a book with an animal on the cover.
Congrats again on your work! I love innovative creations. (Have thought about making a Python book for toddlers...)
>The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people,
Maybe. On the other hand, the publisher sets the price which may be higher than you'd want to set it to maximize readership. For that matter, if you really don't care about bringing money in, you can even make a digital version (or a subset of one) available for free--which I've done in the past.
On the one hand, if maximizing eyeballs is really the only reason you want to write a book, maybe it should just be a blog post.
On the other hand, the publisher can and does negotiate price to do volume deals with retailers. Barnes and Noble buys in bulk at a price we can assume is optimal for them.
I think there is some value (for the right project) in longer form works that aren't just a series of independent articles. Of course, nothing wrong with publishing excerpts. There's also nothing wrong with writing a shorter book if that fits the subject matter. Just because the economics of the publishing industry tend to force length to 250+ pages doesn't mean you can't do a 75-100 page book on your own.
I'm not sure how important physical books are outside of Amazon at this point.
But YMMV of course. I'm in a situation where my books are about gaining credibility and visibility. The money is very incidental.
Point 1 is familiar; of expecting nothing from the publisher, only extend that to nothing at all. A relative of mine wrote a technical book, got nothing from the publisher in terms of support, advice or feedback, and when published they did absolutely zero marketing.
Other than putting ink on paper, absolutely nothing.
I did them myself. Back to the "social proof" thing, the book is the outgrowth of a fairly successful webcomic I've done off and on for a few years [0], which was attractive to the publisher.
I am also now writing my first book (https://efficientdeveloper.com/) and it is really difficult, especially during Covid times (my original idea of writing this book was writing it on a transatlantic cruise... )
What you realise when writing a book is that every sentence gets rewritten 3 times, even before you start caring about proofreading. With all the research and decision making, publishing etc. it takes much more time than it looks.
It really is. I've been going through a fairly significant book revision the past few months. Of course it's been more work than I thought--even though I should have known better.
However, even though I'm making quite a few changes/additions including a new chapter, it's a lot easier to patch something that exists than starting with a blank page. The fact that I don't need to churn out a huge number of words lets me focus on the new material and refactoring as needed.
When I was an industry analyst, I used to joke that the effort to write something went up by something like the square of the page count. There are counter-examples but mostly I think it's at least somewhat true given that you need to sort of keep your head around the whole project.
I think that's true. If larger software projects need more time and resources than small ones (when comparing effort per LOC), I am pretty sure that with books it is the same.
And I agree with the blank page... The more of the book is written, the easier it gets (I think).
And if you are considering self-publishing outside of Amazon, there is a bunch more work to factor in. Some of the more successful self-pubbers I know say the sales/marketing takes more time than writing.
This is a nice summary, and shows the benefit of working with a publisher, when you are writing a book that is similar to ones they have published already. You get a lot of support, and will definitely benefit distribution-wise later as well. Congratulations to the author - especially on publishing relatively quickly, in 10 months from the idea! And it's very nice to read that all royalties are going to Girls Who Code.
I've worked with O'Reilly and a few other publishers on a proposal that was slightly different to what they usually publish. I went through the same submission process, working with an acquisitions editor, similar to how it happened in this case. In my case, O'Reilly rejected the proposal after a month and half. The feedback in my case was that the book competes with another project, which project got priority. Sure enough, I took the proposal without any changes to another publisher, worked with the acquisitions editor there, had the proposal accepted and we went ahead with the writing process with a development editor.
In the end, working with the other publisher did not work out for me. They did not publish the type of book I was writing, and the feedback from the editors kept nudging me to "shape" the book into the type of book this publisher knew would sell, and would sell well. Unfortunately, it didn't feel like the type of book I was excited to write.
A year and some time later, I'm still writing the book -The Software Engineer's Guidebook[1] - and if all goes according to plan, I'll publish it early next year.
What I've learned with working with a book publisher, is just how involved the process is. Now, instead of taking a $5,000 royalty upon completion of the manuscript, I'm budgeting to spend around $5,000 out of pocket on development/copy editing, cover design and production editing. The things that the publisher would have otherwise paid for. It's a bit simpler to hire professionals these days for these areas thanks to sites like Reedsy[2], which I do recommend for fellow authors self-publishing in finding support on various publishing tasks.
I've had mixed feelings about publishers in the past. There is probably still some cachet in a name brand publisher. And they do some things for you which would otherwise take time. On the other hand, for better or worse, editing was pretty lightweight and more errors crept through copy-editing than should have. I did go ahead with a v2 of one book but I probably wouldn't actively pursue a publisher if I do another book at some point.
The summary makes it sound as if the co-authors worked together pretty well although I'm sure it wasn't completely friction-free. It's very easy to end up with a co-author who likes the idea of having written a book more than they like the act of writing it.
Deadlines are definitely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can be really inconvenient if something takes longer, other priorities pop up, you just feel you need to release a chapter even though you're not really happy with it, etc. On the other hand, in the absence of deadlines, it's easy to put things to the side for a "week" that turns into a month or two.
There are deadlines, and they helped, but a lot of it was about having someone I "owed" something to.
Another thing I did was plot my word count per commit. Once per week I would post it to an internal channel at work and add a sentence or two summarising my week. The most interesting thing is that while my output could fluctuate a lot per week, the overall trend was fairly stable.
Even though I wouldn't want the publisher to make the outline of my book for me, I have to say that Manning books were some of my favourites. Their structure is pretty good.
Manning have a fair amount of docs and support for preparing a TOC, including soliciting opinions from outside experts. I imagine it's similar for other publishers.
I didn't feel like I was being made to follow a template. In fact the TOC changed a lot over the course of writing.
Signed up for the notification when the book is published. I really liked your article about the product minded engineer, and follow your blog. Given the timeline you refer here, I wonder if the project O'Reilly was referring to was Software Engineering at Google[1]. Given the book contents summary on your site, the contents do seem to overlap in some areas, except I don't expect that you're making numerous references to Google in your text :-D
> For my first few sections I wrote the code as I wrote the sections, but then Lak made the suggestion that it would probably be easier to write the code first and then write the chapter
I can echo this a thousand times, I've written the last three chapters this way and this has made a huge difference, wish I had known that earlier!
I will also add that it really made me learn so much because even though I thought I knew quite a bit about Ruby (I knew early on that I didn't know much about Redis). So many times I found myself trying to explain something and realizing that I didn't actually know how it worked and ended up spending hours (days?) researching the inner workings of said thing
PS: Using quotes around book mostly because that's the imposter syndrome kicking in, I was calling it "a series of blog post" for a while, to kinda downplay it
> So many times I found myself trying to explain something and realizing that either I didn't actually know how it worked and ended up spending hours (days?) researching the inner workings of said thing
This has been, by far, the best thing about writing.
It is also, by far, the worst thing about writing. The constant terror that I am full of shit.
This is a good tip. If you are writing a project/code heavy book, write the code first. They re-write the code taking intensive notes along the way. There's your outline.
This is a great post mirroring much of my OReilly process. Writing a book can be a wonderful process.
After authoring over a dozen books, I'm making an end-to-end authoring course[0] for those interested in self-publishing. I interview a dozen authoring folks that are known around these parts to get their wisdom as well.
From your description, probably not if you're just curious.
- Writing a book is a lot of writing--even if you do a shorter one. At a minimum, I'd start blogging on the topic before tackling a book.
- "create a strong resume" Under the right circumstances, the right book can add to a strong resume but it's not going to create one by itself. And books from name publishers in the space will have more effect--fairly or not.
- "some bit of passive income" Don't count on it. There are outliers but you're going to have to pay up-front for services like editing and probably design. (And these aren't really optional.) You may or may not earn the cost of those back.
I've written books and they've been useful reputationally. They're also a lot of work, I've been able to write them partially on company time, and they're a direct fit with my day job.
- Expect nothing from the publisher in terms of marketing support. In fact, a good nonfiction book proposal is going to spend most of its length explaining to the publisher how you will sell the book for them through your connections and credibility - not the other way around. It's all on you.
- Don't do it for the money. You're going to make 10-15% of a pretty small pie. If you want to write info products as a moneymaking side gig and you have any following at all, self publish!
So why go with a traditional publisher? I don't feel this is fully articulated in the OP, but here was my reasoning:
- The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people, so if you care about maximizing readership and you don't have a stupid-large online following, their network effects through bookstores, library sales, etc will help you sell more copies than you could on your own (though again, you'll see very little of the money!)
- There's still some social proof involved with traditional publishing, and it's a nice thing to do once - just so you know in the back of your head that you "can"
- In my case, I was producing a highly graphic book that really doesn't work except in print and in full color, and I needed the resources of a traditional publishing house to make it not look terrible.
The Wiley experience was overall positive for me and I don't regret it, but if I ever produce a text-based info product in future it's hard to look away from the ROI advantages of self-publishing.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/...