My Book Writing Process

I wrote an ebook last fall. It’s about the Cordova command line tool (Cordova CLI). Cordova is a way for web developers to build mobile apps that are distributed via the various app stores and can access app fucntionality (your list of contacts, for instance). The CLI is the main method of interacting with Cordova–managing your files, building apps, etc. It’s a niche, but one that I felt passionately about. I love the command line and I love webapps. I find the whole native app experience distasteful. (“Didn’t we already watch this movie?”)

I thought I’d share some lessons from this experience. This post will be about the writing, the next one about the marketing, and the final one about the results.

I wrote a series of blog posts, gathered here, to determine if I would enjoy writing a book, and to give me a head start on the content. Those blog posts were primarily written in July when my wife was away visiting family. I figured that if I didn’t want to write the book, the blog posts would have value anyway–writing clarifies issues for me. If they were useful and shared, then I would have some market validation.

On August 1, weeks after publishing my first Cordova blog post, I received an email from a reader who said the posts were useful, and asked a question. This was enough validation that I decided to start the book. It was five weeks from creating the project on leanpub to completing it (late August to early October).

During the book writing, I focused on expanding on the blog posts to make sure they were authoritative, adding new content as I came up with questions, and verifying all the claims using the Cordova software. I remember spending an hour trying to confirm one part of one sentence in the book. I also spent time answering and asking questions on the Cordova/Phonegap Google group. I also monitored the Cordova developer list, more for interesting topics than for dialog. And a new version of Cordova (3.1) was released just a week or so before I was done with the book, so I spent some time double checking how the new version of the CLI worked.

As far as time, I averaged an hour a day for that five week period–remember, a good chunk of the content was already written and I was simply revising it. I found time on the weekends and in the early morning.

I ended up finding a flickr image to use for the cover page–thanks Marc!

In the end, the writing was fun and a grind all at the same time. You just have to make the time.