{"id":3685,"date":"2025-01-17T22:18:39","date_gmt":"2025-01-18T04:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=3685"},"modified":"2025-04-13T10:21:48","modified_gmt":"2025-04-13T16:21:48","slug":"when-are-you-ready-to-write-a-technical-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3685","title":{"rendered":"When Are You Ready To Write A Technical Book?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This question came up on an <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=42161693\">HN thread<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>My process for any book I&#8217;m thinking about writing is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>write out 10 titles for blog posts on the topic<\/li>\n<li>write 1-2 blog posts (this lets you, in a low risk way, verify you have interest\/expertise)<\/li>\n<li>add an email list signup at the bottom of the posts<\/li>\n<li>do a bit of research to see if someone else has written on the topic (some googling or reddit searching)<\/li>\n<li>write the rest of the blog posts<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you can get 10 meaty blog posts, you have the basics of a book. Plus, you&#8217;ll know that you are interested in the topic and that you can write. As you wrote those blog posts, you probably had related ideas or areas you wanted to explore.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll also be able to share these blog posts with friends, colleagues and online communities that you may be a part of. You can get feedback on the ideas and the overall topic here.<\/p>\n<p>You can self-publish the book (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1339\">done that<\/a>) or use a publisher (<a href=\"https:\/\/letterstoanewdeveloper.com\/the-book\/\">done that<\/a>). The latter will take more time and effort and will require you to fill out a book proposal.<\/p>\n<p>To be honest, even if you are planning to self-publish, doing the hard work of completing a book proposal is useful. Even if you don&#8217;t submit it. It forces you to think about:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>who is my audience<\/li>\n<li>what are my core ideas<\/li>\n<li>what else has been written on this topic<\/li>\n<li>why is what I&#8217;m saying unique<\/li>\n<li>why am I the right person to write this book<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This can help you narrow in on what will make your book successful and can help with your marketing messaging.<\/p>\n<p>What If you can&#8217;t write 10 blog posts about a topic? Then you are missing either:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>interest in the topic<\/li>\n<li>necessary knowledge<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But it&#8217;s more likely the former. Because you&#8217;ll have time to do research to learn. I remember taking something like 4 hours to answer one question about how the Cordova CLI acted in one peculiar edge case. It turned into one sentence in my book.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, if no one else has written anything about the topic (no books, no articles, no social media posts, no nothing) and\/or none of your blog posts get any feedback (positive or negative), pick a different topic or expand your vision.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an exchange I had with Patrick McKenzie in 2013. I wrote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I had a quick question. I was thinking about writing an ebook for a super niche topic (testing ETL transformations using Pentaho Kettle, an open source ETL tool).<\/p>\n<p>I outlined the book, did some google searching and wrote up a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/pentaho-kettle-testing\">series of blog posts with an email list signup at the bottom<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I got some nice retweets from folks in the Pentaho community and have about 8 people signed up to the list. That was a bit disheartening, but a friend suggested that the folks doing ETL work weren&#8217;t exactly developers (perhaps more DBAs or business analysts).<\/p>\n<p>I am still tempted to write the ebook, given my interest in the subject&#8211;I think it is a pretty cool tool that I wish would replace lots of data munging scripts, and testing software written using Kettle makes development with it much more fun. On the other hand, I wouldn&#8217;t mind <strong>some<\/strong> income.<\/p>\n<p>Is this too niche a topic? I&#8217;ve been a generalist for most of my career, and if I don&#8217;t write this now, in 6 months I probably won&#8217;t have the desire or knowledge to do it again (though I might find another software niche to write about by then).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>His answer was:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I regret that I have absolutely no knowledge of anything you just said. In general, I might suggest something slightly less niche (you can reasonably suspect to sell 2 copies to 8 people, so unless it is going for $10,000 a copy, might want more volume). You&#8217;d still learn a lot publishing it but for the same amount of work why not write on a subject big enough to support 100 or 200 people interested in it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I could have expanded this topic in several directions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>focus on more general ETL testing<\/li>\n<li>expand beyond ETL and look at patterns for testing data manipulation<\/li>\n<li>focus more on the tool and write a guide to pentaho development, including testing<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Or, treat the exploration as an end in itself and not write a book. That&#8217;s always a valid outcome of this process of experimentation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This question came up on an HN thread. My process for any book I&#8217;m thinking about writing is: write out 10 titles for blog posts on the topic write 1-2 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3686,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3685\/revisions\/3686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}