Writing a Book — 9 Lessons
Useful lessons learned from the process of releasing a tech book
I’m in a wonderful position to write this blog post. I’m fresh out of writing my second technical book for a publisher. My first book was published in 2014 with Packt, and now my second book is coming out with O'Reilly Media here in 2021. It’s fair to say I have an in-depth perspective on the whole book process, and I’d love to share that wisdom with you because you might need it one day.
Lesson 1: How to get started
You don’t want to hear this, but you’ll probably rewrite your entire first chapter once you’ve finished the book. That might scare you but it should excite you. Just write. If it sucks, know it will be fixed. Start writing today.
If you find you have to cut something you wrote, you can always turn that into social media and blog posts. Any significant content you come up with will add value. The hardest part is building your writing muscle. Runners warm-up for a race by running and a book is a marathon. Find your pace and ride it.
If you’ve got an interest in writing a book, been contacted by a publisher for a concept, or simply have an idea, start writing.
Once you’ve started getting your writing juices flowing, create a schedule. Find the most productive writing time and block it out. I personally found that I wrote best in the evening and weekends. Once you find the sweet spot, organize that time for writing consistently.
Lesson 2: It’s not about the money
Listen to me, there’s no money for writing a book.
But Gant! I know this one person who…
Sure, I’ve met people who have made excellent money and effectively live on their book sales. These are exceedingly rare. If you’re looking to directly make money, forget writing a book. Think of it as music. Starting a band doesn’t mean you’ll get a multi-million dollar record deal, and writing a book does not directly land you money.
It should be noted, you can make money in consulting, training, and personal brand as a result of the book. If you’re calculating ROI from a book, it will be poor for the hours you put into for the checks you’ll directly get. Tech books provide excellent resume fodder for jobs and sales fuel for the companies who employ published writers. You should be focused on the investment in leveraging your book rather than writing it. Books command more in persuasion than they ever will in royalties.
What a great time to mention that we at Infinite Red are your one-stop-shop for anything React Native or TensorFlow.js!
Lesson 3: Publishing is not a barrier
In the tech world, few people are brave enough to write books at all. If you’re willing to write a book, you can get published. Primo publishers are picky, but we live in a world where self-publishing is an option.
If you’re significantly interested in getting the book out there, you can handle the graphics, editing, and printing without a publisher. So don’t think of publishing as a barrier, but do realize there are benefits to teaming up with a high-quality publisher.
The better the publisher, the more prestigious and cleanly edited the book becomes, but it’s nothing you couldn’t organize for yourself in tech. Spend some time investigating publishers.
Regardless, it’s ultimately up to you to make your book sell. Famous quotes come from famous people, not the other way around.
Lesson 4: What is the interface?
I’ve written two books. The first publisher asked me to write in MS Word, which was a somewhat WYSIWYG experience but limited me greatly in being able to use common book tricks, like referencing figures and lines of code.
O’Reilly prefers authors to use AsciiDoc, which feels like GitHub Markdown’s lesser-known cousin. It doesn’t take long to learn, and you install a live previewer in your editor for a somewhat instantaneous write/visualize book feel.
While the AsciiDoc previewer is passable, you can always generate a real PDF build in O’Reilly’s GitHub system. These PDFs give you a glimpse of how the content will exist in print format.
If you’re significantly disturbed by the idea of AsciiDoc, you can write in Google Docs and have it converted later.
Lesson 5: When to think “Marketing!”?
Now. As you write, take note of interesting stories and screenshots so you can build a behind-the-scenes folder for social media. When your book gets close to release, you’ll have a whole folder full of crazy moments to reflect on and make posts for when it’s time to promote the book.
It really helps to build these folders as you go, rather than having to go back and collect moments out of history.
Anyone who’s following me on Twitter might recognize some of these fun images being used to promote the book. It’s nice to open a folder and simply select an image for social media, rather than wondering what you have and haven’t covered.
Marketing a book is almost exclusively the responsibility of the author. While you’ll have the ability to leverage your publisher, these are aircover tactics to help you on the ground.
Lesson 6: Graphics
One question someone asked me was, “How much of the graphics are your job?” When I wrote a book back in the day for Packt publishing, it was 100% of my diagrams, but with O’Reilly, they re-draw everything in what they call O’Reilly media format (ORM styled). Their illustrators take every diagram you make and make it not suck.
The one thing they don’t really touch is screenshots. They might slightly adjust saturation for black-and-white printing, but every screenshot should be treated like it’s the highest quality and the only version possible.
Lesson 7: The Grammar
Step one is Grammarly. I suck at grammar, and I need a service like Grammarly. I use it for all my blog posts. It catches a lot of mistakes, but it’s not perfect.
At some point, they unleash a Ph.D. level editor on your work, and you realize you’re terrible at writing, too. There are some obvious mistakes you should be aware of, for instance, be careful with exclamation marks, exaggerations, or negative examples. These seem obvious when I state them, but there are some non-obvious bits of advice you should have as well.
Here are a few things I wish I could go back and tell myself.
- Don’t ever say “very”
“Very” is an intensity modifier. Either change the word to be more intense or don’t say “very” at all. The editor will remove it. (Now I find/replace very in my blog posts.)
- Don’t use “e.g.”, just say “for example”
Do you know the difference between “i.e.” and “e.g.” as well as the Latin phrases they stand for? Good… no one cares. Use “i.e.” all you want, but when you try to use “e.g.” you anger the editor. They want you to just say “for example” and stop showing off the little bit of Latin you know. Just type as a normal person would.
- Don’t say “above” or “below”
You’ll want to mention where a figure is located in position, but you never know where a position really is with a book. You can’t say above, because it might run to the next page. It’s not like blogging on an endless scrolling web page, so mention figures and examples in a sense of time, like “as previously shown in Figure 12–1.”
- If you use an ordered list, it better have a reason!
Do you think it’s fun to number things? Do they have some kind of loose order of events? TOO BAD! Unless you specifically go back and mention listed items, or demand that the order is important, you better use unordered lists.
Lesson 8: Reviewers
The most important part is actual reviewers. The reviewers should be people who are your target demographic.
Yes, you could have someone who knows a lot about the subject, but they won’t challenge you in the right way. An expert will make you expound more, where a neophyte will show you the steps you skipped.
A person who’s learning while reading your book is a wealth of information for you both.
Lesson 9: The Cover
This is by far, the most popular question.
“Do you get to pick the animal on the cover?”
In short, not really, but you get veto power. You can find a short history of how the animals became the O’Reilly icon, but now a staff of illustrators is forever working on new art, and they aren’t there to cater to the author, and that’s probably a good thing. I made a small joke about this when people had originally asked.
The real story is that two of the books that I really appreciated from O’Reilly on AI were “Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow” by Aurélien Géron and “AI and Machine Learning for Coders” by Laurence Moroney. Both books have a lizard on the cover.
I told the editor that I’d love to have any reptile, so I could continue the awesome reptile exhibit. I also sprinkled in, that since I’m from New Orleans, I would love it to be an alligator.
There was no alligator available. However, there was a diamondback terrapin turtle. The reptile exhibit continues! I had the right to refuse the turtle, but then who knows what I would have landed on?
The book starts with a black-and-white carved architecture and then progresses into color. Here are the iterations as they were shared with me, and the O’Reilly internal platform.
The result is the awesome cover you can find on Amazon!
The Conclusion
Each person will have their own blockers, hiccups, tips, and adventure. Getting around those and feeling comfortable while writing is the key. Enjoy the process. Loving what you’re writing really helps because sometimes it’s going to be hard. Some weekends, you couldn’t stop me from writing if you wanted to, and other days it was the last thing on my mind. Creativity is a muscle. It needs to be worked out and rested to achieve an ideal organic status.
Even though the book is finished, I’m going to keep my creativity in shape!
Join my adventures on Twitter, or maybe even check out my AI newsletter.
There’s lots more creativity coming your way by me, and by all the fantastic people at Infinite Red. Grab your copy of the book or call on us for your TensorFlow.js and AI needs.
Gant Laborde is a co-owner and Chief Innovation Officer at Infinite Red, published author, adjunct professor, worldwide public speaker, and mad scientist in training. Clap/follow/tweet or visit him at a conference.
