I would love to write a book. I have been thinking about spending an hour or two each day this summer working on one. It will be a fictional story. About what? That's still undecided.
Ask HN: Have you written a book?
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#42I've written two books. My first book, Zero to Superhero: http://www.zerotosuperhero.com took four years to research, test and write. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. More than once I broke down and wept in frustration. In the end, for all I learned, it was worth it, times a thousand.
My second book is Economtricks: http://goo.gl/Fd8tW took only a year to write. I got some things off my chest. Not as rewarding, financially or personally.
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#43I wrote BlackBerry Hacks several years ago:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101152
Definitely a lot of work and a worthwhile pursuit.
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#44I've written or co-written ten books, seven of them tech books and three novels. I've edited several others. I own and manage a publishing company, so perhaps that makes me part of the traditional process, but we deliberately avoid the (dying) traditional business model:
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#45I wrote a book on optimizing corporate portfolio management (publisher: Wiley). In English, portfolio mgmt means how large organizations handle resource allocation, i.e., whether to spend that next dollar on a marketing or IT or operations investment.
In terms of money from book sales, it is no Harry Potter but it's done well for a book with a very specific demographic of corporate types. From a larger business perspective, it's brought me opportunities for paid speaking engagements with the likes of the World Bank and companies/conferences throughout the US and Europe. And resulted in consulting opportunities and opened the door as being a "published author" does have some cache at times.
We actually created a training simulation/game (facilitated in-person) based on principles in the book which has done very well.
Book link - http://amzn.to/jp0Xf8 Portfolio Management Game - http://www.portfoliomanagementgame.com/
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#46I write books for a living. Mostly fiction: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap... Which is not to say that I haven't written technical books, back in the day: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Architects-Handbook-Charles-Stross... I'm not self-published -- I've got Ace (aka part of Penguin USA), Orbit (aka Hachette) and Tor (aka Holtzbrinck) as my publishers. Yes, I do this for a day job.
It's times like these I wish hacker news had a user follow ability. You are probably one of my favorite authors of all time, and I had no idea you were present here on HN.
Now that you know he exists, you can track his HN posts with http://hackerfollow.com/ (I'm not affiliated in any way, I just think it's a nice tool.)
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#47Agile/Kanban without the Bullshit For folks who have suffered under various Agile, Kanban, and other improvement regimes and know that it's not supposed to be like this. I'm about 80% of the way through the first draft. I have a few prominent community members that are going to review (and recommend, if they like it) but it's more of a personal statement than a commercial venture. It's a topic I have a lot of experie…
What are the best current resources for self-publishing and the epub maze?
I don't know that it could really be called a reference, but Joe Konrath has a blog that gives a decent overview, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/, unfortunately the information is pretty scattered through the posts. He also wrote an Kindle book, The Newbie's Guide to Publishing (Everything A Writer Needs To Know), http://www.amazon.com/Newbies-Publishing-Everything-Writer-e....
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#48http://nostarch.com/xen/
This was probably the most difficult project I've ever completed.
It was funny; no-starch actually approached me about writing a book, I believe because some of my diaries at Kuro5hin were the first hits for 'pygrub' and 'pvgrub' and a few other xen keywords for a while. But my diaries, I thought, were rather poorly written. The man didn't mention my diaries, so it could have been something else, but that's the only thing I could figure.
I said "I'm semi-literate, but I know a guy"[1] and I called up my employee's roommate, a long-term student who switched from computer science to English. If it's readable, he deserves the credit, really.
Do I regret it? no. I didn't go to school, and this seems to help make up for that lack of credibility, and yeah, it was difficult, but it was also a lot of fun.
The book beginning to hit the bargain shelves, so I've been considering a second edition, but I've been busy with other things.
Really, I think no-starch press deserves a lot of credit; there is zero chance that Chris and I would have finished such a large undertaking without their prodding, and they gave us a really excellent technical editor.
[1] Actually, I think I said "My English skills are presidential." At the time, George W Bush was our leader.
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#49Well... not quite, but I was involved in getting one published and wrote some of it: http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/09/15/tcl-and-the-tk-toolkit... It has left something of a bitter taste in my mouth though... I've made an order of magnitude more money from this article that took my a few hours to put together: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode as compared to weeks of work for the Tcl one. Al…
I ust looked at liberwriter - a very cool idea! A suggestion: you might want to support some form of easy importing material from Google Docs.
Thanks! There is an easy way to import material from Google Docs and Word: cut and paste:-)
It's not as cool as using an API, nor as efficient in some ways, but it works for Word, OpenOffice, whatever, and it's very simple to explain to the target market for LiberWriter (hint: it's not people like Daniel Markham who go out and download the spec:-)
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#50I have written the following books:
a)Differences in Venture Capital Financing of U.S., UK, German and French Information Technology Start-ups — A Comparative Empirical Research of the Investment Process on the Venture Capital Firm Level": http://bit.ly/gDPwz9
b) "M&A, Cooperations and Networks in the e-Business Industry": http://amzn.to/ltiKv4