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Writing a book: is it worth it?

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#111

Post by bluGill »

ipython wrote: post #87
mandeepj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it... Nothing wrong with that. I see it as a conversation starter.

I felt that way too, until the interviewee had no answers to some simple questions about the topic.

At least you caught a lie, which at least to me is a red flag that the interview is over and I know to look for excuses to downgrade the score I give to HR, thus ensuring no offer is made no matter how many people we need to hire.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#112

Post by dhruvkar »

brendangregg wrote: post #71
kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what…

The book would open doors to GET TO the interview, probably not much past that -- exactly for the reasons you stated.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#113

Post by lentinjoseph »

I'm an author of 8 books in Robotics. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this.

Pros 1) Great visibility in the robotics community 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income) 4) People start identifying me in conferences 5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities 6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots 7) Knowledge also doubled (I have to do a lot of homework in order to write things in the book). 8) Self-satisfaction to became an author

Cons 1) Time consuming 2) Need full-time dedication 3) Royalties are very low (only 17% of the book price) 4) Books will easily come online for free download. This will definitely demotivate us to write another book. 5) Books will outdate very easily (Technical books), so you may have to update it by writing a new edition. 6) Getting good income from books is like getting a lottery. It will only happen to a few people.

The list goes on. Just want to share my list of my books here https://robocademy.com/product-category/robotics/

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#114

Post by Murkin »

ticmasta wrote: post #93
Murkin wrote: post #88

Very different experience for me. Wrote a book about Redux ( https://leanpub.com/redux-book ) brought about $15K for 4 months of work. (Granted, did no marketing at all) It always feels strange to say "I wrote a book" and it never seemed to really impress tech people or cause an inflow of consulting work. But it is very fun and you get to really get into the tech (other projects, sources, blogs, testing ideas). Prob…

Do you think the lifespan of the topic or the delivery platform impacted your returns? I don't buy a lot of books anymore but used to drop 40-50 bucks on an O'Reilly book that would be used for years. My LP purchases probably top out under $10 and are for more immediate, short-lived topics (which seems to be what the platform targets with it's digital & updated content focus)

It's easy to use LP but getting into O'Reilly is not that simple.

If we could, we would of published with them instead

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#115

Post by jcranmer »

dredmorbius wrote: post #48
Retric wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specialties are fractal. It’s much easier to be the expert on something that 1,000 people do than something 1,000,000 people do. However, by making expert knowledge accessible it’s likely that far more people discover they really should be doing whatever it is you’re an expert at.

Sure. But the skill remains in competition with all other skills --- some specialisation or specialisations must shrink for another to grow. With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though m…

> With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though most fall at 98% or higher by UNESCO rankings.[2]

I drilled into the literacy reports cited by [1], eventually landing at [3]. From those results, the US is not especially anomalous compared to other countries, although breaking down by nativity does suggest that the US has an anomalously large gap between native-born adults and immigrant adults.

The UNESCO rankings and the PIAAC rankings give substantially different results by observing scores. There's a few countries in both: Chile, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey. Most of those countries are given >99% literacy rates by UNESCO, but have a few percent classified as "Below Level 1" by PIAAC, indicating that UNESCO has a much looser definition than PIAAC.

I can't tell you which ranking is better correlated to what a naïve observer would think of as "literate," but the two rankings are definitely measuring different things.

[3] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/ideuspiaac/report.aspx?p=3...

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#116

Post by libraryatnight »

kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

We hired this guy who wrote a book on the thing the team he was hired for managed. He was a nightmare. He was just insufferable. People would ask questions and he would suggest they read his book. He would mention his book in every meeting. He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book. It was just a huge drag. He managed to also be terrible in other ways and has since been canned. I pity any future applicants that come into an interview with the managers that had to deal with that guy planning to lean on their book during the interview. There's a good 50 people in the company with a real bad taste in their mouths from him.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#117

Post by coliveira »

brendangregg wrote: post #71
kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what…

I think you have some problem of low self esteem or have been brainwashed by the anti-intelectual crowd. Of course writing a book is not a magical think, but it shows that you have technical knowledge about the subject (if the book is any good). Any reasonable employer would be glad to have this kind of people. If they don't, I would suspect that it is a sweatshop.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#118

Post by aliceryhl »

I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point.

I honestly wish I was able to channel this incredible amount of writing into blog posts or a book, but I don't know how. My blog has had one post in the last three years. Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.

It's always been this way too. For example, in high school, I spent the time on https://math.stackexchange.com/.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#120

Post by goostavos »

rllearneratwork wrote: post #67
kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

another good way to become a little bit "internet famous" is to create and maintain a useful open-source project. IMHO, this is more future proof in the technology space since you can gradually evolve a project but a book can become obsolete if it focuses on a specific technology rather than fundamentals.

Meh, I expected this was true. However, after 6(?) years of maintaining a moderately popular project (~10k stars), it hasn't amounted to much real external value. It has never come up in interviews, it has never led to any job offers, it's mostly just a thing I work on for free which people happen to like.

Which is too bad. I want money!

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