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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?

#141

Post by brendangregg »

dhruvkar wrote: post #112
brendangregg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I'd think books can help open the interview door. But then it's about proving you can do the job.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#143

Post by kevstev »

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'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job 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.

Heh- you are quite accomplished I see from some googling. And I have to be honest, I fail to see how having an Addison Wesley book under your name in any context could be seen as a negative- the guys I was referring to were writing "Learn the MEAN stack in 21 days" type of books. But yeah I of course agree that you don't slam a copy down in the opening of the interview and try to use the fact that your name is on it as your primary selling point- its really more to get you in the door and have people reach out to you about interesting opportunities you might otherwise not have found out about.

You might just be running in much more intense circles than I am, but the number of people who have written a technical book is small enough that I have ran across only a handful in my career and my reaction was much more about surprise and delight than worrying about the motives behind it, but YMMV I guess.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#144

Post by GCA10 »

aliceryhl wrote: post #118

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 a…

There's a model in the way Randall Munro turned a bunch of XKCD comics into the best-selling books "What If" and "How To." It's a little more complicated than gluing together all of your posts, but with the right editor, it can all come together. https://xkcd.com/how-to/

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#145

Post by jeromecornet »

csours wrote: post #134

Questions for the authors in this thread: If I'm thinking about writing a book, what stepping stones would you recommend? I'm thinking things like should I write a series of blog posts, do tech talks, etc. What resources were most valuable for you in writing your book?

It depends on your goals for your book; are you trying to make money, to be known in the domain, etc... ?

For me, I was working on a wine-related software project but I had all of these notes that I had accumulated over the years and I felt like they needed to be better organized. My original plan was to write a series of blog posts, but I ended up self-publishing the book on Amazon (under the title Essential French Wine) and it's had a modest success (but quite unexpected since I didn't put any effort into marketing it).

So if you are just trying to write a book just go and do that, don't waste time on other things...

On the other hand if you are trying to know good strategies for book marketing or to get published, I don't think writing should be your primary concern but rather getting yourself known (building an audience) and that depends very much on where your audience hangs out.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#147

Post by TN1ck »

aliceryhl wrote: post #118

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 a…

You could easily write some posts using this:

"Most common errors beginners make in Rust"

You're like the world expert on this.

"What people often get wrong about Rust"

Maybe there are common conceptual issues you spotted?

I'm not sure, but I would also imagine that you explained some things a few times in a more simple language, this could also be a great thing for a blog post. Instead of pointing them to a doc and explaining something about it, point them to your blog post then.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#148

Post by seanalltogether »

aliceryhl wrote: post #118

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 a…

It's easy to solve problems that people currently have, it's hard to visualize the problems people might have.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#149

Post by milancurcic »

lentinjoseph wrote: post #113

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) Knowledg…

Regarding Con 5), it's generally true with some exceptions. I wrote a Fortran book (https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortran) and expect it to stay fresh for at least several years thanks to the slow pace and the unusually high maturity of the technology. On the downside, it's a relatively narrow niche so I don't expect high total number of sales. For instance, about 800 copies have been pre-ordered in the first 2.5 years of writing. The book is done and will be out in print in November.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#150

Post by bryanrasmussen »

brendangregg wrote: post #123
haswell wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I haven't written a book. > Also, you sound overly modest to me. This was my reaction as well. Absolutely no offense to the parent comment, but this sounds like a combination of being overly modest + getting bitten by dumb behaviors by bad companies. There's also a big difference between: - Strut into the interview. Drop a copy of your book on the table. "I literally wrote the book - hire me" And - "Tell…

Right; the person saying "I literally wrote the book - hire me" is saying it matters most, and I think that approach is likely to backfire. There are multiple problems with that attitude, including: 1) You probably aren't hired to write books, so what matters most is other things you'll be doing. 2) There are really good books and really bad books, so saying you wrote _a_ book doesn't carry the weight you may think.…

I think the problem is for most technical areas and for most technical books the writer has not literally written THE book on the subject, they have at best written A book on the subject - of people who have written the book on the subject I can think of, off the top of my head:

Donald Knuth Harold Abelson and the Sussmans

- a few others but you get the picture, most subjects do not have a definitive book.

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