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Ask HN: How do you write a book?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you write a book?

#21

Post by mst »

jrockway wrote: post #20

Some advice that hasn't been mentioned yet: make sure your publisher supports you. Writing a book is difficult and you want to spend your time on the content -- not making sure that there are no typos, teaching the publishers how to run the code, doing the layout, maintaining different versions of the book, etc. I recently wrote a book, and I got very little support from the publisher. It was a disaster, although I d…

I think what Jon's trying to say is "make sure your publisher doesn't do what Packt appear to have done to the first ever book on the Catalyst framework".

Not only did they successfully kill jrock's book but based on his contributions to the project and associated work they also killed his motivation.

So: good publisher, thick skin, pick two or don't start.

Re: Ask HN: How do you write a book?

#22

Post by jrockway »

mst wrote: post #21
jrockway wrote: post #20

Some advice that hasn't been mentioned yet: make sure your publisher supports you. Writing a book is difficult and you want to spend your time on the content -- not making sure that there are no typos, teaching the publishers how to run the code, doing the layout, maintaining different versions of the book, etc. I recently wrote a book, and I got very little support from the publisher. It was a disaster, although I d…

I think what Jon's trying to say is "make sure your publisher doesn't do what Packt appear to have done to the first ever book on the Catalyst framework". Not only did they successfully kill jrock's book but based on his contributions to the project and associated work they also killed his motivation. So: good publisher, thick skin, pick two or don't start.

Indeed. But you don't need a thick skin, you need armor.

Re: Ask HN: How do you write a book?

#23

Post by Eliezer »

Writing one blog post per day on Overcoming Bias, having to do that every day and publish immediately and put it behind me, and then getting feedback, has sped up my writing by over an order of magnitude.

Re: Ask HN: How do you write a book?

#24

Post by mattmaroon »

I pretty much just sat down and started writing. I skipped the planning and just let it flow. That meant a good amount of cutting and pasting things around later to get everything in the proper order, but the free form inspired me to write more, better, and faster. Your mileage may vary.

Do you have a contract and an agent yet? I learned the hard way the value of a good agent.

Re: Ask HN: How do you write a book?

#25

Post by jgrahamc »

blackguardx wrote: post #16
jgrahamc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just finished writing a book that will be published by O'Reilly next year. I'd echo your comments: 1. Write an outline. This is boring, but vital. If you don't do this you won't realize that extent of the task you are taking on. By writing an outline you are convincing yourself and a publisher that you can actually write a book. 2. Do some other writing first. For example, I wrote extensively for different magaz…

What is the subject of your book? How did you get O'Reilly to accept it? I've been thinking about some cool books I would like to write for O'Reilly. I live 10 miles away from their headquarters, which might help me. Are there any other north bay hackers out there?

1. It's a travel book for geeks

2. I followed scrupulously O'Reilly's guidelines on submitting an proposal. I went through their normal channel for proposals and then I asked a friend who's an O'Reilly author to give them a prod for me.

3. I worked with the editor I'd been assigned to convince them that I could pull it off.

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