Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Writing a book: is it worth it?

martin.kleppmann.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 299 posts

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#211

Post by 6510 »

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…

I coin one rule for blogging: However you do it keep it consistent. If you do monthly long reads keep doing that. If you do short posts 5 times per day keep making them 5 times per day (its better to drop to 4 and make a buffer that auto publishes than to skip days)

Forum discussions can be a mess of excess and ot information. You could easily cut and paste questions you've answered. (Sometimes modify them to fit how generic your answer is) Then copy paste your answer under it as well as useful bits from other peoples response.

Put links to topics and/or profiles with everything you "steal" to promote the forum.

Make tools to automate the process. You don't want to be muleing clip board back and forwards.

Just dump it into a post and save the draft if it isn't finished in 15 seconds.

Again: be consistent at it. If there is one post per day the visitor should be able to visit 1 time per day and find it. If it isn't there for 1-3 days - why bother?

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#213

Post by coredog64 »

libraryatnight wrote: post #116
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 al…

At my last employer there was a similar story. The candidate mentioned he had written a book on Flask. So the dev in the interview took that as an invitation to skip the warm ups and go on a deep dive into Flask internals. The author got extremely flustered and couldn’t answer.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#214

Post by stanrivers »

"Writing a book is an activity that creates more value than it captures. What I mean with this is that the benefits that readers get from it are greater than the price they paid for the book. To back this up, let’s try roughly estimating the value created by my book."

This is the key - you need to create more value for your customer than you are asking them to pay you. If you do that, you will never be want for income because people actually value having you around. Otherwise, you are just a rent extractor.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#215

Post by elamje »

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…

This would likely be well suited for a short book of rust anti patterns. I love resources that are learning by inversion: here is what not to do, and why.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#216

Post by Daub »

I was second author of a book on computational aesthetics and first author of a book on drawing. As the only native English speaker, I did all of the final re-write of both. For me also it was a turbo-boost to my ability to write. I thought I could write before I started those books. I was wrong. For this alone it was worth it.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#217

Post by brendangregg »

kevstev wrote: post #143
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…

>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…

The problem is encountering a hiring manager who treats book writing as a red flag: perhaps the candidate is more interested in self promotion and vanity projects than doing real work; perhaps they are too "academic" and don't have real experience; perhaps their book is one of these trash books that is nothing more than the open source docs (that the author didn't write) hastily thrown together; etc. That's not to say the candidate won't get the job, but that they get grilled harder in the interview to overcome these suspicions.

I only mentioned this in the first place as a counterpoint to the idea that books may have a lot of value in an interview. I think it has value in _getting_ the interview, but you might find the interview is now a little bit harder. And thinking that your book matters most may sound too arrogant.

I have recommended that people write books over the years (I'm not anti-book!): I just wouldn't list the interview as a perk. A big perk is getting to help people worldwide (my books have been translated into other languages), including those who don't have access to bay area conferences or other local experts. Another perk is assembling a technical review team of fellow experts and working on the draft with them, listing to their feedback and learning from their experiences to improve the book.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#218

Post by drewolbrich »

winter_blue wrote: post #206
aliceryhl wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's definitely activation energy. Once I've actually started working on something, I can do anything, but damn, starting is tough.

Wow, I can relate to this so much. What are some techniques anyone here has found to help push oneself to get started on things?

Start working on something small and easy that's related to the thing you're actually trying to accomplish, and that'll help swap the broader context into your head that you need to work on the larger problem.

Break the larger problem down into tiny little pieces that are easy to accomplish. Put them in a list. Pick off the easy items first each time you're trying to get started.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#219

Post by Procrastes »

I also wrote a book with O'Reilly and have collaborated on several more with other publishers and indies. I have to say working with the folks at O'Reilly was my best publishing experience by far. Even if I didn't get an animal cover. Not that I'm complaining... but you know, maybe a bat or a weasel or something would have been nice, just sayin'.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#220

Post by sasaf5 »

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…

> Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.

The key here is the interlocutor. Trying to write an interesting post for a general reader is a dauting task hence the energy. Try to materialize that reader a bit more, even if mentally. Or write in dialog form :)

Post reply on HN