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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?

#231

Post by breezest »

grawprog wrote: post #182
mooreds wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a book, too (career advice for new devs). I had previously written a technical ebook (about Cordova) and wanted to write something that had a longer lifespan, but was still focused on developers. Writing a technical book was great, but, like you said, it became outdated very easily. That said, if you want to anchor yourself as an expert in a space, I can't think of a better way to do it than to write a book.…

>That said, if you want to anchor yourself as an expert in a space, I can't think of a better way to do it than to write a book. I think this depends on the field and the audience. I'm not sure about other sciences but, when I was working in Biology and Ecology, there was much higher regard placed on people who'd been published in reputable peer reviewed journals than those that published books on topics. It usually…

It seems like you are talking about publishing research work in book chapter rather than peer reviewed articles.

A book usually covers a selected topic in depth and in a coherent manner. This is particular useful for graduate students. Besides, some book authors also invite their friends to give comments. The impact of a book can be as rigorous and significant as journal articles.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#233

Post by angst_ridden »

Like everything, the answer is "it depends." I wrote a book a decade or more ago on an F/OSS project I was involved with. The advance worked out to about $2/hour, and I've never sold sufficient copies to go beyond that. That being said, it was always intended more as a labor of love and a way of promoting the project than it was a way to make money. Sadly, there was a political battle within the project's core team, and the fundamental API of the project changed around in a non-backwards-compatible way. That rendered my book semi-obsolete within months of publishing. I left the project shortly thereafter. While those externalities don't bear directly on the book-writing experience, they may be things to keep in mind: stability of the subject you're writing about, general versus specific applicability, and the health of the community you're writing for.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#234

Post by pbronez »

goostavos wrote: post #120
rllearneratwork wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It’s your job to highlight your relevant skills and experience during interviews. It’s especially important to be proactive about unusual experience that canned questions won’t hit, like an OSS project you run or a book you wrote. Remember that having something good is NEVER enough. You HAVE to tell people about it.

Case in point - you don’t even link the project in your comment! I can’t even begin to give you specific advice because I don’t know anything about your project beyond its age and basic popularity tier. Maybe it’s super relevant to me and I would benefit from bringing you in for some consulting. We’ll never know because you didn’t mention the crucial details.

Here are some generic things you can try:

- Don’t be afraid to mention your specific project in relevant settings, like this forum or an interview.

- Use examples from your project to answer questions (“Sure I know about X, I considered using that when my project needed Y, and my benchmarking eventually suggested Z was better in that instance”)

- List the OSS project on your resume like a job (“Primary Maintainer, MyLibrary, 2012-. Designed, Implemented and Maintained a library with 12,000 github stars. Reviewed and merged 300 community pull requests. Implemented CI/CD...”)

- Identify corporate users of your OSS and proactively offering consulting

- Speak at conferences/meetups focused on your programming language/ framework /industry

- Blog about the project and your experiences with it

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#237

Post by beezle »

Worth is an interesting thing. I wrote and published a very niche book that was, for all intents, a mind dump of my experiences doing a particular volunteer, non-tech job over a three year time span (now eight). The value to me was the cleansing nature of putting it all down on paper.

I knew I was never going to get rich from it, but felt the many hours I spent doing this job would be wasted if I did not make an effort to pass along to others what had been learned. That it sells 200 copies every year still amazes me.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#238

Post by dredmorbius »

Retric wrote: post #222
dredmorbius wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maths is, like literacy, a fundamental skill, not a specialty.

Math is pardon the pun, fractal in nature. Geometry skills may be reasonably common, but topology and group theory for example are rarely taught in high school or their not even part of most collages general education requirements. Go back 50 years and people may have been studying geometry but they covered significantly different areas.

How much has that fractal expanded?

Is it more or less complex than 20, 50, and 100 years ago?

How many subspecialisations have groups 9f 50, or 10, or5, or 1, who actually understand them?

At what scale of living practice does knowledge fail to be cultural and become merely transient, lodged for a few years in a few minds, perhaps mouldering for a few decades in a fiche copy of a once-read dissertation?

And, a few moments after writing the above I see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24631728

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#239

Post by shaklee3 »

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…

For what it's worth, your name alone has become quite famous in the performance world, and that's due to your blog posts and books. I would be a bit shocked if an interviewer for that field didn't know you.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#240

Post by watersb »

I made about $0.03 per hour from my book.

BUT

I wrote the book at a time when I wanted a change in my career. I had been doing Network administration and tech support and simple repair work, but I wanted to switch into software development.

The book got me interviews. And my life was very different after that.

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