If you weren't going to do it anyway, no.
Writing a book: is it worth it?
31–40 of 299 posts
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#32Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curs…
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.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#33> A lot of money, but I also put a lot of time into it! I estimate that I spent about 2.5 years of full-time equivalent work researching and writing the book, spread out over the course of 4 years. Of that time, I spent one year (2014–15) working full-time on the book without income, while the rest of the time I worked on the book part-time alongside part-time employment.
Is it too creepy to wonder how the author sustain himself during the "full-time without income" part ? (Did he start saving earlier on to get a big safety cushion, did he get an advance, etc ?)
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#34> A lot of money, but I also put a lot of time into it! I estimate that I spent about 2.5 years of full-time equivalent work researching and writing the book, spread out over the course of 4 years. Of that time, I spent one year (2014–15) working full-time on the book without income, while the rest of the time I worked on the book part-time alongside part-time employment. Is it too creepy to wonder how the author sus…
I think if you're a senior software engineer at LinkedIn in silicon valley for a couple of years and then don't have enough to sustain yourself without additional income for a year after that then your lifestyle must be quite extravagant.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#35Even if you earned $0 from your book, I'd say being able to tell people you wrote a book at interviews and on your resume, and even at parties, would make it worth it. And you'd be able to call yourself an author, how cool is that?
This. I wrote a book about React and after that didn't get asked stupid interview questions anymore.
Surely that doesn't work if it's 'just' some self-published book the interviewers haven't heard of?
I don't mean any disrespect to yours at all (since I've never read any book on React, so I can say with certainty not your (unshared name) book on React) but anyone can write a bad book and start selling (or rather, 'offering for sale') PDFs/ePubs on their website (I've thought about doing it!) that shouldn't make them an automatic authority on the titular topic though.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#36Miracles happen and sometimes a book, like this one, takes off. For the most part, it's not worth your time and energy. I've made far more money as an author of articles and as an expert witness than I ever did from my books, even though one did with quite well and was translated into Greek and German. I'll also add that he must have one heck of a deal with ORA to get those kind of royalties because the standard ORA…
Your book titles?
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure where I first heard this, but I feel it, even as I think about writing more: "everyone loves having written a book, not so much writing a book."
I've heard it as, "I hate writing but love having written." The source is apparently unclear: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/10/18/on-writing/
"Everyone one wants to have written, but no one wants to sit down and do the work to write." Is how I heard it.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#38Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technical books in print are generally better formatted than their e-book cousins (O'Reilly's digital library, Kindle) unless they're PDFs. This has a major impact on readability if there are significant amounts of diagrams or code samples or tables in the text.
I've also found some physical books nicer for reference then their digital versions.
I sometimes think 'I really prefer physical books, if only they had Ctrl-F' - but actually, in reality, it's often so much easier to leaf through and find something (from rough memory of where it was, skimming, jumping around, ..) than it is to search digitally (get the search term right, see results with little context, find it's impossible to search for part of an equation or the text in a diagram, or oh damn it was rendered as an image).
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#40I wrote two books this year, Beautiful Spark being the more popular of the two: https://leanpub.com/beautiful-spark
My book writing experience was much different:
* just took a few weeks of part time work, mainly just organizing blog posts
* Leanpub pays much higher royalties (80%)
Books are a great way to learn more about the topic and help others. It makes training and employee onboarding a lot easier. You can tell folks to read a chapter and then review.
Books aren't a great way to make money, but they're fun to write and a great way to give back to the programming community.