A tech manual, he means?
Writing a book: is it worth it?
41–50 of 299 posts
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#42I 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…
> mainly just organizing blog posts
Were these your own blog posts, or posts from other folks? If the former, you should include that time as time it took to write the book!
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#43Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation. Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.
Agreed. I'm reading it just now and it is really high quality. Just the chapter on transactions is probably the best explanation of a single topic that I've read in any technical book. It's really good for such a complex topic—thorough while still being very readable!
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#44He 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 contacted about other jobs, and even to write other books.
They all said the actual book itself made them no money beyond their initial (small-hardly five figure) advance, and in terms of dollars per hour they probably would have been better off getting a fast food job, but it opened up a lot of doors and made them at least a little bit "internet famous."
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#45“A Career in Professional Basketball: is it worth it?” by Lebron James.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#46> 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.
Sure ! To clarify, that's also my assumption, but I was wondering if he specifically decided to save money to prepare for the "writing" period ; or he if "accidentally" ended up with enough money to spare a year of full-time employment.
In any case, good for him, of course, no jalousy implied !
(Also, as for the "your lifetime must be quite extravagant"... Again, "fair enough", but apparently the whole "FIRE"[1] movement might beg to differ ;) )
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's how I feel about lifting heavy weights. There's certainly a general principle to be found here.
One piece of feedback I got from someone I respect very much is, "read less and write more." So far that's been limited to quality documentation and Tufte style presentations, but I can definitely see the appeal of writing a book even if I don't make a penny off it.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#48Writing 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.
Sure.
But the skill remains in competition with all other skills --- some specialisation or specialisations must shrink for another to grow.
With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though most fall at 98% or higher by UNESCO rankings.[2] And even basic literacy expresses a minimal language and cognitive capability.
Skill itself is finite. Over half the population, and over 2/3 in most surveyed industrialised countries, have poor, "below poor", or no computer skills at all, by an OECD survey.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
The population with the demonstrated capacity to aquire any advanced computer skills seems to be about 5--10%, and this competes with all other high-skill, technical, or professional occupations. Increasingly it's a prerequisite for them, possibly shrinking that pool.
Again, the larger point is that attention, a key component of skills acquisition, is rivalrous, in both individuals and populations
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Notes:
1. NCES reports 4% "could not participate", 4.1% "below level 1', and 12.9% "level 1", or 21% "low English literacy" ages 16--65, in 2012 and 2014, a level insufficient "to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences".
https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
2. Rankings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_...
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#49I 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…
> mainly just organizing blog posts Were these your own blog posts, or posts from other folks? If the former, you should include that time as time it took to write the book!
They're my blog posts and that's a good point. I can generally write a blog post in a few hours.
Martin's book is clearly a masterpiece and mine isn't. Just though I'd chime in and let folks know that writing a book doesn't have to be a 2.5 year full-time commitment.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#50> 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…
An advance probably isn't going to be much more than beer money. It's not unreasonable to imagine though that a West Coast developer could have some savings.
That said, given his comments about finances (which are spot-on), it does seem like sort of a leap to take 1+ year off. Nothing wrong with taking some extended time off, but most wouldn't use it to write a book full-time. Of course, going in he may have had unreasonable expectations which were indeed met.