Having recently released a "technical" book with a large traditional publisher (Wiley) [0], here are a few of my learnings:

- Expect nothing from the publisher in terms of marketing support. In fact, a good nonfiction book proposal is going to spend most of its length explaining to the publisher how you will sell the book for them through your connections and credibility - not the other way around. It's all on you.

- Don't do it for the money. You're going to make 10-15% of a pretty small pie. If you want to write info products as a moneymaking side gig and you have any following at all, self publish!

So why go with a traditional publisher? I don't feel this is fully articulated in the OP, but here was my reasoning:

- The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people, so if you care about maximizing readership and you don't have a stupid-large online following, their network effects through bookstores, library sales, etc will help you sell more copies than you could on your own (though again, you'll see very little of the money!)

- There's still some social proof involved with traditional publishing, and it's a nice thing to do once - just so you know in the back of your head that you "can"

- In my case, I was producing a highly graphic book that really doesn't work except in print and in full color, and I needed the resources of a traditional publishing house to make it not look terrible.

The Wiley experience was overall positive for me and I don't regret it, but if I ever produce a text-based info product in future it's hard to look away from the ROI advantages of self-publishing.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/...

I am also now writing my first book (https://efficientdeveloper.com/) and it is really difficult, especially during Covid times (my original idea of writing this book was writing it on a transatlantic cruise... )

What you realise when writing a book is that every sentence gets rewritten 3 times, even before you start caring about proofreading. With all the research and decision making, publishing etc. it takes much more time than it looks.

This is a nice summary, and shows the benefit of working with a publisher, when you are writing a book that is similar to ones they have published already. You get a lot of support, and will definitely benefit distribution-wise later as well. Congratulations to the author - especially on publishing relatively quickly, in 10 months from the idea! And it's very nice to read that all royalties are going to Girls Who Code.

I've worked with O'Reilly and a few other publishers on a proposal that was slightly different to what they usually publish. I went through the same submission process, working with an acquisitions editor, similar to how it happened in this case. In my case, O'Reilly rejected the proposal after a month and half. The feedback in my case was that the book competes with another project, which project got priority. Sure enough, I took the proposal without any changes to another publisher, worked with the acquisitions editor there, had the proposal accepted and we went ahead with the writing process with a development editor.

In the end, working with the other publisher did not work out for me. They did not publish the type of book I was writing, and the feedback from the editors kept nudging me to "shape" the book into the type of book this publisher knew would sell, and would sell well. Unfortunately, it didn't feel like the type of book I was excited to write.

A year and some time later, I'm still writing the book -The Software Engineer's Guidebook[1] - and if all goes according to plan, I'll publish it early next year.

What I've learned with working with a book publisher, is just how involved the process is. Now, instead of taking a $5,000 royalty upon completion of the manuscript, I'm budgeting to spend around $5,000 out of pocket on development/copy editing, cover design and production editing. The things that the publisher would have otherwise paid for. It's a bit simpler to hire professionals these days for these areas thanks to sites like Reedsy[2], which I do recommend for fellow authors self-publishing in finding support on various publishing tasks.

[1] https://www.engguidebook.com/

[2] https://reedsy.com/

This is great and really useful to me! I am also, like others here, in the process of writing my first "book": https://redis.pjam.me/. Mainly inspired by https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/, rebuilding Redis, instead of git, in Ruby.

> For my first few sections I wrote the code as I wrote the sections, but then Lak made the suggestion that it would probably be easier to write the code first and then write the chapter

I can echo this a thousand times, I've written the last three chapters this way and this has made a huge difference, wish I had known that earlier!

I will also add that it really made me learn so much because even though I thought I knew quite a bit about Ruby (I knew early on that I didn't know much about Redis). So many times I found myself trying to explain something and realizing that I didn't actually know how it worked and ended up spending hours (days?) researching the inner workings of said thing

PS: Using quotes around book mostly because that's the imposter syndrome kicking in, I was calling it "a series of blog post" for a while, to kinda downplay it

This is a great post mirroring much of my OReilly process. Writing a book can be a wonderful process.

After authoring over a dozen books, I'm making an end-to-end authoring course[0] for those interested in self-publishing. I interview a dozen authoring folks that are known around these parts to get their wisdom as well.

0 - https://mattharrison.podia.com/effective-authoring

As a curious 'outsider' (Developer, not a writer), is it worth the time and effort to publish a book on Self-Publish platforms like Amazon Kindle?

What I am basically looking for is to create a strong resume and some bit of passive income.

This is a valuable guide through the entire process. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for sharing your experience! It is really insightful.

I've had mixed feelings about publishers in the past. There is probably still some cachet in a name brand publisher. And they do some things for you which would otherwise take time. On the other hand, for better or worse, editing was pretty lightweight and more errors crept through copy-editing than should have. I did go ahead with a v2 of one book but I probably wouldn't actively pursue a publisher if I do another book at some point.

The summary makes it sound as if the co-authors worked together pretty well although I'm sure it wasn't completely friction-free. It's very easy to end up with a co-author who likes the idea of having written a book more than they like the act of writing it.

I've been working on my first book with Manning (should be out in the next few months).

Without the structure a publisher provides it's likely I would not have come even vaguely close to finishing.

The marketing is icing, really.

Signed up for the notification when the book is published. I really liked your article about the product minded engineer, and follow your blog. Given the timeline you refer here, I wonder if the project O'Reilly was referring to was Software Engineering at Google[1]. Given the book contents summary on your site, the contents do seem to overlap in some areas, except I don't expect that you're making numerous references to Google in your text :-D

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-P...