Thanks for the article, Teiva! I (and likely most non-authors) had no idea how much work went into writing a book, and your 2000 hour lower bound really opened my eyes. Evidently, your writing has grown a ton since you started out. Out of curiosity, if you wrote a second book of similar length and depth, do you think it might take an order of magnitude less time/effort—by being able to skip revision stages, having internalized the lessons from this book—or would the bulk of the effort likely remain?
Also, thank you for your transparency on revenue and margins! I’ve always wondered about the profitability of authoring technical books, and given that your book seems to sit at the upper end for sales for its class (in lieu of extensive and arduous marketing efforts) your numbers provide an excellent datapoint for prospective authors.
About your question, the time it would take me to write sentences that my DE and I would consider fine enough would probably take me much less time. Yet, I think a significant part of the 2,000 hours is going over all the different reviews and this would probably not drop a lot.
So glad to comment first and I one hundred percent cherished every word of it. Being an aspiring tech author, I read this post in awe 😲 with my mouth wide open. Thank you very much for such an authoritative (pun intended) author post. Kudos to your determination and perseverance. I’m definitely looking forward to your second edition.
I wonder, did you also eventually end up building something like this (https://github.com/dunyakirkali/letterpress) for yourself? If so, is there maybe some tips'n'trick you could shared which I could also benefit from?
Also curious, how are editors when it comes to working with git repos? Are they used to that flow?
Thank you for sharing this, Teiva! Writing an article is a lot of work but a book is really hard work and requires a lot of determination apart from expertise.
Congratulations on your book. It was such a labor of love.
Thanks for writing this. It shows the behind the scenes of many published books we read
Thank you very much.
Thanks for the article, Teiva! I (and likely most non-authors) had no idea how much work went into writing a book, and your 2000 hour lower bound really opened my eyes. Evidently, your writing has grown a ton since you started out. Out of curiosity, if you wrote a second book of similar length and depth, do you think it might take an order of magnitude less time/effort—by being able to skip revision stages, having internalized the lessons from this book—or would the bulk of the effort likely remain?
Also, thank you for your transparency on revenue and margins! I’ve always wondered about the profitability of authoring technical books, and given that your book seems to sit at the upper end for sales for its class (in lieu of extensive and arduous marketing efforts) your numbers provide an excellent datapoint for prospective authors.
Thank you!
About your question, the time it would take me to write sentences that my DE and I would consider fine enough would probably take me much less time. Yet, I think a significant part of the 2,000 hours is going over all the different reviews and this would probably not drop a lot.
So glad to comment first and I one hundred percent cherished every word of it. Being an aspiring tech author, I read this post in awe 😲 with my mouth wide open. Thank you very much for such an authoritative (pun intended) author post. Kudos to your determination and perseverance. I’m definitely looking forward to your second edition.
Thank you very much 😊 Glad you enjoyed it!
Go teiva!!!
Nico!! ❤️❤️
Love the article! Thank you
I wonder, did you also eventually end up building something like this (https://github.com/dunyakirkali/letterpress) for yourself? If so, is there maybe some tips'n'trick you could shared which I could also benefit from?
Also curious, how are editors when it comes to working with git repos? Are they used to that flow?
Would love to enrich my ideas on the topic: https://blog.incrementalforgetting.tech/p/sculpting-a-book-the-chisel
Thanks!
> I wonder, did you also eventually end up building something like this (https://github.com/dunyakirkali/letterpress) for yourself?
No I haven't built anything. I just had a command to generate PDF from my AsciiDoc content.
> Also curious, how are editors when it comes to working with git repos? Are they used to that flow?
Not much. As I explained in the post, comments were done sometimes on the source code itself. That was quite weird.
Thank you for sharing this, Teiva! Writing an article is a lot of work but a book is really hard work and requires a lot of determination apart from expertise.
Thank you very much, Abhinav :)