Shades of a Cloud Book

I’ve began discussions on my first book prospect.  I’ve written a lot of material; white papers, documentation, consumer documentation, training curriculum, and more over the years.  However I’ve never written a full on book.  Anyone out in the blogosphere and twitterverse have any advice on a prospective book writing?  I know a lot of you guys have written books before, I’m curious what I should watch out for, focus on, etc to assure I bring in a solid, successful book project?

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5 thoughts on “Shades of a Cloud Book”

  1. How to write a book? You mean one a publisher will print?

    1) Take some coursework. It if take 10k hours to be really good at anything,then better plan on some practice. Not white papers, not dous, not training, but books. Don’t expect the first three to get picked up by a publisher.

    2) Get an editor. A *real* editor with published books. Do what they tell you. No whining.

    3) Stop asking the huddled masses how to write a book. Or we could just go to a collaborative book writing site and do it.

    1. Ah, well this is a “I was approached” to write scenario. So I don’t have to shop it around. However, I’m sure I may one day be working toward writing a fiction book and seeing if someone will publish it. 🙂

  2. Technical book writing is difficult, time consuming (more than you’ll ever know) and the financial returns are pitiful. I started one a few years ago and had the good sense to bail out in time.

  3. My step-dad is writing a book. By the time it gets published (assuming it will), he will have spent about 10 years writing it, and re-written it a couple times completely. Expect a lot of closed doors. If you can find a subject that purely technical, and hasn’t been covered by one of the big publishers, perhaps you can have an easier time of it.

  4. Before I started out on “Dependency Injection in .NET” I’d written four full articles for MSDN Magazine, as well as numerous blog posts and other smaller pieces, so I thought I was prepared. I wasn’t.

    It is surprisingly hard to write a book. You can’t just take those smaller pieces you already wrote and scale up. At least I couldn’t. It takes much more time!

    I’m now about 3/4 done with the book, and have so far spent a year on it. My kids “miss” me and I can’t remember when I last really relaxed.

    It’s going to be worth it, but it sure is a long haul. Be prepared for that.

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