Writing a Technical Book

I liked the information in Andre&#x27;s post. Aspiring writers would do well to heed his thoughts on outlining. He also states that writing is the easy part and editing is the hard part, and I completely agree.<p>I wrote a diary during the almost two years I spent writing and revising a book for Manning Publications. I muse about the trad pub process and my feelings on the great slog that is writing a technical book.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gitmol.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gitmol.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;</a>

&gt;<i>Self-publishing ... PRO: You have full control over all the process really.</i><p>This is one of the best things I like about self publishing. I am not restricted by guidelines set by a publisher regarding chapter structure, images, exercises, etc. I can give away free copies, put up free web versions, share source code, etc. And recently I&#x27;ve tried sharing content chapter wise as I write the books.<p>&gt;<i>Traditional publishing ... PRO: You have professional editors looking over your draft.</i><p>I miss this aspect of traditional publishing the most. Also applies to quality of the ebook (formatting, cover, etc) produced.<p>&gt;<i>The hard part is editing and revising it so that your draft becomes something that is good enough to share.</i><p>I actually like the editing and revising part. It&#x27;s somewhat like bug hunting and feels good to squash them. Creating the first draft has been more difficult for me, since it takes time to organize my thoughts about what I should put in, reading documents, researching ideas etc. When I&#x27;m editing, most things are already in place and easier to keep myself occupied with smaller list of tasks.

Good reading! I did learn a lot regarding tools I didn&#x27;t knew and I will definitely check Reedsy and Scrivener, I did use leanpub which was really good, doing almost everything for me.<p>The hardest part is about marketing for me, and I am happy that I first wrote the book for me and see the completion as an achievement, I talked with a lot of people who thought it was kind of easy to get rich just writing books, I don&#x27;t think so, not easily.<p>Also, it&#x27;s really tough to promote a book without feeling like you&#x27;re over-trying to do it, and regarding an IT book, except for a reddit community, or twitter I wouldn&#x27;t know where to start.<p>I have even been invited to online conferences, people seemed to be interested (don&#x27;t think they were faking it), but it generated zero sales :)

Thanks for a fantastic post. I&#x27;ve actually wrote a single tech book in my life, and found Pandoc to be really indispensable.<p>For example, while writing a book about Vim* I simply used markdown and Pandoc would allow me to translate it to all the different e book formats.<p>Pandoc supports syntax highlighting out of the box. Unfortunately, there wasn&#x27;t one for VimL, so I had to implement it myself, but Pandcon would allow me to extend it.<p>I wonder if that&#x27;s possible with Scrivener? Does it even support syntax highlighting?<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vimfromscratch.com&#x2F;book" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vimfromscratch.com&#x2F;book</a>

I&#x27;m writing an online book right now, the advice to build your samples as you outline is really good. I&#x27;ve stumbled to that conclusion myself. Nothing like writing a series of samples to make you figure out what should or should not have been covered yet, and in what order you should introduce concepts (which for me is the hardest part of outlining).