Awesome Book Authoring

A collection of resources for technical book authors.

Table of Contents

• Must Reads
• Book Proposals
• Contracts
• Royalties, Advances, and Other Money Stuff
• Editors
• Publishers
• Marketing
• Misc.
• List of Publishers
• Self Publishing
• Writing Workflows and Tooling
• Personal Experiences, Post Mortems and Campfire Stories

Must Reads

• Scott Meyers’ Advice to Prospective Book Authors
• Writing A Technical Book: Is It Worthwhile?

Book Proposals

• The Proposal (O’Reilly: So You Want to Write a Book?)
• Scott Meyers’ Advice on Preparing a Book Proposal
• Write for Us (Pearson Education)
• Drafting a Proposal (Que Publishing)
• Anatomy of a TOC (Que Publishing)
• Proposal Guidelines (The Pragmatic Programmers)

Contracts

• Book Contract: What’s Negotiable and What’s Not
• Scott Meyers’ Advice on Contracts
• The Contract (O’Reilly: So You Want to Write a Book?)
• Apress Standard Contract
• No Starch Press Standard Contract

Royalties, Advances, and Other Money Stuff

• Scott Meyers on Royalties, Advances, and Other Money Stuff
• Royalties and Advances (O’Reilly: So You Want to Write a Book?)
• Writing A Technical Book: Is It Worthwhile? - The benefits for writing a technical book, and the basics of how book advances work.
• How Book Advances Work – A Simple Explanation for Writers
• Typical O’Reilly Advance Structure

Editors

• Scott Meyers on the Importance of a Good Editor
• The Editing Process and Editor Types (Que Publishing)
• Writing and Editing (O’Reilly: So You Want to Write a Book?)

Publishers

• Scott Meyers’ Advice on Finding a Publisher

Marketing

• Marketing Your Book (O’Reilly: So You Want to Write a Book?)

Misc.

• Scott Meyers on Advance Sales, and How They Are Impacted by The Delivery Schedule
• Ask HN: Considerations when asked to write a book? - A discussion on Hacker News where many authors discuss their experience.

List of Publishers

• O’Reilly
• Apress
• The Pragmatic Programmers
• Packt Publishing
• Pearson (parent company for Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall Professional, Que, Sams, and more)
• Que Publishing
• Manning Publications
• Wrox
• No Starch Press

Self Publishing

• Self vs Professional Publishing - The pros and cons of each, plus a look at many of the options available for self publishing.

Writing Workflows and Tooling

• Living the Future of Technical Writing - Scott Chacon shares his workflow and tools for writing “Pro Git” in Asciidoc.

Personal Experiences, Post Mortems and Campfire Stories

• Writing a Programming Book: FAQs after Writing Learning React Native
• Do Not Buy This Book - Jeff Atwood’s warning to potential writers.
• Writing a Technical Book: Motivation, Publishing and how to stay focused without ruining your Life - Adam Tornhill shares experience gained writing his three books (two of them self published).
• Writing a Technical Book - Michael Foord shares his experience publishing with Apress.
• Tips for Writing a Programming Book