Originally Published December 6, 2023 on Medium.

Congratulations — your proposal has been accepted! If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably done a good bit of pre-writing, and you’re probably anxious to get started writing. What happens next varies from publisher to publisher, but I’ll lay out the basic form of what you can expect.

Originally Published November 30, 2021 on Medium.

If you’re thinking of writing a technical book, you probably have an idea of what you want to write about. Right now, that idea is probably a thing: some language, some tool, some framework, some management technique. That’s a pretty common place to start, but it’s not enough for a book, not in the current publishing environment. If you start by thinking “I want to write about CoolFramework.js,” then you’ll probably start by listing features or components, and explaining how to use each feature in turn until you run out of them. That’s useful information, but it’s reference documentation, not a tech book. Reference docs serve a purpose, but they’re a fundamental part of the product itself, not an extra you need to pay for. Reference docs are usually available on the Internet for free, and that’s not the right model for a tech book.

Originally Published April 5, 2022 on Medium.

Publishing can be an opaque and frustrating process, whether you’re looking to write a technical book, your memoirs, or a science-fiction novel. The publishers are large, gatekeeping entities who seem to hold all the power, and who make decisions for reasons that aren’t made public. You might have tried submitting to a publisher and gotten rejected, or maybe you don’t like what you’ve heard about working with publishers. Maybe you’re a do-it-yourself kind of person.