Developers: Write a Tech Book?

Should you write a tech book? In this video, we look at the pros and cons, including how it can help your career.
00:47 - Why you should write a book
02:07 - Why you shouldn't write a book
02:50 - What to write about?
05:50 - What tools to use to write?
06:50 - Outlining and word counts
08:04 - Writer's block
09:17 - Where/how to publish
09:47 - Publishers?
Links:
Amazon Book Sales Calculator - TCK Publishing
www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-...
Amazon Sales Estimator
www.helium10.com/tools/free/a...
Leanpub
leanpub.com/authors
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
kdp.amazon.com/
Gear I'm using to make my videos
changenode.com/gear-list/

[@shakes115]

What is your workflow for using Lean Pub? The build time seems pretty brutal for compiling the book. Also I put a simple math equation inline and it looks quite ugly on the ePUB version

[@ChangeNode]

Do work locally mostly, and then use a command line to trigger a build that then worked locally. github.com/hjiang/leanpub-cli via brew on macOS is what I was using. Here's a little bash script I was using, just looked and haven't touched in a bit so YMMV. ``` echo "Starting..." git status mkdir -p preview cd preview leanpub-cli --api_key $LEANPUB_API_KEY --slug mybook --gen_type pdf pandoc -o mybook-preview.docx mybook-preview.epub echo "Generated mybook-preview.docx" cd .. echo "Done." ```

[@ChangeNode]

If you are doing fancier stuff like LaTeX I think there's extra stuff to check out WRT leanpub, eg help.leanpub.com/en/articles/6116789-methods-for-writing-and-displaying-math-in-ebooks-and-html

[@shakes115]

Thanks for the response! The cli you gave doesn’t seem to work but I figured out a different way that is ok (just ok, not great). Their support for math is very limited as it describes in the post you sent but there are workarounds

[@ChangeNode]

Yeah, at some point if you are doing a lot of figures it does turn into a rougher Q. Big tension there between something like Affinity Publisher for top notch control vs reflowing content esp for eBooks. Mostly personally I just write prose and have code snippets, with some png illustrations. A lot of books do publish their content on GitHub and I've seen some pretty intense pandoc etc configs out there...