Writing a Book

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our Between Seasons foray into various topics, a couple of random things to catch that are, they're basically about an episode of content and not worth even a small season or short season. Last time we looked at lessons learned and sort of a helpful hints for starting a podcast, running a podcast, doing the technical work that's involved. This episode, I want to go back and revisit a little bit the idea of writing a book. This is one that we've also touched on a couple of different occasions over the years, but I've had a little bit more time to reflect, have written a couple of different times and gotten feedback and things like that. So I'm hoping that these are some helpful tips that will maybe make your life a little easier should you choose to write a book. First off, I think you need to. Everybody really, I think, should. It's, it is one of those things that I think way too many people feel is out of reach for them. It's not something they can do. They don't have the, whatever it is, you know, the skill, the, the, the knowledge, the technical writing ability, whatever it is. But I think it's worth it to go through the exercise and it doesn't have to be a novel. It doesn't have to be something that's huge and complex. I think just picking a topic and writing the equivalent of a long essay, you know, 30, 40, 50 pages or more on that topic, even if it's just talking about your life, maybe something that's occurred to you could be something like the story of the winning baseball season for your kids, you know, or something like that. Just going through the process, particularly for those of us that are in this technical world, I think it is very valuable because it does help your personal brand. It does help bring to you. It helps develop some skills that I think are very valuable in so many areas of what we do. And since we write a lot, we just happen to write code instead of, you know, grammar or prose or something like that. But we still write a lot. We can type, we can put thoughts together. Typically we do them in logical statements and things like that. But I don't think it's that big a leap to do a book, a story. And it doesn't have to be for publication, but I think it's worth it for you to take it through. Go through Amazon's CreateSpace or I forget what they call it now. It's Amazon's author or something like that. But they've got a nice little way for you to be able to put together content, put it into a template, and then ship it off to them and do a little bit of plug and play marketing type stuff to put some content on the cover and the back and images and some stuff like that. And then Bob's your uncle. You got a book. They'll actually send you, if nothing else, a test version of your book as you go through everything. And I think that's a cool reward to get for going through that effort. This is one of those that the journey I think is far more valuable than the outcome. Just sitting down and writing is a very educational kind of experience. And so from what I've learned in a couple different ways I've done stuff, I think I'll throw some ideas out there and hope that this helps maybe even motivates you to go out and write something. First off is a topic. This is much like the idea of creating a side hustle or something like that, except for maybe not to the same level as a side hustle. If there's something that fascinates you, something that you find in your quiet moments, you turn this idea over and over in your head or you keep revisiting it or you keep adding onto it or attacking it or whatever that is, then that may be a very good idea for a book. And it could be something very controversial. Maybe there's a political position or argument or something that you just find yourself in an internal debate over that over and over again. Maybe there's a TV show or a band that you obsess over. There's things that I think most of us, and it's probably seasonal, there's certain seasons of life and things that go on where we get mentally sort of stuck. We have like we'll say a home page or a home base that we go back to when we're just sitting there, maybe riding in a car or drifting off to sleep or generally not having to think about stuff, things that will pop back in our mind. And then there's the standard things like, oh, I've got this to do for work or I've got that errand to run, things like that. But I think for most of us, there is something else. There's some other topic that we obsess on is probably a strong word, but that we revisit on a regular basis. Whatever that is, that means that you've put thought into it. Probably more thought than the average person, depending on what the topic is. And so that's a good starting point. Now the other thing about this is that you've got this topic that you've thought about. Once you start putting it down on paper trying to explain the topic or your position or why the arguments for or against it are strong or weak or however you want to look at it, then I think it's going to prompt you to sort of evaluate some of those thoughts and say, okay, well, how do I add some weight to this? How do I back this up? How do I find some sort of supporting arguments for this, whatever my position is? And so you're going to go out and you're probably going to do some research and some reading, which goes back to why you want this to be something that you care about, because you're going to spend some more time digging into it. You're going to get some more time in learning it more. And maybe it's something where you sort of back into it, where you realize that you're pursuing something and it makes sense to maybe write the story of your journey or write the lessons learned for you going along that path. And this could be a certification pursuit or a degree or some skill that you want to teach yourself or some encounter or event or bucket list item that you're chasing after. There's all kinds of stuff that can be turned into decent stories and you can start with an outline, start with sort of high level, here's some points I want to make, and then start digging into it. Start actually making those points. Start writing around those points. From a technical point of view and even from a personal life story kind of point of view, when I wrote, that was what I started with. I essentially started with the chapters, I guess, or what became the chapters. It was really just some key items that I wanted to include, that I wanted to address. And then with those, particularly on the technical side, then with those, then I would look into those and realize that they had multiple points. And then those had maybe some points. And then in really digging into those, there would be, that's usually when stories and experiences and other things would come to mind that added, I hope that I consider added color to whatever the points were, whatever it was that I was going over at the time or digging into or presenting. And when you do that, it's an interesting, essentially rabbit hole, I think you'll end up going down. Is it where it may be very difficult to get started? Once you get going, once you start putting some of that content in, I think you'll find that it sort of feeds itself. Is it you'll start writing and then you'll realize, oh yeah, I want to write about this. Oh yeah, I need to add that. And the next thing you know, what was that maybe something you struggled to figure it was going to be more than four or five pages. You know, now you're 30 or 40 pages in. And I mentioned, you know, pages and stuff like that. First off, if you're writing a book, don't focus on length. Whatever you put together, it could be an ebook, it could be a novel. I don't know. That's up to you. That's up to where you want to go with it. But I think if you target a certain length or something like that, then you're probably going to be challenged. And an ebook side is a little different because they are more or less summaries of topics. So you can, you know, you can know that, okay, I'm going to do, you know, whatever it is, four or five pages per topic. I want to hit, I don't know, 50 pages. So that means I basically need about 10 topics, you know, or maybe 12 topics, something like that. You can, you can do some things like that when you, you have some of this a little more open-ended generally. So maybe you are, you can somewhat use length to restrict yourself. Otherwise, I would highly recommend don't, don't try to restrict by you saying, I'm going to get more than, you know, X pages or I want to keep it to, you know, X pages. I'd say just start writing and let it, let that dictate how long or short your book ends up becoming. I highly recommend you use tools like Grammarly or there's several others out there that I use Grammarly. So that one always jumps to mind. I do know there's some other tools out there that help you with grammar and spelling. Some of them, I think there's even a few that'll, you know, sort of help with essentially white space and flow and some things like that. I highly recommend you use one of those tools, get used to it. That is something you probably want to actually incorporate into your daily life, into emails and things like that, that you write and, you know, letters, documents and stuff like that, that we just, you know, may not be our first choice, but we do have to deal with those and write them on a fairly regular basis. And these tools make, are more than worth their weight, more than worth whatever the investment is in them because it will make you a better presenter of your ideas. It'll clean up some of your grammar and spelling and some of the other issues that sometimes people can get hung up on. And it's just going to make you look like a more professional in what you present. When you get to the editing side, which you definitely need to, you know, it's just like when you write code, you run a compiler, you may go through a code review, things like that. You're going to need to do that as well. And I think that's a good experience to go through. You know, reread what you wrote and do your own personal flow and general editing, but then also get somebody else to take a look at it. I struggle with the idea of getting professional editors, you know, people that are just out there that you can, you can go get them off of. Guru or Upwork or Fiverr, any of those kinds of sites, you can find editors and Amazon will provide them. I think they still have links so you can get access to editors that essentially you're going to pay, depending on the size of your book, a few hundred, I don't know, maybe a couple of grand. You probably want to limit the amount of money you're going to pour into this unless you're really trying to turn this into a moneymaker. Spoiler note, books as moneymakers are not a good idea. I think I've talked about this before as well, is that books are more like a gateway drug into your product or service that you have. If you're trying to make money as a writer, then basically you've got to be writing novels and that is not an easy industry to get into. You're very good at that and that may not be, you're probably not going to be able to make a lot of money doing that unless, like I said, you're really, really serious. And at that point, you need to not worry about what I'm telling you. You need to go to like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling or one of those people or a thousand other people that are high end professional writers that, you know, and they've got, you can find stuff from them on how they write and what they do. It seems like every one of them is a little different. So definitely at that point, I'm not going to be able to help you very much. So this is more not necessarily as a lark, but it's trying to, a little bit of it, I guess, is providing a legacy of what you've done or what you know. But it may also be just the ability to pass on, you know, knowledge and experience and to share with others. There's definitely one of the books I've done, probably two of the books I've done that very much of that are just trying to take what I've learned and, you know, the good, the bad and the ugly and share that with others so that they can maybe learn from that as well and gives them a little, maybe, hopefully gives them a head start on some of the things because they can see where maybe I tried something that didn't work or tried something that did and maybe that helps them with some of their options, you know, just learning from the experience of others. But you may have others' goals and it's, that's, I think, going to factor in quite heavily into what you want to really invest outside of some time when you're getting feedback or you're getting something out of that time. You're learning how to write, you're learning how to present your ideas. Other stuff, editing and things like that, you will get, you'll learn, I think, from that because you always learn when somebody else takes a look at what you've done and provides feedback. Make sure that you, if you go that route, make sure that you vet the editor, take a look at what they've done in the past, talk about what to expect, what you're going to present to them, what you expect to get back from them as far as feedback and how is that going to be incorporated, how are you going to incorporate their suggestions, whether you take them or not, into your work. It may be as simple as, you know, you send them a Word document that has track changes on and they can go in and make some comments and stuff like that. There may be some other format. Make sure you're clear on that because this is one of those situations where expectations can be all over the place. I think it's very important that you go in and set in the proper expectations so you've got something to follow up on. Whether they exceed them or fall short of them, then you've got something to measure that against and not just, oh well, I sort of hoped they were going to do better or wow, I was sort of surprised that this much went in. If I had known that, maybe I would have done more. when expectations are either met or exceeded, then I think you want to do your best to take advantage of. So communicate that. And they should. That's part of their job. However, help them help you basically and let them know what you expect and talk to them about how do they normally deliver things and what timeframes and all that kind of good stuff because I think that's going to help immensely with that process because that is the bulk of the work, I think, is really the editing is going back and it's not the writing of the first time. It's reviewing it and rewriting it and editing it and reading it again and editing and that's just a process that it seems like is, to me, I think it almost takes more time than the writing itself. Regardless of the book, the topic that I've covered, it seems like by the time I'm done, the time I ship it or whatever, besides I put a done stamp on it, I've probably read that thing dozens, maybe hundreds of times. Not all in one sitting, but maybe you'll write a chapter and then you'll go reread it and make some edits and tweak it and do some adjustments and then you have formatting and things like that. All of those things just add up to a lot of time. Formatting, before we wrap this one up, I do want to talk about the formatting side of it. I highly recommend that however you write this, that you have essentially a template with some settings from the start. Ideally, it would be something where you use styles within the word processor. Most of them have it, so that you have styles like a heading, secondary heading, tertiary heading, outline, general text, maybe quoted text or something like that. You set those things in place first. How do you generally want to format this? Alignments, do you want to do left aligned, right aligned, fill, fonts, font sizes? Particularly if you've got a situation where you've got styles that you can edit the style and then apply it across the document, get those things in place sooner rather than later. Because they're going to help you when you do get into that editing phase and you realize that, oh, I really thought this was going to work, but I want to do a different font or I want to adjust some of the sizes here or I want to highlight better maybe chapter titles and how those are separated. Things like that that you're not going to think about when you're writing, but they are key presentation items that you're going to want to deal with as you get to the end. If you haven't set yourself up to have some ways to rather quickly apply those changes across the document, especially something like this when you're talking hopefully at least dozens and maybe hundreds of pages that can be in itself very time consuming and very monotonous and annoying. So the sooner rather than later, get your basic framework up and then start writing. And that's all there is to it. And that is the challenge of the week. It's seriously just sit down, take yourself a few minutes and think about it. What would I write if I was going to write a book? And then the real challenge to this is put aside some, it doesn't have to be much, even a small amount of time. Let's say even 10 minutes, I guess even five minutes, but 10 minutes a day or more. And you just put a little alarm clock or something, you do a little timer and just promise yourself you're going to spend 10 minutes a day working on this book, whatever it happens to be. It's been 10 minutes a day writing. If you want to do a different timeframe or if you don't want to really do it in a word document or something like that, there's websites. One I think is called 15 minutes a day. It makes it very easy for you to write. You just pop up, write for 15 minutes a day. It saves your stuff. You can look at what you wrote over time. At this point, I don't even think you have to do seven days a week and do Monday through or you do double time on Saturday and Sunday and then maybe pick one day a week or something like that, depending on what your time is. But get yourself a schedule to write. And even if you never complete this thing, and even if you change it at some point and say, that was a horrible idea. I don't want to write on that. At least you took that first step. If it's a, quote, failure because you decide you don't want to do it, that's okay. Learn from it and then change gears and try again. I think you'll find it's very rewarding to you. And as I said, the journey is something that I just, it's an experience that I don't think I think you really need to experience. I don't think it's one of those things that you should let life go by and pass on that opportunity to do so. Even if you don't get all the way, you know, don't actually even self publish it and print a copy and have something sitting on your shelf to say, wow, I wrote that, that nobody ever reads. You know, even in that case, at least you've, you've added to your skills. And I think you've expanded your life. You're going to, I think you're going to find that it is at the end of the day, at the end of your days, it would be something to be able to look back on. I think with pride and say, hey, at least I did that. But however it goes, it's time to move forward. Time to get out there. And as always, go out and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoir.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go. Developer Noir podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developernoir.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.