8000 words into the new book and then my mind turned left…

They say that a year in internet terms is equivalent to three or so in our own. The speed with which the web development tools we use continue to change and improve remains consistently high despite the fact that in internet terms, the web is now in its fifties. ASP.NET development too has reached its mid-life crisis, swapping the classic postback estate car for the sportier Web 2.0, AJAX-enabled asynchronous model, dallying with coquettish client-side javascript libraries and yet still relying on the server-side framework to do all the chores that are taken for granted while it remains ignorant of those interactions on the browser. Some homely webforms with the extra slice of viewstate on their pages have been divorced in favour of the slimmer, higher maintenance MVC models, while CSS fashion gurus tell us that this year's little black dress is increased web standards compliance (when is it not?) with a dash of HTML 5 and a soupcon of CSS 3, accessorized with a little Silverlight bling and social network integration.

As a writer, this pisses me off. Someone scraped the contents of Darren Di Lieto’s website and published it
into a 350-page book being sold online for $100. Publishers have faked their details, resellers refuse to pull the book.

Please spread the word about this and help alert people that they should not buy this book.

Well, tech books anyway. Charles Petzold has written an excellent post on the state (and the point) of being a technical book author in response to Jeff Atwood’s own post on how he found writing his first book now that it has found its way to the shops.

And Charles has it pretty much spot on vis a vis the experience and the rewards of producing a 700+ page book. And the comments to the post are pretty much in two camps : ‘I chose to write a blog’ and ‘why don’t you self-publish?’ Ironically, Charles is probably one of the few technical authors who could go the way of lulu.com or Amazon’s createspace.com because he is well known enough to have knowledge of his book spread by word of mouth. Others would include Don Box, Scott Guthrie (if he ever chose to write one), and Bill Joy. Perhaps Miguel d’Icaza. The self-publishing route is double-edged. If you do go that way, you get no advance up front but you do get a higher return per book (with some payment to the printer pay book depending on the company you've gone with). It’s also true that post-publication, a self-published book will require more support and PR effort from you to get people to buy it.

As someone who’s now 200 pages into his 13th book, writing it in the wee small hours with support from Red Bull, I’d add two more brief points to Charles’ words on writing. You Write Books Because That’s What You Like To Do. Writing a book makes you learn and relearn your subject. Which is also good.

Before the fall of Wrox back in 2002, an erstwhile attempt was made to produce monthly books on new cutting edge topics. Java Server Faces, Hailstorm, XQuery and more were all covered in hastily put together 200 page tomes. It being 2002 though, the number of topics you could write a book on were limited and the EA series became the Handbook series before Wrox fell into liquidation.

With a new owner, it looks like Wrox v2 are taking another crack at the early adopter series but in a more sensible form. From Jim Minatel,

Wrox Blox are short, electronic-only, downloadable, and typically going to be on hot cutting edge topics. For short, these first few range from about 20-40 pages. Electronic only and downloadable: they’re PDFs available from Wrox.com.

And, here’s something I think you’ll find cool: they’re DRM free. If you’re paying $3.99 (US - which is the introductory price for these) that’s low enough that we don’t want to hassle readers with DRM.

The launch Blox are:

• Silverlight 1.0 Animation
• Leverage LINQ in ASP.NET 3.5 Projects
• iPhone and iPod Touch Programming
• Building a Photo Gallery with Adobe AIR

And new ones are due approximately every week. I almost really like this approach. it’s a median between ASPToday’s daily free (when I was there) content and the untenable EA concept.

Tim O’Reilly states that the C# book market is up 78%, ASP.NET up 61% and Javascript 171% thanks to AJAX. SQL Server books have also boosted sales recently thanks to the release of Yukon. While this is undeniably good and indicates that development budgets are stretching a bit further these days, I wonder exactly how sales still compare to the heyday of mid 2000. For those unaware of it, this is when the dotCom bubble burst, book sales halved in three months and companies like Apress and Wrox were forced to either shelter under the cover of a new owner or go bust. It does feel like there is a new optimism to it all at the moment though. Unless you propose to write five or six books on using your iPod however, there’s still very little money in the writing business as an author or reviewer; it is still a matter of passion rather than money. That’s been true of writing across the board though.

What has been lacking recently is a way into tech book writing for those who are interested. Subject areas have been fixed for a while and there are only so many different ways to  However, the new influx of nascent technology - notably from Microsoft - and the introduction of CTP schemes does mean that there is a lot of scope for new authors to flex their literary muscles.

In looking back at my experiences though, a few words of warning to those entering the dark waters of writing.

• Know your subject. It sounds obvious but writing a book is hard enough without you having to learn everything as you go along.
• Know your audience. No-one knows as much about the subject you will write about as you. They will know more or know less. Define the level of knowledge for your target audience and stick to it. Don’t skip coverage on one subject because you think it’s too trivial or because you don't like it. This is a book - not an option piece.
• Know what your editor will and won’t do for you. Time was that editors had the time to fix consistency of style across chapters, rewrite sections in better (American) English, test, debug and fix sample code and generally make authors seem even better than they were. This is not so much the case these days and it’s important to know what they will do for the book.
• Know the format style. Writing MSDN documentation is infinitely different to writing a book which is inifitely different to writing a script. Research the format you want to write. Figure out why you like it and what you want to do with it. Let your editors know and put it in your initial proposal so they know what you want to achieve.
• Know your language. Developers like things described unambiguously. It means that they can understand a concept, use it and move on. Putting a vague indecisive spin on things isn’t so great. It implies you don’t get something and that the developer will need to spend a couple of hours experimenting with code to determine a fact that they just bought your book to tell them.
• Write. Edit. Leave. Reread. Edit. The first draft of a chapter will make complete sense to you but not to others.
• It will take you longer than you think. Trust me - it will. And writer’s block is a pandemic. Everyone gets it for a bit. Don’t worry unduly.
• Thank your family in the credits for putting up with you being a hermit as you finish the book. This helps a lot. Or go one better, as Chris Sells did recently.

Book writing is a bit like cramming for an exam in some ways. The best way to produce cogent text is to be on top of the subject you’re covering and let it flow - in a structured way. Braindumping everything you know on a subject into a splurge and calling it a chapter isn’t as good.