The Book Writing Business, part 1

I’ve gotten several questions about how to get into the technical book writing business based on my posting from March 9^th.  This ended up being a bigger discussion than I expected.  So I thought I’d blog it in the next three entries.

Nowadays, I enjoy a strong writing relationship with O’Reilly & Associates.  However, I’ve worked with several publishing companies in the ten years I’ve been writing technical books and have accumulated a little bit of experience on the topic.

There are a couple things that are worth noting for the book publishing business.  An overview of the process looks like this:

A good technical book will have a 3 or 4 year life cycle.  But some topics are so time-sensitive that they have to be rushed to production and then quickly fade out.  I try to stay away from topics like that, personally.

First, you really don't need an agent to get a book deal or even to write for magazines and websites.  In my experience, the most notable value-add that agents bring to the table is with white papers and specialized article writing.  Since this pays some of the best fees in the technical writing world, agents are worth the cost for someone who wants to write all the time and often on tight deadlines.  On the other hand, I prefer to write as a side gig to my day job.  So I'm happy without an agent.  On top of that most all of the big technical book publishers have easy to find guidelines posted on their website for submitting unsolicited book ideas. 

Second, the most important element of getting a book deal is a solid book proposal.  Your book proposal should contain:

Remember, the idea of the book proposal is to enable the publisher to determine if they can make money on your title or not.  Some authors I've encountered tend to think of the book proposal as a sort of 'demo' of a completed book.  It's really not that.  The publisher will quickly be able to determine if the technical premise has merit.  They usually need help figuring out if the audience is big enough, dynamic enough, and hungry for new content.  That's where your help will make the biggest difference.