Should I try to publish a book or write a blog?

Question

I've got an idea for a book, and I think I could flesh out about 200-300 pages including code examples. I'd like to give back to the community from which I've gleaned so much information over the last couple of years, and I'd like to make a small amount of money to cover the free time I spend writing.

I'm trying to decide whether I should pitch it to a few of the big publishers or go alone on a blog. Thoughts?

Some initial pros & cons:

• Being backed by a good publisher means instant reputation and recognizability. Starting a brand new web site in the cold vacuum of the Internet is scary.
• A publisher would provide help from a seasoned, veteran editor — a person who could turn my inane ramblings into handsome prose.
• Book income would probably be a percentage of sales, while a blog would produce revenue from ads and referrals. (But, I'd bet that a higher percentage of programmers have installed AdBlock.)
• A publisher might make me write in some terrible medium, such as Word.
• There's no "Edit" button on books! What happens if I make a mistake?
• I suck at design. A publisher would have designers.
• Both would be searchable thanks to Google Books, but one would have to pay to get 100% of a book's contents — unless they know how to search for torrents.

Answer 1

I'd recommend blogging. It gets your material out incrementally, and by enabling comments you will potentially get a lot more feedback than from just one editor.

And if you add a link to the blog from your Stackoverflow user page, you can possibly attract the kind of audience you seek.

Answer 2

Blogs are usually a starting point for most people, unless you are already well known and want to further increase your visibility. Blogs help to get your foot in the door and well, most blogs do end up failing unless you are extremely passionate about the subject.

If you start with a book, you are basically hoping that the book is so good and refreshing that a lot of people will want to actually buy it. I'm not saying this is a bad deal, but it does not seem any easier than starting a blog. I'd imagine it's also quite a bigger investment to create a book, especially if no one ends up really using it.

Start with a blog I would say, and then use your blog to bring attention to your book gradually. Once you have somewhat of a following and more people know who you are, you'll have a better starting point for introducing people to your book, and you may even set yourself up for right-off-the-bat potential customers.

It's really your call, and neither direction is easy. Both directions will require a huge time commitment.

Answer 3

If you write the book and no publisher wants it, you can still blog it. I think there's a bit more prestige in being a published author, and even if you don't succeed, you're sure to learn something from the attempt.

Answer 4

It'll be hard to get a publisher to take any notice of you unless your name is a known one. In addition, there's an awful lot of costs they soak up before you even see a dime.

One of my friends actually got his book (shameless plug) published via Lulu, a self publishing mob and he's still working, so it's not the money spinner he first thought. It is providing a little bit of extra income and is now in use at a few Universities.

In order to get exposure, you need to get an ISBN (Amazon et al won't touch books without that) which costs a little extra but not much.

I'm actually part way through a small book which I plan to publish this way. I still believe it's taken more seriously than just running a blog.

You can use any package that provides PDF output and as for editing, get a meticulous friend or two to go over it before submitting. And your edit button is later releases and/or updates/addenda on your web site.

Answer 5

Book. It really depends on the topic. If you are publishing a book like Javascript, you better choose the blogging option because you have a lot of competition and it's much harder to gain attention.

If you are publishing a book about relatively new technology like HTML5, Developing in iPhone then go for the book direction. It's much lesser friction.

Or you can publish a blog, then after gaining reputation you can self-publish it and turn it a book like most of the top bloggers did.

Answer 6

First, advertising to programmers still works (see to the right for example).

Second, please consider doing screencasts as well. Could your 200-300 pages be replaced by 2 hours of screencasts (chunked by chapter)? That might be better, and e.g. peepcode.com might give you better ROI on your time vs. publishing. This helps the community because if your material can be communicated quicker via screencast, the community saves time in aggregate and you have done even more of a service.

You are to be commended for your desire to contribute back.

Answer 7

Hmm... I guess it depends but in this case I guess a blog would be better because of the following things. Feel free to comment and correct me if I am wrong.

1. The time required for writing a book - Generally writing a book is bit time consuming. But as I feel the technology revolution is relatively faster. I mean even when you are studying the area and writing the book, the technology gets newer and your product "the book" may be outdated for a certain extent even when you release it. But in a case of blog you are releasing the part you complete i.e The reader gets more up to date information. And you can add info/revise according to the technology changes.

2. "The power of Google" - The modern community specially your target group use search engines as their primary way of "learning". If you are maintaining a good blog it will be ranked well and will be popular among your target group. In a Book.. you need to worry about publicity, marketing (Assuming you have no commercial aspects)

3. The ability of getting comments and improving the contents - By the comments you can learn what the community needs. There is low opportunity of having such comments in a case of a book. But in a blog you will get suggestions may be from experts, that may be valuable so that you can make your commitment more valuable by updating your resources.

Answer 8

You could blog and then turn your posts into a book. Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Scott Adams, for example, have all done that.

Still, don't expect to make much money directly from a blog or a book. But you might be able to make money form either a book or a blog indirectly. For example, you might get more consulting or job offers due to name recognition.

Answer 9

Blog. I've noticed that as the years go by, the average attention span decreases, and most people don't have the patience (or the focus) to check out and actually read a book. Also, it's unlikely that your book will be anything original (no offense intended, I'm just making a generalization) because there is a book on everything you can think of nowdays. There aren't that many creative things you can put into a book, but you have a lot more power on the internet to do whatever you want.

Answer 10

I suggest something along the lines of http://www.djangobook.com/. They have the whole book online, in the form a chapters, rather than blog articles. As well Apress publications have published it. So it is an one shot, two birds strategy. But I suggest, contacting the publishers first, if they are OK with keeping online, the contents, of their going to be published or published book freely available online. Not all publishers are OK with this.

Django Book, though, was not built in one go, they have incrementing the chapters one at a time. Once the whole book has completed Apress has published their first edition.

This could help you give a one stop solution website, where you can put up additional content, not in the book, or any errata, or more code hacks, samples etc. Probably, you can gain some advertising revenue too.

I hope this will be good, both for you as well as the community, and the publisher too.

Answer 11

Since you anticipate 200-300 pages of text, a book would be most likely preferable to a blog. When you have that much text it is necessary to pay attention to the structure and presentation of it, because a well structured book with table of contents and a good index is still much more enjoyable for the reader than any collection of web pages.

Finding a publisher might be a problem, especially if the topic is not main stream and the target audience is not that big. In that case you might consider to self-publish your work. Look at companies such as lulu.com.

Even if you publish a book, you might still want to consider a web page for discussions, code samples, feed-back and erratas just in case you notice mistakes.

Unless you already have published, you probably have to finish at least a rather fleshed out draft before looking for a publisher. Having an editor available is a big help. Alternatively you might consider finding coauthor. Also I wouldn't worry about the text formatting software that you use. If you prefer LaTeX or else to Word, that shouldn't matter. Any publisher should be able to print various formats.

Answer 12

I dont know how much money will cover your free time spent. but this is going to be the deciding factor for this choice. Just figure out how much would you want. Also there are other factors you might wanna consider

• Penetration (high with blog, low with book)
• Money (Cant say. )
• Quality (high with the book, as you mentioned reviews, design etc)

Maybe you could find more factors. Assign a percentage to each factor and find an absolute score for both choices. Higher number wins

Answer 13

I love the way how the authors of The Django Book did this. They put up the whole material online in a way, to which anyone can contribute, fix mistakes, and send their suggestions—paragraph by paragraph. When they have enough feedbacks, freeze that state, and publish the printed version of the book.

Blog is good for keeping in touch with your audience, and share ideas that would change too suddenly to put in a book.

Answer 14

I'd say it depends on:

• The subject matter. Is this a rapidly changing topic? Will everything you write be out of date in six months? Does it really benefit from being in book form to start with (more on this later).
• Your experience of writing. Are you already confident in your ability to write a long piece? I'm not saying you have to be a fabulous writer before you start, but you should at least have a reasonably established style (in my view, anyway).
• The amount of time you have available. Writing a book is a long, hard slog. When you're in a contract with a publisher, it will be difficult to throw in the towel or take a month's holiday from writing. (Both are feasible, but they won't be pleasant experiences.)

Both forms of writing are certainly fun, and can be quite addictive. Both are very rewarding - seeing your blog's readership (and comment level) is nice, and seeing your name in a book shop is fabulous. Just don't underestimate the amount of work involved.

Oh, and for technical books I wouldn't put too much faith in editors. Copy editors in publishing houses aren't very technical (in my experience) - which means they'll be nervous of changing your text too much, in case they change the meaning. I've worked on a couple of books where I've been listed as a co-author but I've mostly been there to edit the language with an eye for technicalities. Having said that, copy editors do still make a huge difference in polish. Be nice to them :)

As others have said, don't expect much direct financial benefit from either channel. I suspect you'd have to have a very large readership to make as much from a blog as from a book, but you're likely to be working at around minimum wage rates. Very few people write technical books for the money. It can certainly help the rest of your professional life though.

You ought to think about the benefits that books bring, and how relevant they are to your subject matter. Pretty much all the information in my C# book is already available on a blog, for instance, often in even more detail - so why would anyone want to buy a book? I believe it's a matter of organization. If you've got a book in your hands, someone has thought about the best order in which to present the material. They've picked the most important/useful material, too: it can be hard to piece together umpteen blog posts and know whether you're still missing some crucial aspect of a topic. There are the benefits of design, type-setting as well of course, as well as the physical aspects of having a book in your hand - I personally prefer the reading experience of a book over a blog.

You express concerns about technical accuracy: good! Please find a really good tech reviewer who is willing to read your work really carefully. Ideally they should know more about the topic than you. If you're incredibly lucky they'll be able to furnish you with even more information - this is particularly true if you're writing about a particular tech product and they're within the product team. Background information is invaluable, even if you only work a small amount of it into the writing.

Finally, it's unlikely to be an either/or decision: if you do write a book, you should almost certainly blog about the topic as well, if only to drum up readership. You can also use this channel to get feedback on your writing style etc.

Answer 15

Writing a good technical book takes a huge amount of time, so you should try to be sure that your topic is in an area you feel strongly about and can succeed at. A blog is a great way to test the waters. Another way is to contact a couple of good publishers and get their perspective, authors' kits, and lists of tips for prospective authors. Also, don't count on a lot of royalty income unless you have a topic with a wide audience: the financial benefit is more likely to come from consulting opportunities, better job offers, etc.

Answer 16

I'd recommend you do both, and re-publish the content twice. 37 signals did a great blog post called making money twice about how they made roughly $765,000 from the same content. They published their book "Getting Real" in the following ways

1. On their blog.
2. Published as a PDF
3. Self published on lulu.com

With that said, it takes a LOT of time to write great blog posts, let alone a good book, and I know many published authors who basically say you shoudl write books for the love of it, not to make money.

Answer 17

If you want to write a book keep a couple things in mind:

1. The publisher will want a couple of chapters before they even talk to you.
2. It's a ridiculous amount of work, you will have no life.
3. There are a lot of authors out there, you might want to consider co-authoring a book instead of trying to go at it by yourself.
4. You don't write a book for revenue (unless you make the bestsellers list). You only get a couple of dollars per copy.
5. Every book has mistakes, that's why they reprint a book for a multiple editions. Also, there's usually a website where readers can track errata.

Overall, it's a tough but worthwhile.

Answer 18

books are really hard work, trust me on this.

I'd start off with a blog to get your prose up to scratch and then if you feel more confident start putting together something small, say 50 pages and let someone review it or even sell it as a mini-guide if it's any good.

but always start small.

do it on something you know for starters and then if you feel confident focus on something you don't know but would love to and see where that rabbit hole takes you.

but don't commit to something big to early on as it'll kill your enthusiasm for doing anything.

...and definitely don't get anyone to read it until it's done as they'll start picking holes in it and again you'll never get past chapter 2.

give it a go and above all enjoy yourself