Researching the Topic

It’s a good idea to have a few topics in mind. Now, let’s discuss the research to support or disprove your topics.

Needless to say, good writers are readers. In writing, your first move (after settling on some topics that are of the most interest to you) should be reading or at least skimming most of the best competitors’ books. They are the best books on your topics, or related topics, if yours is too new.

Just go to Amazon.com and type the term, for example, “nodejs.” On the first page, you’ll see the best books according to ASE (Amazon Search Engine) related to this search term.

While you’re on Amazon.com, browse through categories and open the books’ first pages. Note their global rank. This is how popular the book is among other books on Amazon.com. Typically, the 100,000s and above is mediocre, the 10,000 to 100,000 range is good, and the first 10,000 is amazing! If you see that none of the top books in the category are in the first 10,000, that may mean the category and topic are not in such high demand.

Often books are placed in not-so-fitting Amazon.com categories, so be careful when comparing. This is done to push a book to be a best seller in a more obscure category rather than compete in a crowded but more fitting one. For example, Pro Angular ³ is #5,526 in Books and #4 in Network Programming but is not even listed in JavaScript, and it is a book on a JavaScript framework. Same with the longtime best seller in XML Programming Node.js in Action ⁴, which has very little to do with XML and a lot to do with JavaScript. Its rank is #10,487 in Books. In Chapter 5’s “How to Improve Amazon Sales,” I’ll go into more detail about this.

Another step: Go to Google Trends⁵ and search for your term. The trends should be going uphill, and not downhill. In an example comparing node.js and ruby on rails topics, Node.js crosses over Ruby on Rails’ popularity (sorry!) in March of 2013, as shown in Figure 3-1.

Another example is if someone decides to write a book on a particular browser’s JavaScript framework but can’t decide what to pick. Among the top choices are React.js, Angular.js, Ember.js, and Backbone.js. A quick Google Trends query for the past 12 months, shown in Figure 3-2, puts Backbone at the top, with Angular trending up toward Backbone’s ranking.

Sign up for a newsletter on your topics to look for hot new frameworks that might need a supplement book. For example, for JavaScript Weekly⁶ and Node Weekly⁷ check out the newsletter by Peter Cooper.⁸

Join a local meetup or a virtual Facebook group, or a Google Plus community to stay on top of the trends. Hacker News, Geekli.st and similar sites are also good sources of hype.

Technical Book Categories

There are no set-in-stone categories for programming books, but most authors, readers, and publishers adhere to some conventions, which you can spot by certain keywords. For instance, “in action” means practical, “beginner” means no prior expertise required, and “expert” means it will be hard to comprehend without prior experience.

The types might be mixed, for example, definitive guide with practical solutions.

A typical book length is about 300-400 pages, which consists of 10-20% illustrations, and about 30% code. This means that per 100 pages (8.5 x 11” with 11pt font size) there are about 10,000 words.

Testing Your Topics

To find a social media group/community, just log in to the web site and use search. Try not to solely ask or self-promote on these web sites. In other words, before asking for help contribute something first, such as useful information or answers to questions.

The way I picked the Express.js topic is that a few posts on it brought 25+% of traffic to my blog. The decision to write a book on it was a no-brainer. However, I waited because I didn’t want to be the first person to publish a book on the topic. In accordance with the technology adoption life cycle (shown in Figure 3-3), I wanted to capture a bigger market. Only after I saw that another Express.js/Node.js blogger released a book on the topic did I start the work on Express.js Guide .

An even better step would be to set up a landing page (buy an SEO-friendly domain for it!) with a sign-up form, or take it even further and start taking pre-orders with Gumroad¹⁹ or Leanpub²⁰.

Once you’ve picked the topic, length, audience, and the title, and you’ve tested the topic to ensure that the demand is there, get to writing! No excuses!

Writing the Manuscript

As many prolific and successful modern authors have noted when talking about writing: make it a habit. I can’t agree more. To me it’s almost like a muscle. I started writing in a journal, then on my blog, and then books came naturally.

Some experts advise you to keep a pace of 500-1,000 words per day. But if you feel like you want to write more, don’t let the word count stop you. Your writing doesn’t have to be on your book’s subject. Any type of writing can be useful in maintaining the practice and perfecting it. For example, you can write about food, or travel, as I do on azat.​co/​blog²¹.

If it’s close to November, sign up for National Novel Writing Month²² (NaNoWriMo). It’s a writing contest with the goal of having a 30,000-word manuscript by the end of November. The prize has no great value. The real reward is the writing that you’ll produce and the discipline gained in doing so.

The discipline is important. It’s extremely important for most of us who have to maintain a day job and moonlight writing books during free time. It’s easy to get distracted by the errands of life. Try to find at least a half hour every day (morning, before my job worked the best for me), and write anything. If you can make it technical, that’s even better. Your short posts can then be incorporated into the manuscript later, or serve as marketing material, which is covered in Chapter 5.

One last piece of advice: don’t try to find a perfect day/night for writing. Just chip away at it anytime you have 5-10 minutes to spare. Of course long streaks are better because you can get into the writer’s flow, which is a very similar feeling to the programmer’s flow, when the sense of time is lost, focus and concentration are increased, and awesomeness is fired from under the fingertips. Tools and cloud services make writing anywhere easier. I’ve heard of someone who wrote his programming book on his smartphone while riding a train (saving to Dropbox²³ and publishing with Leanpub).

Markdown for the Win

Markdown is not a programming language in and of itself. The name is gimmicky, because markup means a language that defines metadata. The way Markdown works is similar to another widespread markup language—HTML—in which we have special symbols that define formatting and styles in plain text files instead of relying on word processing software like MS Word, or Pages.

Why use Markdown vs. word processor vs. plain text? Have you ever caught yourself spending time adjusting styles, margins, and fonts instead of writing? Have you ever had your writer’s flow interrupted by moving your hand away from the keyboard to find and manipulate a mouse to make some text bold? Plain text just by itself is not a solution either, especially for technical text that requires bullet points, emphasis, and code blocks. But what if we can define basic formatting with special symbols right in the text, right as we’re typing? That is what Markdown is.

Renders into:

Italic text and bold text.

Markdown was started by Daring Fireball²⁷ and quickly gained popularity among developers for documenting readme files (readme.md*.md is a markdown extension, but *.txt and any other extension works just fine because it’s plain text!). GitHub spread markdown (with its own flavor²⁸) like a virus. Then it conquered the hearts and minds of writers.

In this book, I’ve assembled a quick start guide: Markdown Cheat Sheet , which is located in Appendix A.

Health

I’ve heard of a person who almost ended up in the hospital trying to beat a book publishing deadline while juggling a full-time job and family. Don’t overdo it. Be realistic when committing. A good rule of thumb from software development is to multiply the number of days/weeks by two, or three if this is your first book, because everything usually takes at least twice as long as we expect it to²⁹.

When you write, use an ergonomic keyboard like Kinesis Freestyle2 ³⁰ (Figure 3-4) and an app like Time Out Free to avoid repetitive stress injury.

I personally maintain a primal/paleo lifestyle, which is akin to having superpowers³¹.

Fitness is as important as food—and we often come up with the best ideas while working out.

So now, once the first draft of the manuscript is ready, it’s time to move on to publishing.