Writing my first Book
I managed to write my first book “Spring Boot 2.0 Projects: Build production-grade reactive applications and microservices with Spring Boot” (available at amazon) and get it published mid this year.
A lot of people wanted to know about the journey and how I started and ended the book so this article is intended to shed some light on it.
Last year I was fortunate enough to travel to Belgium twice as part of my work. Right after the second visit I had this nagging feeling of starting something off. By this time I have been reading some books and on and off writing technical articles on my Blogger blog.
This got me thinking to implement my own Platform for Sri Lankan IT industry niche where Industry experts, Students and IT enthusiasts can get together to write articles and share knowledge. Thus https://www.techtalks.lk was born. I was able to get people to join and write on the platform but I was the major contributor to the platform.
There is only one way to find whether you can do something or not. It is by just doing it.
Whenever I write an article on the platform I would share it on the Techtalks.lk facebook page and also on other social media including LinkedIn. This is where the serendipity took place. An Acquistion Editor from the Packt Publishing by the name Sandeep Mishra has seen my articles on Spring, Spring Boot written on the platform and contacted me to find whether I can write a book on the latest version of Spring Boot 2.0.

I was both excited and worried to be honest. I have been writing articles which may take maximum two days to write and publish where as the book needed to have a minimum of 300 to 400 pages with each page having 300 words minimum. This was a daunting ask from me and quite frankly I didn’t know if I could do it.
But there is only one way to find whether you can do something or not. It is by just doing it. So I took up the challenge and got the contract signed with Packt Publishing to write 9 chapters each with minimum of 30 pages with a 6 months deadline starting in January 2018.
There were some moments when the only viable thing to do was to quit.
Slowly down the road I started to realize writing a book is not as easy as it sounds. Yes, it is fun and educating but it requires a lot of planning, time management and of course motivation to get pages written and diagrams drawn. For this reason Packt Publishing has great Content Development Editors to keep you up and motivated. I was assigned to work with Tiksha Sarang who would always keep an eye on progress and kept pushing me to get what seemed impossible to me done.
But no matter how much organized you are there will be some days where you will feel so down and won’t be able to get anything done and I was no exception. There were some weekends where I didn’t even write a single word and there were some nights where I was exhausted and burnt out. There were some moments when the only viable thing to do was to quit.
At moments like this kind words of encouragement of my wife Nadhiya helped me to get through. That is where I realized it is not just about always me. None in this world can triumph without help from others as we humans are social animals. It dawned on me that when I can’t do everything by myself I should ask for help.
Finally I was able to pull my self up and get things straight. I managed to write and get the book published well within the given deadline making me a Top Author in Packt Publishing. But obviously this is just the beginning. A book’s success depends on how it is received by the readers not by its completion and publishing. So these days I am into get as many people to know about the book as possible.
