How I wrote my first book
Here is my story of how I became the most famous software developer author that you have never heard of.
This story is how I wrote my first book, first two actually. My first book was a self-published on CakePHP.
I later was able to publish my first book with an actual publishing company — O’Reilly Media, arguable one of the largest tech book publisher in North America.
My story begins in 2009, roughly around January (prior to having kids when I had a lot more free time).
Throughout 2008 I was developing all of my projects using CakePHP. I had become the expert in the little development shop that I was working in. I was the go to guy for all questions CakePHP related.
This made me realize that I had a lot of knowledge to share. So in January of 2009, I started compiling some ideas for articles. It was my time to start my blog: End Your If. The first articles officially started in February.
In the first year I wrote over 10 articles of CakePHP tutorials. I continued to accumulate more articles throughout 2010, amassing (what I thought was) a nice collection of articles. A lot of these articles were not just how to solve XYZ problem, they were actually complete examples on how to build CMS’s and drag-and-drop systems.
Now it was time for my next brilliant idea. I wonder if I could reorganize all of these articles and put it in a book format. In early 2011 I started creating my first book.
Wow. It was so much more challenging than I could have expected. The writing part was easy, I had all of the content and example code. What I did not expect was how hard it would be to format the code!
I persevered and was able to create Rapid Application Development With CakePHP. At the time Amazon had a subsidiary company called Create Space that allowed you to self-publish books on Amazon. Create Space is now rolled into Amazon’s KDP program — how much easier it is to create books now is like the difference between night and day.
As you may observe from the reviews, a few people were unhappy with the formatting. Well I’m sorry, I truly did my best. There were other people who liked it a lot and that makes me happy; I was able to help others learn. Mission accomplished.
This was a good lesson, you need grow thick skin because you cannot let negative reviews get you down. Instead you need to use that feedback and improve for your next project.
I didn’t want to stop here though. While I was officially an author appearing in Amazon’s library. I think at the time I may have been the first person to publish a book on CakePHP; now that’s an accomplishment!
As soon as I was finish with this book, I had the itch to write more. Talk about right place, right time. I reached out to O’Reilly Media to write a book on ASP.NET’s MVC (at the time version 3). O’Reilly was interested immediately as they were streamlining their new publishing processing to be able to churn out books faster, like NetFlix today they wanted content.
I signed a contract and had three months to complete the book. O’Reilly had some good templates, it was so much easier to write and format this book. And in September of 2011, my dream came true (again). I had just published my first book with a major publisher. The book is called: 20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3: Faster, Smarter Web Development.
I wasn’t done there though. I have since gone on and wrote three additional books published via O’Reilly Media. A true honor. I’m so proud of my work, it was not easy.
While writing all of books, I had to balance work, twins, and an awesome surprise of a third child. It was not easy.
Hard work truly does pay off.
And that is the story of how I became the most famous software developer author that you’ve never heard of — until now.
I am Jamie and I am a software developer/author/father.
