Pitching a Tech Book to a Publisher

How to succeed when approaching a publisher about writing a programming book

Previously I wrote on what it’s like to write a tech book. In that article I deliberately glossed over the process of getting to the agreement to write the book. Let’s talk about that process.

There are a very limited number of scenarios in which people talk to a publisher about a book project:

1. They have a book idea and want to write it through a publisher
2. The publisher has a book idea and thinks they might be good to write it
3. The publisher has a book and wants to revise it or complete it

The first case is what people frequently think of, and what I recently went through this fall as I successfully pitched a book idea (more on this soon). In this scenario, you have an idea, you think people will like it, you’ve decided you don’t want to self-publish, and you now want a publisher to work with you.

The second and third cases involve an acquisition editor reaching out to you about an opportunity they believe exists in the market that you might be able to write about. This is how I got to write my first technical book, Refactoring with C#.