A short guide on writing an excellent book
4 Things You Should Know When Writing a Technical Book
Writing a book for the first time can be a tough experience for novice authors. When I was working on Mastering AWS CloudFormation, I felt a bit stressed, thinking that I won’t deliver an excellent book for my readers. This project has taught several valuable lessons, which I want to share with you.
Master what you write about
Mastering series is a series for mid-level specialists who want to (surprise!) master a certain skill or technology. To provide them with high-quality material you must know the topic from top to bottom.
Ideally you have a proven experience with the topic. If it’s about a certain database system, you’ve run it in production. If it’s a programming language, you’ve been coding a lot. If it’s about a major cloud provider, you are certified, and so on.
Do your homework
If you write a book for a publisher, you likely have signed a contract. Although I don’t expect you to do a trial in case of disagreement, it is wise to read the contract thoroughly as well as check all the deadlines for the chapters. Once you sign a contract you commit, and this commitment is about pages per chapter and a material covered in…
