Keyvan Nayyeri

My dear friend, Simone Chiaretta, has put together different stages of the writing process of a programming book based on what he could experience during our work on Wrox Beginning ASP.NET MVC.

First of all, I should state that this has been an excellent experience for me to work with Simone and our editorial team on this title, and I’m glad that we could make it regardless of all the difficulties that both of us have had in the past months to free up on time for writing. Of course, we haven’t completed the whole writing process yet and some review stages are being done, but the main part is already gone.

Simone has written about different stages of writing process, especially a programming book, from infancy to the production, and in good details. As he has said, many guys ask about this process from authors and I’ve faced with such questions many times, so this post is worth reading for everyone who’s interested to know the actual process.

Book writing starts with skill, and this is the concealed point of the writing. You should have a great level of skill and understanding in a field to be able to write a book about it. Obviously, you cannot teach something if you don’t know it very well, and this is the most important point in the success of a book. Besides, if you’re not an English speaker and are going to write an English book, then you’re obliged to have a level of English skills, especially in writing, in order to work on a book.

As Simone goes on, you need to find an appropriate book title and a publisher that may be interested to publish it then you should write a proposal. I had pointed to a great series of posts by Chris Webb which covered book proposal in good details. If publisher approves your proposal then you start writing with a Development Editor and one or more Technical Editors. After initial writing, you do a final review and send the book to production where different editorial groups at publisher proofread the book, designs the figures, align the papers. The last three steps are, printing, distribution, and marketing. Simone has discussed these stags in good details and I recommend you to go over his post to find additional information about them as well as the payment and other stuff.

Having these said, I’d say that writing a book can be a different experience and may vary by publisher but the main stages would be constant; however, bigger publishers have a more complicated process and put more effort into their titles which of course affects authors and requires them to more effort into the title. As Simone has pointed out, he has had a different experience from his friends in Italy because smaller publishers don’t put much effort into their titles to assure the quality, but bigger publishers hire more editors and invest in their books to deliver the best content.

You know that I’ve authored four titles for John Wiley & Sons in the past three years, and somehow passed abovementioned steps for each title. To be honest, the writing process is difficult because many factors play a role in writing. While you need to deliver the best content, you also need to care about the number of pages and the length of the book because publisher starts marketing in earlier stages and there is an acceptable tolerance for this. You also need to care about deadlines and it’s very difficult to do this specifically as a software developer who’s busy with many projects. Note that writing a good book requires enough time to be spent on it.

By the way, as I had said when I announced Beginning ASP.NET MVC on this blog, most likely I’ll put my book writing progress in a long suspension after this title, and will not write new titles for some years, mainly because I want to learn more and work on more advanced titles in the future. I don’t want to become a writing factory and victimize the quality by quantity.

Doubtlessly John Wiley & Sons is one of the best publishers even the best one, especially in Computer Sciences, and it’s been an honor for me to write these books for them (totally over 1000 pages), but I feel that I need to stay away for a few years and return back with more critical titles to better influence the world.

However, I’m happy that this last title was about one of my favorite topics, and I worked with Simone and a great group of editors. Simone has been doing a great job on the ASP.NET MVC and I bet he will lead the ASP.NET MVC stream in the upcoming years.