How I published a 👩💻👨💻⛅️ book 📖 on Cloud technology in 12 months
Last year in May I have been invited to write a book on Serverless and it got published this year in August. How I have done it, being an IT immigrant with a startup founding under my belt, and fair command of English?
This blog post is about the book from an idea, throught the writing process, to publishing. And this blog post isn’t about a particular cloud technology. I hope it helps you understanding the motivations, the challenges, and the sence of self-accomplishment in these difficult times.
Why — The Idea
As a technology visionary you are trying to share your views with many people. You attend conferences, present everywhere. You have to learn a bunch of fashionable cutting-edge technologies, and during the workshops you lead others in using them.
Early on I realized that these actions aren’t enough to capture the imagination of any developer community and won’t allow you to be heard. When watching other experienced and very successful developer advocates, you can realize quickly that the most successful ones wrote a book or more on the technology subject their fond of in order to expand their reach even more. And now they get more attention in social media. In addition they receive a bunch of invitations to speak at conferences.
As soon as I realized that about 3 years ago, I started to ask for the introductions to publishers to propose them that I would write a book on some latest technology for them. I tried various technology subjects to get the attention of the publishers… All my efforts were in vain. Until last May.
The invitation — seizing the opportunity
The last year I was planning on speaking on Serverless Swift at ALTConf — the conference hosted alongside the Apple World Wide Developer Conference in San Jose. This was my typical fast paced and quite interesting presentation with a workshop using the managed Apache OpenWhisk product in IBM Cloud. I was excited, since there are always people interested in what you have to say about Apple based technology being expanded to the cloud and in made available in the enterprise sector.
Then just a week before the conference I got this email from a publisher out of blue:
Hi Marek,
I’m the Senior Editor at Apress over our Apple development titles. Your Alt-Conf talks looks interesting. We don’t have any significant content covering serverless mobile backends with Swift. Would you have any interest in working on a book or producing video convering the topic for Apress? If so, I’ll be out in San Jose for the conference and would be happy to meet and discuss.
Best,
Aaron Black
And as I was looking for the opportunity, and writing Massive Online Open Courses (so called MooCs) on iOS apps using AI services in the Cloud, or managing IoT devices over the Cloud — I jumped at this invitation since I was so excited.
So in early June 2019 I met Aaron, the editor, in San Jose, and I also introduced him to Lennart Frantzell, my friend. I thought that Lennart might be able to help out, and could off-load some of the research work on the book, and also he would keep me motivated in writing the big swaths of it (as I wrote in the past all MooCs in the team with Lennart, we had great fun and challenges in completing the parts of the courses). Finally Lennart has got this massive experience in IT and working in Silicon Valley with various customers — while I am just a technology immigrant to California from Poland.
Aaron was sympathetic about Lennart and myself writing a book, so he provided us with some guidelines, and introduced us to Jessica, the Technical Editor. We started our adventure with the proposal… it took us some time, since we had to understand the State-of-the-Art. There were some other books written on Serverless already. Also one of my more experienced colleagues already covered Apache OpenWhisk. We wanted to make it a really good introduction to the technology, with providing witty descriptions motivating you to use the Serverless when, and where it made sense. Also we wanted to point out why it was an overstretch in some cases.
Besides we wanted to let developers know that they can expand their career beyond the mobile device development by using the Cloud based Serverless Mobile Backend as a Service (Serverless MBaaS). It makes a lot of difference when you call yourself a full stack developer, in addition to the smart device developer. And knowing the cloud based backend isn’t trivial.
Finally our proposal got accepted, and we signed the contract to write the book. And we learned that we will earn couple hundred dollars. So we have known from the start, that the book might only boost our internet presence. But this was all we really wanted.
Delays — where is the Muse?
We were suppose to finish by end of the year. We had 9 chapters to deliver, and it takes about 3–4 weeks to get the chapter out to the technical editor. Then we needed some time for the feedback. We also learned that we need a Technical Reviewer. Fortunately we were able to connect with our mentor — Matt Rutkowski, who is a senior technology leader in IBM, and serves on the Apache OpenWhisk project management committee. Matt gave us numerous suggestions, and we learned a lot from him. We were often laughing that Matt basically re-wrote parts of the book. 📚
We started right away with the easiest chapter — the Hello World example. But from there it got difficult. First we did the introduction chapters drafted, but in the same time we were buried in other jobs. Eventually with Lennart motivating us to write, and Jessica pinging us constantly — we got the next chapters out. Lennart did a great job researching best practices, and use cases.
In January this year we started to mention the book on Serverless Swift during the meetups in San Francisco. Now everybody knew that we were writing the book! We weren’t able to let them down, but on the other hand we were working hard talking about the technologies at various meetups and workshop (not only Serverless Swift, but on Containers, Blockchain, or AI).
In early March we were barely passing the mid mark of the book. At this point being that late Lennart lost some of the interest to complete the task. Apress gave us some push, but also shared with us understanding that they are sure we would complete it in time. So having someone believing in I got suddenly very motivated, and I spent long time over weekends to catch up. Especially during the shelter-in-place order there was nothing else to do or to go, except to write. I spent next weeks evenings, mornings, weekends (in addition to my work during long teleconferencing days) on writing the book.
The ultimatum — wrap up and deliver what you have
We started to get the technical reviews back, so in May we reviewed most of the book. Then I got an email from Aaron, saying that we need to wrap up our work, and to deliver what we have in order to meet the deadlines for publishing.
I got very nervous 😩 and got last two chapters during long night hours basically hacking through the full example — having the technical challenges of the cutting edge technology, and last conclusion chapters in loooong three last weeks without the sleep. 😴
We had to review the examples, best practices, and conclusions with our mentor. And suddenly at the end of June we were done. ✅
The email from the publishing branch of Apress caught me in early August. Lennart and I worked hard over weekends to get through all the questions, suggestions, and changes by the publisher. And surprisingly we got the book in a month!
The book is out — and now what?
Was it worth it? YES, if I were asked again the same question — I would definitely jump to write a book like this. This time I hope I would be more systematic.
The book is out, and I plan to introduce its contents in the blog posts here. Please look out for it. Am I going to write another book? Everything is possible!
If you like the story, give me some claps 👏 , subscribe to my Twitter account https://twitter.com/blumareks , and eventually check out the e-book here:
