How to Write a Software Book in 4 Steps

Step 1 — Come up with a great topic

It’s critical that you pick a topic people won’t be able to put down.

If you were to attend a technical conference today, imagine what are people talking about. Because if they’re talking about, they’re probably willing to purchase a book about it!

Back in 2014, Spring Boot made its first GA release. And the buzz was STRONG. In the midst of that year’s SpringOne conference, I received an email from my publisher asking about doing a Spring book. I looked around, and seeing all the chatter, hastily threw together a counter proposal, telling them we HAD to write a book about Spring Boot. They had never heard of Spring Boot, but leveraging my expertise and pointing out the excitement, my publisher agreed to a five chapter book deal.

Suffice it to say, that book was a slam dunk. Being the first Spring Boot to market, it sold FAST. The advance they gave me was earned back in six months.

I’d like to take credit as some phenomenal writer, but the truth is, Spring Boot as a topic is a gold mine and did much of the heavy lifting.

What are you an expert in? What is something you could talk about all day without hesitation? And contrast this with, what is something in the vicinity of your expertise that you KNOW people want to LEARN MORE about?

Redis? React? Spring? Project Reactor? MongoDB? Postgres? There are MANY opportunities.

Try this — carve out one afternoon, perhaps four hours. Sit down and try to write (or type into a Google Doc) a list of your skills. Not necessarily stuff you have committed to memory. Just imagine the areas of code you have written LOTS of code using. Also list book topics you would read about. This may reveal a topic others would like and you could write!

Alas, as important as this is, the next step is vital.

Step 2 — Start writing the code for it

There is no other genre of books I can think of that has the concept of writing both prose AND code.

For software-based books, we need the code. Your readers will WANT THE CODE. So plan on this — don’t be stingy. Considering GitHub organizations are now freely available, go carve one out and make a public-facing repository to hold all your book’s code.