Book? Book?¶

Tags: book

I might write a book. Wow! (But I’m not disclosing yet what it’ll be about).

A while ago I got an email from my favourite tech publisher, asking me whether I was interested in writing a book about a certain topic. I’d have to submit a detailed proposal to them.

After a few emails back and forth I agreed to write a proposal. Some thoughts I had about that:

• I feel inadequate. I’m not the number one expert. Not even the number ten expert.

• I can write. I get a lot of positive feedback on my live conference blogging (plone, fossgis, djangocon.eu, europython), for instance. And my English ain’t bad.

• I still feel inadequate, subject-wise.

• I can write a book. I’ve written a PhD thesis (pdf version). 250 pages or so. So I know I can do it.

• Oh blast, they want a proposal soonish, but I’m moving to a different house right now and I Don’t Have Time.

• Wow, it is my favourite tech publisher that’s asking it. Wow.

• Big big chance. I have to take it. And it seems like fun!

So I’m currently digging myself out of the boxes in the living room and in my study room and doing brainstorming on my book proposal. I’ve got to hand it in this month, preferrably. It’ll be work but I think I can make that.

I’ve gotten a good brainstorm done on what I want to tell in the book. Just doing that brainstorm and seeing the amount of material I want to tell about and my enthousiasm about it… My confidence got a boost. I’m not a super-expert on this subject, but I’m sure I can make a good and useful book. I’ve got a message and a bunch of opinions and a bunch of tips and some experience explaining it all and… that made me enthousiastic!

The big thing I need to figure out is a subject/usecase/example/project to use as a skeleton for the book. And to hook all that up in a table of contents.

I just created a fresh bitbucket project to hold my proposal so I’m stopping this entry and I’m getting cracking on actually writing down my proposal now :-)