Last month at the JavaOne conference I had the opportunity to participate in a birds of a feather session titled "So you want to be a published technical author?". I was glad to share my experiences as a published book author, unfortunately the session was only 45 minutes and we had 5 people plus the moderator in the panel, so we didn't have time to cover everything we wanted to. Here are some things we covered during the session, plus a few more things that were left unsaid.
How do I get noticed?
The easiest way to get noticed is to blog about the topic you are interested in writing. Personally, the way I got discovered was when one of the articles I wrote for my own web site was linked to from The Server Side. My advice to aspiring authors would be to blog about your topic of choice then submit your own blog posts to Reddit, Hacker News and other popular technology sites.
Is it profitable?
Not directly. Yes, you'll get some extra cash, but not enough to live on. However, the fact that you are a published author will increase your demand as a programmer a lot, allowing you to charge higher rates. Also, being published opens the door to other opportunities that further increase your exposure, such as speaking engagements and invitations to write articles for high profile publications. A quote I read somewhere that deeply resonates with me: "You don't write books for the royalties, you write books for the consulting fees".
How do you find the time to write?
Very few technical authors write books for a living, for most of us that is something we do on the side. Since we have a full time job we have to write on nights and weekends. Personally, I have a home office in my basement where I go on the evenings to work on my books.
What topics should I write about?
Something you are passionate about. Personally, I tend to pick open source projects such as NetBeans and GlassFish and write about versions that are still in development and have not been officially released yet. I try to time the book publication to match the official release of the project in question. This approach has the risk that things I write about may change in the final version of the product, however the trade off is that your book will cover the latest version of the technology in question.
