Skip to content

Comment on Ask HN: What's keeping you from writing a book?

Comments

I have written an ebook ("Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS": https://stratospheric.dev/). So, technically, I'm not qualified anymore to answer that question.

However, looking at it ex negativo, I can tell what convinced me to write this particular book: A subject to write and learn more about and two co-authors to write the book together with.

Making writing a collaborative effort is enormously helpful, not only since it helps with staying motivated but also because it allows you to more easily break down what can otherwise seem like a daunting amount of work. We even organically arrived at a "pull request"-style review process that allowed us to release quickly and iteratively without getting a third-party editor involved, which could've been a bottleneck and hence might've slowed down progress (more on our writing process: https://progmot.com/post/self-publishing-a-book-with-almost-...).

Another key factor was a relevant target audience we could relate to. Knowing that there's a problem (How to become productive with developing Spring-based applications on AWS?) which hadn't been explored and addressed in an in-depth, comprehensive manner before and being aware that we weren't the only ones having that problem but a significant number of people from our peer group were facing the same issue, was vital for our decision to write this ebook.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.