You Too Can Write a Book!
Thanks to Neeldhara Misra for pushing me to write this post, based on a thread on Twitter.
You can write a book.
You probably should write a book.
1 You Can Write a Book
Let’s say you’re not using someone else’s textbook, or using it only loosely. That means you’re going to spend a lot of time organizing your thoughts. You will probably produce some kind of “lecture notes”. The delta from there to a book is much smaller than you imagine.
Here’s a pro-tip. Back in about 2003/4, I noticed that the quantity of reading that students would do before class was at most about six pages; once it got to about eight pages, they wouldn’t read at all. (These numbers may be much lower now.) But this automatically bounds how much you have to write!
In short: let’s say you’re writing up lecture notes. You’re writing about four to at most six pages per class. Let’s say you have about 30 classes (often many more). You have automatically written about 200 pages without even especially thinking about it. Two hundred pages of writing is often called a … book. It represents your “take”. So your take now has a book!
2 You Should Write a Book
What are the incentives to do this? There are many, but they may not accrue immediately: they may take time. Think of it as a long-term investment in yourself.
First, simply: you believe strongly in your view of the world, and you’re pursuing it with intensity. Right now nobody else is really able to download your brain. Your book becomes how others can download it.
People at other places might use your book, or at least put it on reading lists. Even if only one student there reads and internalizes that supplemental material, that student now carries your ideas with them. Much more concretely, they could be a PhD applicant.
I have gotten so many great PhD applicants over the years thanks to my books! In particular, when they come from a less-well-known university, this guarantees for me that they have the preparation I need, and that we have a shared mindset.
What’s out there may not be very good. This is especially an issue in programming languages, where some of the widely-used texts are basically hot garbage: basically a broken, 1970s view of the world. I once wrote a position piece on it entitled “Teaching Programming Languages in a Post-Linnaean Age”! So worldview really matters.
So that’s another incentive. To drive out the bad with good. Do you use the standard text that everyone else uses in your field? If you’ve read this far, probably not. Why not? You know (or think you know!) what should be taught in your field. Who uses a text? Someone less certain. So it’s not their fault. We need to help them along.
Sometimes we have resources—
like software— that many people don’t know about, but that are especially well suited to education in our field. For instance, the #lang feature of Racket is one of the most powerful tools for teaching programming languages. But most people don’t (yet) know that.
I speak from experience. I have written several books, some solo and some with co-authors. I did the very thing you are told to not do as a tenure-track assistant professor: I wrote a quality undergraduate-level book. I survived (it didn’t hurt my tenure in the slightest), and I then benefited from it for a long time.
3 Mechanics
The one big thing I haven’t said, which drives a lot of this, is the publishing medium. And oh boy, do I have opinions on this! I wrote up some of them when I published the first formal edition of my programming languages book, in an essay entitled Books as Software. Let me summarize/expand.
Don’t go to commercial publishers. They are either just not ready for the modern world or will basically paywall your work. Paywalling is the total antithesis of wanting to have impact and influence and wanting to drive bad books out of the market.
Publish it free online. Especially those of us who are immigrants from poorer countries know what it’s like to not be able to afford high-quality material. The next you is sitting right now in Bangalore stuck with a crappy course and crappy book. Be their light.
Some people like paper. Upload your file to a print-on-demand service. Even with a markup, it’ll be a lot cheaper than a book from a commercial publisher.
In a STEM subject, your tenure case is not going to hinge on a contract from MIT Press. Getting that contract is actually relatively easy. Impact is hard. Go for the hard part, as you do in your research. Optimize for it.
Put out a new release once a year. Don’t fall for the temptation of continuous releases. People using your book need to be able to depend on a fixed version for the semester. They will have references to pages, sections, etc. Don’t break their build.
Publish permalinks. Not everyone can upgrade their course every year. Yes, it means your old mistakes are on permanent display, and some people won’t use your latest and greatest. Live with it. Your ego is not that fragile. You’ll get over it.
Make it easy for people to send you corrections. They will (just as they did for your software). Sometimes you will even get very insightful and creative ideas. Of course you’ll also get various dreck. Just as with your software. Because books are software, as my essay says.
Try to provide materials in both PDF and HTML. The reasons should be obvious. It’s not always easy. I personally prefer to use Scribble for this purpose. But I have also used LaTeX and even Google Docs. The latter two are each terrible in their own way, but the best tool is the one you use and that lets you get something done reasonably quickly. There’s always time to revise. Don’t suffer the paralysis of tool indecision and let that become the reason you don’t write!
You won’t make much money this way. It’s okay, you’re probably already paid pretty well. And the money you’re not getting is money the author of the crappy textbook is also not getting! And you’ll get paid in mindshare, which is infinitely more valuable.
You can also do what I did: I published the free PDF on my Web site. On the print-on-demand site, offer a modestly-priced PDF. I let readers know where they can get the free version. Therefore, the only reason to buy the PDF is the equivalent of a tip-har. Most don’t, but a few do. (You can also use one of the tip-jar services, though they didn’t provide enough value for me.)
Sure, my revenues have been modest. I view the checks as a little surprise bonus. Added over time it could probably have bought me a new bike frame (my unit of measure!), but mostly it’s mostly just a nice dinner and ice cream. But I’m not doing it for the money. I’m doing it to spread a worldview and to liberate a field from terrible books. Both are much more worthwhile to me.
In short: if you’re even slightly tempted to write that textbook—