You Too Can Write a Book!🔗

    1 You Can Write a Book

    2 You Should Write a Book

    3 Mechanics

Thanks to Neeldhara Misra for pushing me to write this post, based on a thread on Twitter.

This article is primarily directed at academics. Its purpose is to tell you two things:
  • 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.

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.

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—go for it. I got you, fam.