[Raynes]

I don't know how many people on here know this, but I've been writing a book for quite a while now. The book is called Meet Clojure and is an introductory text on the Clojure programming language.

The reason I'm posting this is because I recently struck a deal with No Starch Press to publish my book. Alas, attached is an image of an excited Raynes holding up the signed contract. :>

Furthermore, a buddy and I have thrown together a website for the book, and detailed information about it can be found there.

This post constitutes my DiC announcement of the book. Once the book is completed and in print, I'll talk with the admins about holding some sort of drawing or competition to give away a copy or two of the book.

I is teh excited! :>

Attached image(s)

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[no2pencil]

Hey, that's really cool! I met with some reps from Starch Press at HOPE & talked about possibly writing a book. I don't have what it takes. Great job man!!

[macosxnerd101]

Congrats on the contract! When does it come out officially?

[Raynes]

macosxnerd101, on 11 April 2011 - 05:02 AM, said:

Congrats on the contract! When does it come out officially?

When it's finished. ;-)

As I mentioned on the website, there aren't any dates yet. My soft deadline is November, so make of that what you will.

[Core]

Great job, man! You are a great asset for the Clojure community (and the functional community in general)!

[Dogstopper]

I knew about this, but it is great to finally see the contract! Good job dude!

[JackOfAllTrades]

Congratulations, that's AWESOME!

Now the question is will we have to hold the book up to a mirror to read it?

I've been toying with the idea of writing a series of introductory books on C for distribution via Amazon/Kindle, but lack the confidence in myself to do so.

[Raynes]

I took that picture with the front facing camera on my evo. Alas, it's uses a mirror-mode. It was either mirror or upside down Raynes. I choose mirror. :>

[baavgai]

Very cool! Congrats man. Guess you'll be busy for a bit.

[Raynes]

I'm just finding out what 'busy' means. Got a book to write, a million personal projects, and on top of it all, I'll be doing some contract work for Relevance starting in a week or two that will last at least up until November (which is, quite hilariously, also my deadline).

[Dogstopper]

What happened to school?

[Shane Hudson]

Congratulations! I think many of us would be interested in knowing the journey of writing and publishing a book... so if you ever get time to write a few articles or blog posts that would be great too!

[skyhawk133]

Congrats. I heard you had gotten the book deal, thanks for sharing here! I have a friend who wrote a book and she said it was one of the most stressful things she's ever done and would never do it again, but was glad she had the opportunity to become an "author".

Good luck with it. I'll see if I can find her recap/advice post as it may have some tips to help you through the process.

[Raynes]

JackOfAllTrades, on 11 April 2011 - 02:59 PM, said:

I've been toying with the idea of writing a series of introductory books on C for distribution via Amazon/Kindle, but lack the confidence in myself to do so.

You don't need confidence to write a book. If you don't care about getting published and just want to write a book, you don't have any chains whatsoever. Whether it's good or bad is irrelevant, you don't lose money and you don't bother anybody. Furthermore, it's really easy to self-publish books these days. I say go for it.

Dogstopper, on 11 April 2011 - 09:40 PM, said:

What happened to school?

I'm homeschooled. You know this! School work is such that I can usually get a whole month's work done in a day or two. It doesn't take a significant amount of my time.

Shane Hudson, on 11 April 2011 - 11:04 PM, said:

Congratulations! I think many of us would be interested in knowing the journey of writing and publishing a book... so if you ever get time to write a few articles or blog posts that would be great too!

I've written a couple of posts about it on my blog and will almost certainly write more. I linked to my blog on the Meet Clojure website. http://blog.raynes.me

skyhawk133, on 11 April 2011 - 11:09 PM, said:

Congrats. I heard you had gotten the book deal, thanks for sharing here! I have a friend who wrote a book and she said it was one of the most stressful things she's ever done and would never do it again, but was glad she had the opportunity to become an "author".

Good luck with it. I'll see if I can find her recap/advice post as it may have some tips to help you through the process.

It isn't nearly as stressful as you think. Actually writing the book isn't stressful at all once you get together the tools and knowledge needed to put the book together. The stressful part is dealing with a publisher. A publisher (rightfully) wants their books to be as perfect as possible, especially No Starch. As a consequence, they put you through hardcore editing. The only stressful thing is organizing content in a coherent way and going through the editing phase. I'm not an English grammar wiz, so I anticipate some level of difficulty. All in all, it isn't that bad.

Now, there is a situation that I could imagine being extremely stressful and difficult, and that would be the "starting with nothing" situation. This would be where you'd go to a publisher with an *idea* for a book and an outline for this theoretical book and the publisher accepts it and decides to publish it. At that point, you would have a contract and a deadline and wouldn't have even written the first line of text. It's really easy to come up with book ideas. It's really hard to actually write them. I could never imagine doing this.

When I started talking with No Starch (who contacted me. I never intended to publish this book), I had already written quite a bit of the book. I have some 160 pages written right now. Therefore, I've already got the focus of my book and the direction in which I'm going fairly solid, so it isn't nearly as stressful as it could be.

[Shane Hudson]

Will you be needing proof readers? Or do No Starch provide all of them?