[gregdoesit]

This is a nice summary, and shows the benefit of working with a publisher, when you are writing a book that is similar to ones they have published already. You get a lot of support, and will definitely benefit distribution-wise later as well. Congratulations to the author - especially on publishing relatively quickly, in 10 months from the idea! And it's very nice to read that all royalties are going to Girls Who Code.

I've worked with O'Reilly and a few other publishers on a proposal that was slightly different to what they usually publish. I went through the same submission process, working with an acquisitions editor, similar to how it happened in this case. In my case, O'Reilly rejected the proposal after a month and half. The feedback in my case was that the book competes with another project, which project got priority. Sure enough, I took the proposal without any changes to another publisher, worked with the acquisitions editor there, had the proposal accepted and we went ahead with the writing process with a development editor.

In the end, working with the other publisher did not work out for me. They did not publish the type of book I was writing, and the feedback from the editors kept nudging me to "shape" the book into the type of book this publisher knew would sell, and would sell well. Unfortunately, it didn't feel like the type of book I was excited to write.

A year and some time later, I'm still writing the book -The Software Engineer's Guidebook[1] - and if all goes according to plan, I'll publish it early next year.

What I've learned with working with a book publisher, is just how involved the process is. Now, instead of taking a $5,000 royalty upon completion of the manuscript, I'm budgeting to spend around $5,000 out of pocket on development/copy editing, cover design and production editing. The things that the publisher would have otherwise paid for. It's a bit simpler to hire professionals these days for these areas thanks to sites like Reedsy[2], which I do recommend for fellow authors self-publishing in finding support on various publishing tasks.

[1] https://www.engguidebook.com/

[2] https://reedsy.com/

[ghaff]

I've had mixed feelings about publishers in the past. There is probably still some cachet in a name brand publisher. And they do some things for you which would otherwise take time. On the other hand, for better or worse, editing was pretty lightweight and more errors crept through copy-editing than should have. I did go ahead with a v2 of one book but I probably wouldn't actively pursue a publisher if I do another book at some point.

The summary makes it sound as if the co-authors worked together pretty well although I'm sure it wasn't completely friction-free. It's very easy to end up with a co-author who likes the idea of having written a book more than they like the act of writing it.

[jacques_chester]

I've been working on my first book with Manning (should be out in the next few months).

Without the structure a publisher provides it's likely I would not have come even vaguely close to finishing.

The marketing is icing, really.

[ghaff]

Deadlines are definitely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can be really inconvenient if something takes longer, other priorities pop up, you just feel you need to release a chapter even though you're not really happy with it, etc. On the other hand, in the absence of deadlines, it's easy to put things to the side for a "week" that turns into a month or two.

[jacques_chester]

There are deadlines, and they helped, but a lot of it was about having someone I "owed" something to.

Another thing I did was plot my word count per commit. Once per week I would post it to an internal channel at work and add a sentence or two summarising my week. The most interesting thing is that while my output could fluctuate a lot per week, the overall trend was fairly stable.

[petr25102018]

Even though I wouldn't want the publisher to make the outline of my book for me, I have to say that Manning books were some of my favourites. Their structure is pretty good.

[jacques_chester]

Manning have a fair amount of docs and support for preparing a TOC, including soliciting opinions from outside experts. I imagine it's similar for other publishers.

I didn't feel like I was being made to follow a template. In fact the TOC changed a lot over the course of writing.

[petr25102018]

Oh, okay. I get the assumption because Manning books do resemble one another a bit.

[dd82]

Signed up for the notification when the book is published. I really liked your article about the product minded engineer, and follow your blog. Given the timeline you refer here, I wonder if the project O'Reilly was referring to was Software Engineering at Google[1]. Given the book contents summary on your site, the contents do seem to overlap in some areas, except I don't expect that you're making numerous references to Google in your text :-D

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-P...