build-lists: true autoscale: true
Azat Mardan
All Things Open 2018
About Me
- Eng. Leader @ Indeed, World's #1 Job Search Site
- Live in San Fancisco Bay Area
- Book and course author
- Paleo lifestyle enthusiast
- Microsoft Most Valuable Professional
- ex-Tech Fellow @ Capital One
239 most active GitHub contributor
Why bother?
Written communication is everywhere
- Slack, IM, Google Chat, Skype
- Wiki, Confluence, GitHub
- Emails
- Blog posts
- Books
5 reasons writing will only grow
- Precise
- Cheap
- Asynchronous
- Removes bias
- Fast to consume
5 benefits of tech writing
- Clears your thoughts
- Scalable communication and teaching
- Documentation for future
- Extra income
- Prestige
Who would like to make $300-1000 extra for a few hours of work (at your own schedule)?
My Story
- Grew webapplog.com from 20 to 2000 visits/day
- Wrote 200+ posts
- Wrote for Microsoft, edX, StrongLoop (IBM) and others
Common obstacles
- I don't have time
- I don't know anything interesting
- I am scared of negative comments
- I don't know where to start
7 Steps to Writing a Blog Post
- Come up with a topic
- Write an outline
- Iterate on the outline
- Write the post
- Iterate on the post
- Publish
- Engage with the audience
Tips to come up with a topic
- Conferences
- Newsletter
- Water-cooler convos
- Your work
- Things you want to know more about
My Story
- Not a native English speaker
- Terrible at typos (speed read)
- Didn't blog about ground-breaking things
My Story (Cont.)
- 18 Books
- Lots of top-sellers and Amazon best-sellers
- Speaking and consulting gigs all over the world
- Wrote first books in 2002
Writing books
Two way to publish a book
- Self-publishing: Leanpub, Pandoc, Amazon KDP
- Traditional publishing: Apress, Manning, Wiley
Would you like to be paid while you sleep?
10 Steps to writing a book
- Decide why you want to do it
- Come up with 2-3 topics
- Write blog posts to validate
- Presell or write&submit proposals to validate
- Start writing
- Hire tech & copy editing
- Review
- Publish
- Update
- Repeat
What's need to be in a book proposal
- Detailed outline
- Target audience
- About author
- Keywords
- Pre-requisites
- Sample chapter
- Competitors
https://www.apress.com/us/write-for-us
This lecture is not a rocket science.
Most of your will never become good writers or publish anything substantial or publish long enough to give yourself a chance to become better.
Why most people never follow through?
- Afraid of a failure
- Lack of accountability
- Too much comfort and not enough whys
- Cannot break down large tasks into smaller
- Try to finish everything at once
Home work
- Write about ATO 2018
- Find a topic for another blog post or a book
- Find a mentor and coach
Further study
- Write Your Way to Success (Apress, 2018)
- Using Your Web Skills to Make Money (Apress, 2018)
- Find a coach and/or mentor
^Take your cameras and take a picture