Over the past year I’ve been asked several times how I got involved in writing a book. In this first post I’ll offer a few practical hints of how to get started. In a second post I will follow up with the process of putting together the Game Programming Gems 8 book. Also, in future posts to Visual Adrenaline by Gem contributors, they will go into more technical details on their areas of expertise, I encourage you to follow up with them if you have questions on more specifics.
These recommendations are based on my experience serving as editor of Game Programming Gems 8, the 8th in a series that target game developers with an interest in learning the latest and greatest techniques from industry experts and peers. Many articles are contributed by world renowned talent at the best studios including Blizzard, Valve, id, EA, Bungie, Nintendo, and many others. We’ve just wrapped up the book and its hit the shelves, so if you want more info I encourage you to pick up a copy. We’ve also included source code for many articles that you can being to use right away.
I want to write a book on my favorite technical topic, how do I get started?
It may be a bit ambitious to start with an entire book, especially if you don’t have any experience working with editors, publishers, and technical reviewers. However, we should leverage this desire with some practical advice about how to turn this goal into a tangible result.
First, I recommend starting by writing articles for magazines, online journals, or blogs. There are two styles to approach these early engagements. One is to have a discussion of what you are going to write with the publisher, gain approval, then writing the article. However, I think a better way is to have something started that you want to work with an appropriate publisher to refine, it gives you something to focus the conversation, particularly if you are using email and the publisher does not know you. I’d recommend you have something as close to a completed draft as possible. Having a discussion with some example content is a much more constructive conversation. If you are writing an article about a demo or simulation you have working sending a compressed video (FRAPs is a great tool to do video capture) is a great way to motivate the publisher to have a discussion with you.
As an editor, the easiest articles to assess were the ones that the most work had been done. In fact, I think those that sent in an 80% or more completed draft were ALL accepted to GPG8. As an editor, these are the easy ones, and you want to make the editor have confidence in you. Additionally, as you work on the article, this sharpens your own thinking about the content. This is one of the rewards of writing, it not only gives others a better understanding of something, and it improves YOUR understanding.
There is a big difference in the number of people who want to write and who actually. It’s hard to find the time in our hectic schedules, and getting all the details of an article right takes more time than a first time author estimates. If you don’t finish something you committed to, it just ends up being bad all around. The publisher is now scrambling to fill a content gap, and you have burned a bridge. You need to set aside time and mental space for writing and be realistic about the time and details. Writing a blog is a much more informal process and can be more ad hoc in nature. When writing an article for publication, whether on the web or in print, the bar is higher and the time it takes on grammar and look and feel can take quite a bit of time, don’t forget to budget for it. I’ll go into more details in a few paragraphs on time estimates.
Second, take a step back and think about the overall story you want to tell. Quite a few authors start by writing articles that are later collated into a more detailed book. They add value to the book by including additional chapters and expand upon their original articles to include additional figures and data and perhaps include expanded content on a DVD or online content. This strategy, a series of incremental steps, is not a bad idea and increases confidence you and your publisher will have that you really do have sufficient content to justify the investment of resources into putting together a complete book.
How do I get in touch with a publisher or editor?
Publishers and content editors typically have their contact information on the web. I’ve written for a few game websites, and I started by emailing an initial email to the contact available on the website for the magazine. After I got an affirmative interest response, I sent an article draft at about 80% complete with clear descriptions of what wasn’t in yet and what I was going to add. Using Intel Visual Adrenaline website as an example, in two clicks I was able to get to a form that I could fill out to submit an article. Gamasutra had a list of contacts on the left hand side of the main page under ‘About us’.
To get in touch with publishers, think about leveraging your social network and people that know you that may have published before. Knowing somebody personally is very useful in establishing your first contact. After you have established a track record you can use your previous work and approach new publication venues more easily as you have started to build a portfolio of work. Additionally, you have become more experienced and can take on wider levels of responsibility such as editing or writing an entire book. As a concrete example, I served as section editor for previous books in the Gem series before taking the editor role, and this helped immensely in being prepared for the expectations and responsibilities of the role. I do not recommend jumping into an editor role without taking the steps of author, section editor, then editor for a book like this.
What is the time commitment to this type of effort?
You need to take a step back and realize the responsibility you are taking. If you make a commitment to write a book, be reasonable about the expectations of time and diligence required to pull it through the final phases. I’d estimate I spent about 40-60 hours writing an article to get to a first draft and this is AFTER I have a working sample codebase that I am writing about. Code cleanup and a bit of QA to make sure you have created an install and instructions that will work on a clean machine takes another full day and access to machines and some testers that you can hand a README.txt and your files and see if they can successfully follow your instructions. Take careful notes on what was missing (you will have missed something), and refine your installation and compilation instructions. Also, investing early on in making your first draft as complete as possible will give you the mental space to focus on the nitty gritty details of grammar and clarity of communication in the second and any follow-up drafts. In my experience, with writing technical articles it takes another 8-12 hours of sitting down with a pen and a printout and going through the article by hand as a reader, and this is after having some time away from the content. I’m always frustrated when I go back and look at previous articles and read something that I feel didn’t come out just right that is so obvious 6 months later I just didn’t see on the 50th time I read it during the heat of the publication cycle.
In the next post, I’ll go into more detail of the execution phase of the one year process of putting a book like Game Programming Gems 8 together.
These recommendations are based on my experience serving as editor of Game Programming Gems 8, the 8th in a series that target game developers with an interest in learning the latest and greatest techniques from industry experts and peers. Many articles are contributed by world renowned talent at the best studios including Blizzard, Valve, id, EA, Bungie, Nintendo, and many others. We’ve just wrapped up the book and its hit the shelves, so if you want more info I encourage you to pick up a copy. We’ve also included source code for many articles that you can being to use right away.
I want to write a book on my favorite technical topic, how do I get started?
It may be a bit ambitious to start with an entire book, especially if you don’t have any experience working with editors, publishers, and technical reviewers. However, we should leverage this desire with some practical advice about how to turn this goal into a tangible result.
First, I recommend starting by writing articles for magazines, online journals, or blogs. There are two styles to approach these early engagements. One is to have a discussion of what you are going to write with the publisher, gain approval, then writing the article. However, I think a better way is to have something started that you want to work with an appropriate publisher to refine, it gives you something to focus the conversation, particularly if you are using email and the publisher does not know you. I’d recommend you have something as close to a completed draft as possible. Having a discussion with some example content is a much more constructive conversation. If you are writing an article about a demo or simulation you have working sending a compressed video (FRAPs is a great tool to do video capture) is a great way to motivate the publisher to have a discussion with you.
As an editor, the easiest articles to assess were the ones that the most work had been done. In fact, I think those that sent in an 80% or more completed draft were ALL accepted to GPG8. As an editor, these are the easy ones, and you want to make the editor have confidence in you. Additionally, as you work on the article, this sharpens your own thinking about the content. This is one of the rewards of writing, it not only gives others a better understanding of something, and it improves YOUR understanding.
There is a big difference in the number of people who want to write and who actually. It’s hard to find the time in our hectic schedules, and getting all the details of an article right takes more time than a first time author estimates. If you don’t finish something you committed to, it just ends up being bad all around. The publisher is now scrambling to fill a content gap, and you have burned a bridge. You need to set aside time and mental space for writing and be realistic about the time and details. Writing a blog is a much more informal process and can be more ad hoc in nature. When writing an article for publication, whether on the web or in print, the bar is higher and the time it takes on grammar and look and feel can take quite a bit of time, don’t forget to budget for it. I’ll go into more details in a few paragraphs on time estimates.
Second, take a step back and think about the overall story you want to tell. Quite a few authors start by writing articles that are later collated into a more detailed book. They add value to the book by including additional chapters and expand upon their original articles to include additional figures and data and perhaps include expanded content on a DVD or online content. This strategy, a series of incremental steps, is not a bad idea and increases confidence you and your publisher will have that you really do have sufficient content to justify the investment of resources into putting together a complete book.
How do I get in touch with a publisher or editor?
Publishers and content editors typically have their contact information on the web. I’ve written for a few game websites, and I started by emailing an initial email to the contact available on the website for the magazine. After I got an affirmative interest response, I sent an article draft at about 80% complete with clear descriptions of what wasn’t in yet and what I was going to add. Using Intel Visual Adrenaline website as an example, in two clicks I was able to get to a form that I could fill out to submit an article. Gamasutra had a list of contacts on the left hand side of the main page under ‘About us’.
To get in touch with publishers, think about leveraging your social network and people that know you that may have published before. Knowing somebody personally is very useful in establishing your first contact. After you have established a track record you can use your previous work and approach new publication venues more easily as you have started to build a portfolio of work. Additionally, you have become more experienced and can take on wider levels of responsibility such as editing or writing an entire book. As a concrete example, I served as section editor for previous books in the Gem series before taking the editor role, and this helped immensely in being prepared for the expectations and responsibilities of the role. I do not recommend jumping into an editor role without taking the steps of author, section editor, then editor for a book like this.
What is the time commitment to this type of effort?
You need to take a step back and realize the responsibility you are taking. If you make a commitment to write a book, be reasonable about the expectations of time and diligence required to pull it through the final phases. I’d estimate I spent about 40-60 hours writing an article to get to a first draft and this is AFTER I have a working sample codebase that I am writing about. Code cleanup and a bit of QA to make sure you have created an install and instructions that will work on a clean machine takes another full day and access to machines and some testers that you can hand a README.txt and your files and see if they can successfully follow your instructions. Take careful notes on what was missing (you will have missed something), and refine your installation and compilation instructions. Also, investing early on in making your first draft as complete as possible will give you the mental space to focus on the nitty gritty details of grammar and clarity of communication in the second and any follow-up drafts. In my experience, with writing technical articles it takes another 8-12 hours of sitting down with a pen and a printout and going through the article by hand as a reader, and this is after having some time away from the content. I’m always frustrated when I go back and look at previous articles and read something that I feel didn’t come out just right that is so obvious 6 months later I just didn’t see on the 50th time I read it during the heat of the publication cycle.
In the next post, I’ll go into more detail of the execution phase of the one year process of putting a book like Game Programming Gems 8 together.
Comments
Great tips. Thank you.