And So It Begins
A couple days ago, I got the final tranche of my book advance money for finishing my final draft. So besides some minor details, I'm done and get to rest for a few months until the book is released....
If only that were the case. The upside of writing a tech book is that you get to write about current and evolving technologies. And it's also the downside. If we turn back to a year ago when I started the book, HTML5 was just starting to grow into its own and but seen as fad for gaming.
You can't write the book that you want today. Write for the book you'll need in a year.
When working with a traditional publisher, you'll take about 9 months to a year to complete the work. Writing the book you want today is a recipe for fail. Writing instead involves a certain amount of guessing where the market might go. I made the some risky bets that CoffeeScript would be a force to be reckoned with, that people would want to use GWT to make games and that Node.js would be bigger. I feel reasonably well about how those choices worked out.
I really envy fiction or historical non-fiction writers. Writing a book on Lincoln? Take your time, he'll still be dead next year. Technology keeps progressing. In a year's time, projects have had splashy launches only to wither away and die.
To combat this, I'll continue to do what I was doing before the book deal and continue to blog and push code out to Github. Samples that didn't quite make it into the book will be there as well as new stuff that was just emerging as I was writing.
Learning HTML5 Game Programming will be released October 9th.