Ever wondered what it's like to make a physical book? It ain't as easy as shipping code lemme tell ya 😅
It's been 8 years since I published a physical book. Back then a publisher reached out and said "Hey wanna write a book based on this cool blogpost of yours?"
Heck yeah I do!
By the time it was done, I was so sick of the process that I never picked up my copies from the post office. Even gave a talk vowing never to do that again.
Writing books is like running marathons.
You finish the race, say this was stupid I'll never do it again, and sign up for the next race 3 weeks later.
Serverless Handbook for Frontend Engineers – free chapter
Dive modern backend. Understand any backend.
Serverless Handbook taught me high-leveled topics. I don't like recipe courses and these chapters helped me to feel like I'm not a total noob anymore.
The hand-drawn diagrams and high-leveled descriptions gave me the feeling that I don't have any critical "knowledge gaps" anymore.
~ Marek C, engineer
Start with a free chapter and email crash course ❤️
Digital for the win
Since that first book, I've been publishing digital books and courses.
Digital books are easy. You write in markdown using a text editor. I like iA Writer because it's pretty and clean.
Put that on GitHub and you get version control and render previews on the web. Wonderful.
Add a pdf/epub generator like Leanpub or Remarq and you can offer "books". Ebooks were big as email signup freebies for a few years.
Desktop is where my e-books go to die. Never read a single freebie e-book that I downloaded. 😂
That's why I always added a price to my ebooks. Figured people would value them more. And if you value it more, you read it. And if you read it, it becomes valuable.
Digital is Agile ❤️
Agile is a bad word among cynical engineers, but it's way better than waterfall.
Waterfall being the approach where you plan a big project in every detail, get to work, discover your plan is all wrong, and keep trying to hit the deadline. Then you wonder why everyone's tired and burned out.
Agile means you tinker. Garden your way to perfection.
Little trim here, supporting touch there, sprinkle a dash of love, hit submit. Then do it again tomorrow.
You iterate.
That's why Serverless Handbook started as an interactive website, not even a pdf. Oh there's a typo? A bug? Weird wording?
- tweak
git commitgit push master
Changes live in production in 2 minutes 😍
Look at how many "editions" it's had!
528 days since first going up 🤯
Paper means waterfall
And then I had a bright idea. What if Serverless Handbook became a real book? How hard can it be!
By mid January, the book was finished. All chapters done. Huzzah! 💪
Lulu can do print on demand, Gumroad can do sales, hook them together and that should work. Tell early supporters book is coming out by mid February.
Wait shit, you can't edit a physical book!
Editing to the rescue!
Went through the whole book and fixed a bunch. Whole paragraphs got cut, an entire chapter, and I reshuffled topics for better flow.
While doing that, I asked Stas, who designed the original chapter art, for a cover. He said yes!
A few days later we had a cover. And I kept editing.
The waterfall keeps waterfalling
A physical book cannot change after print. You have to read all 300+ pages out loud to find odd wordings.
That helped.
And then came the layouting. Oh god the layouting ...
Everyone who sells book layouting on Fiverr laughed me out of the chatroom. Serverless Handbook is way too complex 😅
Remarq to the rescue! One of the output modes is a print ready pdf. This'll be a breeze.
It was not a breeze.
Getting everything into Remarq was easy enough. I outsourced that part 😇
We broke the layouting tool
Serverless Handbook was so complex it broke Remarq. Many times over. The founder said it was like a stress test of his technology. Fixed a bunch of bugs we uncovered 🤘
I ordered the first test print. Mid February by now.
It kinda looked like shit ...
Look what arrived in the mail this week! The Serverless Handbook test print 🥳
— Swizec Teller (@Swizec) March 3, 2021
Partnering with @GatekeeperPress to make it "available wherever books are sold" end of March, preorders coming to an email inbox near you soon 🤘 pic.twitter.com/ZnxnQSawsz
The pages were weird, the cover looked bad, everything was terrible.
Back to Remarq! Painstakingly adding page breaks, tweaking image sizes, chapter by chapter, page by page.
And then Stas was like "Hey Swiz, I need exact dimensions, especially thickness, to make a nice cover". Can't know that until the layout is perfect can you 😅
It took over 2 weeks to get that ready. WEEKS! To finish a finished book.
But hot damn it looks great 😍
Well well well if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions pic.twitter.com/J4qeWGCJyd
— Swizec Teller (@Swizec) March 16, 2021
And guess what?
There's a typo on the cover and the inner margins are too small. Code on right pages goes into the spine and you can't read it.
New test print coming next week 🤘
And the publisher I hired to help with global distribution committed to a Mar 31st publication date. Stay tuned
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: despite the frustrations, it worked pretty well
When you search for "serverless" on Amazon, you get my self-published book surrounded by O'Reilly
— Swizec Teller (@Swizec) December 16, 2021
pretty happy with that 😛 pic.twitter.com/0ilDhidSHJ
Continue reading about Different medium, different mindset
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Want to dive into serverless? Not sure where to begin?
Serverless Handbook was designed for people like you getting into backend programming.
360 pages, 19 chapters, 6 full projects, hand-drawn diagrams, beautiful chapter art, best-looking cover in tech. ✌️
Learn how to choose the right database, write cloud functions, think about scalability, gain the architecture mindsets for robust systems, and more.
Leave your email to start with a free chapter and email crash course 👇
Serverless Handbook for Frontend Engineers – free chapter
Dive modern backend. Understand any backend.
Serverless Handbook taught me high-leveled topics. I don't like recipe courses and these chapters helped me to feel like I'm not a total noob anymore.
The hand-drawn diagrams and high-leveled descriptions gave me the feeling that I don't have any critical "knowledge gaps" anymore.
~ Marek C, engineer
Start with a free chapter and email crash course ❤️
Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.
Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.
Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.
Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev
Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization
Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections
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By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️