How & Why Did I Became an Author?
In almost any interview or conference, other than being asked what have you been up to lately, people and interviewers keep asking me the following questions:
How did you became an author?
Why did you decided to be an author?
How long did it take you to write each of your 4 books?
To get these out of the way, here are my reasons, and part of the journey of becoming an author.
The Starting Point
Since 2017 up until today, I published 4 books, 3 of them were developed with massive help from many industry experts, while the 4th one was a complete solo. My education and skills are in mathematics and computer science, and most of my career I was leading teams that were in charge of software testing across different domains (web, mobile, healthcare, chipset, and more). When I joined Perfecto in 2012 as a senior director of product marketing (PMM), I was hardly able to write a decent blog post that would keep a reader on the site more than 10 seconds, I had no skills in content creation but I understood the technology that my product was covering — Mobile and Web application testing. It took me 4 years of painful experimenting with speaking sessions (virtual and face to face), few dozens of articles posting, and great feedback from the market, internal readers, and Yes — My own self criticism.
Than, late in 2016, after gathering quite a lot of experience in both the domain of mobile apps that were increasingly transforming, and in writing, I thought to myself — Why don’t I do a brain-dump of everything I know about delivering great digital app experience in a form of an eBook … While the idea was great, I did owned a full time job and time wasn’t on my side, so I brainstormed with few of my colleagues and decided that with few more contributors I can accomplish my objective faster and with greater quality.
As you can see above, it took me about 9 months to accomplish and self-publish the book on Amazon, but it was a joint journey which made all the difference — I outlines the entire book, the 24 different chapter, each representing a stand-alone topic. My biggest challenge with this book was to ensure that there is a seamless flow of content across all different chapters so the readers receives value without repetitions. Another challenge was orchestrating the work of several contributors, curating their content, ensuring that content is consistent with the overall book theme and outline, and that it can stand as much as possible the test of time.
With technology books, the biggest challenge is — when does content becomes outdated?
The Turning Point
Once I published my first book on April 2017, the excitement and the feedback that I received from the audience, my followers, and my inner circle gave me great confidence that — Yay — I Did It!. Still, I never introduced myself as an author, didn’t changed my title on social media, but was just feeling a bit more accomplished. It only took several more months after my publication when I started feeling “Full” again (with knowledge and insights). What worked for me in the first book seemed like a valid approach to follow towards my second book. I started building a new outline, engaged with subset of the previous contributors that worked with me on my first book + few new experts, and decided to name my book — “Continuous Testing for DevOps Professionals”. Back than, late 2017, the term Continuous Testing was a bit challenging, since many were using automated testing, agile testing, and this term was a “hard sale”. With my colleagues we were able to build an outline of 28 chapters/topic that provides a full industry guide to this term and practice.
In September 2018, the book became live on Amazon (again, self-published), and I was fortunate enough to launch it at Jenkins World (led by Cloud Bees) in California. The book got his own stand at the book store at the show, and for me this was the biggest honor I could think off — Still, I was not feeling comfortable enough introducing myself as an Author (I am a thought leader, speaker, but I was still not “feeling it” :))
You Cannot Longer Run From It
After launching my 2nd book, I started getting more and more market feedback, I was show casing the books at events, customer visits, doing signing for individuals and I became more convinced that I am indeed an author, perhaps a junior one, such that is dependent on other contributors, but I can actually sustain this additional “title” for which I worked quite hard (If I may say :)). Late in 2019, Perforce Software acquired my company (Perfecto), and as I was migrating all of my practices, daily activities and more into the new owner. I kept hearing more and more conversations and questions around the future of DevOps, can it transform into a better practice with the help of intelligence (AI/ML)?, Are AI and ML trends or tools that can accelerate DevOps? and many more — I needed no more to ignite my 3rd journey that was 100% focused on the future of DevOps with intelligent technologies. At the same pace as my 2 previous books, it took a bit less than a year (September 2020) to self-publish with the help again from industry experts my 3rd book.
Migrating to a Full Author
Honestly, after releasing the 3rd book, I told whoever was willing to believe :) that I think I am done with writing books, I felt much more empty after dumping so much content in such a short amount of time, BUT — Than came Covid and Packt Publishing to change things for me. As I was working fully remote, no travel but more and more online meetings with emptier weekends that myself and most of the population weren’t used too until the pandemic, Packt publishing team approached me and suggested a whole new book. After playing “hard to get” for few months, I was convinced that I am full enough to contribute a 4th book to the marketplace, and this time 100% focused on frontend web development testing, and this time 100% content writing of everything in the book. To not rely on other contributors for the first time was a challenge, since i had to meet strict schedule for the book due date, and ensure that every single word, code sample, image is accurate and valuable. Also, I needed to ensure that the content will also stand the test of time to its maximum extent. All in all, this journey resulted in long after work hours and weekends to deliver my 4th book, However, my 1st end-to-end book writing.
What Have I Learned?
Throughout my personal transformation I learned many things that I can summarize in bullets:
- I can now admit that I am an Author, what a relief :)
- Apparently we can accomplish the wildest things if we put our minds and efforts to it.
- Publishing a book on your own and with 3rd party contributors is so much different (has Pros and Cons — I can leave this to a separate post).
- Like anything in life, succeeding in writing a book Must start with a solid outline and plan, abstract, detailed chapter planning, time-testing, and a great designers/editors!
- Think about your audience first when writing a book (other than your own goals). Your audience is more likely to spend the majority of time with the book, respect that.
- Technology books and normal books are so much different (content type wise, audience wise, lifetime relevancy, etc.)
Good Luck to any Drawer Writers and Dreamers out There!
