How To Become An Author - Growth Mindset

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Good morning and welcome to another episode of Growth Mindset Show. My name is Mahesh Chan, the founder of C Sharp Corner

This is a nice breezy Friday here in Philadelphia area, outside of Philadelphia

Thank you for joining me here today. We have a bunch of people joining in

I see a good morning Bhaskar. How are you? Long time no see. Good to see you guys

As we know, in this show, we talked about different things, different topics and purpose of really learning something new every week

Right. That's what we do here in growth mindset is try to learn something different, something new, something it makes, you know, it makes us think, think on different ways

Right. And eventually the growth. Every episode you watch here should be helping you at least learn something new and helping you in your growth

um in today's topic is like how do you want to become a technical author if you want to

so many people ask me questions you know send me a message or on social media

they ask me that i want to publish my own book i want to write to become a technical author how do

i become that so that's the and the reason i picked this topic actually uh yesterday is because

some people asked me a couple of times actually two people asked me that um they had they're

working on a book, they don't know how to publish it, what the process and how they can, you know

get their book published by the real publisher. And publishing doesn't mean, I'm not talking about

publishing your own book in a PDF and sell it on Amazon. I mean, how do you become a real

published author with a publication? So that's one thing we will talk today. Anything else you

have in mind you can ask questions um but again come and say hi and just tell us where you're

joining us from um are you new or you've been watching the show how do you like the show

anything any topics you have in mind you want me to cover we can definitely cover those as well

deepak good evening uh from india hello akula nithin akula nithin where you joining us from

nice to see you looks like we have some new people joining us thank you for your comments

letting me know at least i know who's joining me and then again some topics you you know questions

can be anything they haven't they don't have to be related to the publishing in that book but

that's kind of main topic today this is more like think of this shows like a radio show you can

call and you can just say anything you know you can ask questions you can comment on certain

things if you are agreeing or disagree it's always to disagree it doesn't have to be agree all the

time okay um we have uh who else is joining us simon anybody else joining us guys let us know

where you're joining us from um hey we can give away some uh cool goodies maybe we will ask a

question or two in between simon today we're going to ask a couple of questions about maybe

my books or C Sharp Corner and if you can answer that you will win a C Sharp Corner

to these. So let me start with a question now and you can post questions as you know

what what was the first no what let me ask this question let me repeat this

what was the date when first article was published on C Sharp Corner

What was the exact date when first article was published when the first article was published

on c-sharp corner that's number one question number two question is what um when was my first

book published month and year maybe year is yeah that's two way month and year so that'll be good

those are two good questions um so deepak says growth mindset is a good rating 10 by 10 that's

great that's good to hear us uh deepak i'm glad you're learning something here um so yeah let's

get started um give a couple of minutes more time uh who else is joining us guys post us your

comment where you joining us and i want to get involved get you involved in gays

all right besides so before we start this topic what else happened last week

um a lot of things happened on last week on c-sharp corner um we are spending a lot of time brainstorming we are hiring new developers to the team

somebody who knows c-sharp and dotnet one or two or three people we are hiring and you will say why

are we hiring because we are rebuilding the product we are rebuilding the whole platform

right now this is an esp.net we are trying to move to blazer that's our goal so we are hiring

people who will who should know esp.net and c-sharp and you know database cql server

but eventually they will migrate to blazer so we are looking for people in that younger better

the reason one to three years is good for us because you know they want to learn and even you

have a little bit more experience let me know you have to be unfortunately you have to be either in

the US or India and it hard for us to work in different countries for just legal reasons it hard for companies to work outside of those two locations two countries

All right, so let's get started. So, yeah, how did I become in, how did I publish my book, right

That's how I'll share with you. So, I started C-Sharp Corner in 2000

to be exact December 1999 was when I was writing and planning and I think it was

live at that time but domain was taken and everything was good

but I think in let's just call it January 2000 was when it was launched

C Sharp Corner so it's been 21 years long time long time

so when I was writing my articles in the beginning they were kind of whatever

I was just learning. At that time, there was no C-sharp content at all. There was no help. There's no documentation. There's no website. There's no online. There was nothing. If you go back to that world, there was web publishing, blogging, code sharing, especially in Microsoft world, C-sharp.net, there was not much there. Also nothing

So if you have to write a program in C Sharp, you have to kind of dig deep, learn yourself, figure out from the libraries, from the classes, how to use a class and how to write code for that

So that's really. So I was learning C Sharp and I was writing about it because, you know, when I was writing, I was manually creating kind of blog, you can call them or articles, doesn't matter

and I was sharing my code. And the purpose was, okay, if you want to learn C-sharp

rather than you going through the digging deep and spending hours and hours, you can just read the article

or read the blog and just download this code and you're good to go

And I was publishing the entire my code as a project online on C-sharp perm

So like right now, what you would do in GitHub today, that's what I was doing is putting my code out there

as an open source. And I was writing about the code, how the code works and that's what we do on github today

so in 2000 i got some emails from a press a press hey venkat good to see you you are our regular

regular guest here i mean audience we i see you every week thanks for coming um um joining us

this Friday. So I'm telling my story how I wrote, I published my first book. Today we are talking

about, you know, publications and how do you want to publish your own book and I'm sharing my stories

So I wrote my, this first article on GDI plus because I built a, I wrote a lot at that time

Funny thing is that my work, you know, you would say, how did I start working on C-sharp

I was working in C++ at that time, Visual C++ at my work in Downing Town

And the thing with C++ and MFC and ATL was it was a lot of

if you're building a UI applications, user interfaces, desktop applications, it used to take a lot of time to build applications

It wasn't like, okay, here's window, here's the controls, here's event and click event and you're done, right

It used to be a lot more time. There's a lot of manual codes to be written. There was no Visual Studio wasn't Visual Studio at that time

So I wrote my, I know I learned a lot in GDI Plus because one of the products we were building in that company was related to drawing and graphics

So we were, you know, you can draw a bunch of things on the screen

think of this as today if you look at the modern you know paint brush you know paint or something

paintbrush or a little more advanced than paintbrush but what product I was working on at

that time is that you can drag and drop different boxes you know rectangles circles you can create

UIs and in the behind the scene this software will create code for you okay so it's like what

you call it today UI UX for building your web pages or your local no code that was remember

that was 99 in 99 we were working on a product and product was called K-Skin I exactly know the

product. Product didn't do well. It failed, you know, it didn't do much and you know, it was not

successful at all but the product I was working was on. We were just two developers working on it

me and Owen. The product was called K-Skin and the idea was on a screen, on a Windows screen

you can drag and drop these different UI components like rectangle, circle, lines and build your

screen in the behind the scene, this tool will write code for you

And then you can take the code and then, you know, compile in Visual Studio

And there you go. Your code is written. But rather than writing code, you are building screens in UI

That was the product. So we were doing that in C++ and that was a lot of work

And then C Sharp came. And then C Sharp came and it was very early

Nobody knew it. You had to install it from CDL version. There was no documentation, all that

So I was learning that while I was learning building my application, then I was writing about how to do that

And my first article was on GDI+. GDI is a technology that is used in .NET to build UI graphics user interfaces

So I wrote an article, and just put it out there on C Sharp corner

and I guess publishers found me at that time and in 2000 in A-Press, I know Karen Waterson

Karen Waterson contacted me. She was the editorial director there. Like, Mahesh, we like your article. Would you be interested in writing a book

In C-sharp and .NET, that was 2000. So that's how I got started and that's when I published my first

this was my first book of ad.net and c-sharp a programmer's guide to ad.net and c-sharp

um it's not an amazing book but this was pretty good at that time okay it gives you uh let's see

it has you know six seven hundred pages but uh i writing this book took me a year and a half

because book was published in 2001. Yes, Bhaskar said 2001. Because the .NET and C Sharp

was in alpha version and there were so many, every beta version

and all these things will come. They, you know, it will change a lot

It will change a lot. So there's a lot of time, a lot of things change. And then you have to upgrade the code You have to test them again You have to make sure it running um yeah but in 2001 if you let see the date i don know if it has date on it um

did it does not have exact date but yeah it was uh published in 2001 and uh this was done in dot

1.0 but it has every little details about edu.net. edu.net is a library if you are working with

databases in G sharp and it still works like some code will still work obviously a lot of things

have changed since then. So the first book was published in 2001 not 2007. Well that's an incorrect

answer. Vaskar has the right answer. Vaskar you win. So Simon will win. So yeah, the idea of the book was really to learn more, dig deep into the library, how to use most of the functionality in the library and I built more like tutorials. So I wouldn't call it a great book, but it's a first book. That's how it was

um then you know then i got then i also i work on this book this book was again it is graphics

programming with gdi plus it has ideas they're very basic things you learn in these and then

obviously you figure out how to build your systems but it's more like a tutorial gives you all the

details and this was even third book then apres said hey this is a good book uh c sharp form this

says a book, C-sharp book was great. Can we build another book on VB.net

And I think, yeah, then I built, this is a VB.net, exactly. Yep

Yeah, so this book is a VB.net book. Correct. This is a little, yeah

So yeah, this was a, so I end up, long story short

that's how I started in the writing of this book part. but let's back to the main question if you were wondering how do you want to publish your book so

i have written an article on c-sharp corner and i'm going to update that article it's a load article

so simon if you can share the screen um i'm going to run through that if you want to become an

author this article has all the details if you want to become a technical author

um all right so that's not good i can hardly see the screen because this is supposed to be my deck

right yeah so first thing you need to do is hey dave how are you you want to jump in here if you

feel like coming for 10-15 minutes in the show come join us we are just talking about today how

to become a technical author um published author not just like going your own but with a publisher so so

yep so so what first thing let's say you want to become an author

what you need I think first thing you need is you need to have a a good topic in mind

and the topic not should be just no worries David so first thing you need to do is come up with a

topic and topic cannot be just any topic something at least you are good at it something actually you

you can call yourself an expert you cannot just write a book on anything you don't know about

okay so to me that should be your first um research is okay okay what i really want to

write book on book can be something on you are working on let's say you're working on a

cloud native technology recently at your work and you've been doing a lot of work there

you know a lot about you learn a lot you found some tricks and tips you build the solutions on

that's a perfect example of picking a topic. All right. So you can just scroll down there

So now you have a topic, right? You have a topic, what do you want to write on

You can keep down when you see those titles. Then what you're going to do is because if just because you have a topic

you have publishers are not going to really give you the chance

if you are especially if you are a new person in the space right if you're already published author

have written several books that's easy for you you already have a contact but this is

if you don't have any contact what you're going to do then is we'll also write a TOC table of

content you feel like this is the table of content I my book should have and if possible

if possible write a simple chapter it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be really detailed

but at least write a small sample chapter. So once you have these three things ready

a topic in mind, a table of content, and then you have a chapter

then what you can really do is start, you know, going through these publisher websites

You can go to A-Press, RocksPress, Pack-T. There's a bunch of out there

And then they have a contact form there. There's a contact place. If you're an author, you can contact them

and send them your details. So that's one way to do it

and what happens is then they're going to look at your table of content and your book title

and then your chapter but here's the trick uh if your writing say if your topic is something they

already have a book on chances are they're probably not going to accept it so you need to pick a topic

or you have to kind of know that your topic is unique and they don't have a book at it so for

For example, if you want to write a book for say, Pacti, let me target Pacti or Apress

you have to go to their website and see that they don't have a book on that topic

Right. For example, Cloud Native. If you go to Pacti and look at the Cloud Native, they already have a bunch of books out there

It will be hard for you to get selected. So you want to go to a different publisher who don't have that book already in mind or they're not working on it

That's one thing you need to keep in mind. once you publish them then it's pretty standard then you know publishers have a process to follow

they will send you a contract they will send give you tell you how much you know royalties you're

going to get paid if you want some advance then they're going to also you know send you some

templates you have to follow to write the books you have to kind of put it can be your usually

they each publisher have they have their own template and in template then you start using

and put your content in the template they also templates also have um it's a word template

usually and templates also have these how you're going to format the images how you're going to

format the text how you're going to format the code how you're going to format the images and

every all that it's already part of the template so that's kind of works and then after every

chapter is done and core is done, you're going to send them. They hire

reviewers from the side by side. They're going to review your book and they give you

feedback. So after every chapter, you're going to submit a chapter with the

code They will have a technical reviewer Technical reviewer is going to review a chapter and side by side going to give you the feedback and then you can go and fix the feedback so that kind of your process works hopefully so far so so good so far

so good everybody's clear on that if you have any questions on this process feel free to ask your

questions right i'm just running through my experience here and as also i'm going to update

that update that article as well um so any questions so far no if you have this postage

here david says his makeup makeup person did come today so he can't come on online

um it's okay david don't worry we uh we all love you here you can come however you want as long as

you have some quotes on. All right. So how long does it take to write a book? That's a good

question. A lot of people ask that. And some of them, sometimes you're not prepared for that

It's a long process. Writing a book can take you a year, a little less depends on how much time you

have, how good you are in the writing. But six months is a kind of pretty good amount of time

These days, I think these days things have changed in last few years

Now you want to write this, you want to write a book, they are like shorter, they're like less number of pages, probably, you know, 200, 300 pages

You don't want to write a book with 1000 pages because that's overkill

And you don't want to take two years by the time you finish the book. You know, you've got a new product out there

Your .NET has changed totally or Azure has changed totally, right? So goals should be, if you're writing a book, you should finish that within six months or even quicker

It should be, you know, two to three hundred pages. It should be more focused on a topic itself

So that's what it should be right now. It should not be more like, oh, I want to write a book on everything on C-sharp

And then you're just taking two years. That's kind of the process. um um so yeah vasker has a question while writing a book can we get a reference from some other

books websites uh so that's a good question when you're writing a book and you have reference

um you can learn from it so for example you can learn your writing book on say

adio.net or ncshar you can learn from microsoft documents uh you can learn from any books that's

fine but the content in the text in the code it has to be your own you cannot exactly take the

same code and change it a little bit and publish it that's no that's a bad um it has to be your

own idea if you're writing a application say you're building your own application it has to

be your idea you cannot have application written by somebody else and you just repackage or rewrite

the code that's not a good idea in other words for example if somebody has you know for example in my

let's say my GDI plus book if somebody has created online a a online editor for graphics and

drawing I cannot do build exactly same application it should be different it should be your own idea

Everything should be your own original. That's the first rule. Otherwise, you're going to get a big backlash and big name out there

You definitely cannot copy and paste content from even Microsoft document. You can take a couple of lines when you are kind of referencing, say, oh, this author on Microsoft said this about this library

That's pretty much it, but it has to be written by your own words and your own understanding how you think of that

that's that's the important part yeah so the Dave says not from other books unless you can get

permission I would say some for the web but it's less of an issue yeah it's yeah you can legally

but you don't want to anyway the reason you don't want to is because author may not have a problem

but some people are going to say what is this like I paid for this big and you just copied

some content from here. That's another challenge, right? So, and then Vaskar has another question

says, should we show our table of content before writing OR or completing the book

Yeah, you can share your table of content. I don't think, nobody cares of your table of content

It's not like people are going to copy it. Yeah, it's fine. You can have your own table of content

but the idea is idea is really well you're going to share with your publisher table of content

ahead of the time before even your book get published or approved not published even

your book project get approved they will ask you for ttoc anyway but yeah so table of content is

not a problem and nobody's writing same book on the same topic even they are they have their own

ideas they have their own table of content so yes publishers need table of content

they need the book title they need the a one sample chapter before they can actually sign

a contract with you that is correct that gives them an idea that yeah you know exactly what

you're writing about you're not just newcomer fair so with that that covers to me i think that

covers the whole publishing process hopefully you get the idea how to get started how to publish

and then my last topic is this how much money you make from publishing book and that's very

tricky question um you need to ask yourself why are you publishing why are you you want to publish

a book why you need to ask yourself some people publish it because they want to become an author

they want to get their name out there they feel you know it's like achievement to some people and

Yes, that's a big achievement. Writing a book is not an easy task. If it was easy, everybody can go and write a book, right? On your profile, you can say you are a published author. And I'm not talking about somebody going and publishing their own PDF. I'm talking about a real book published by a real publisher. And it's, you know, it's a good, you know, when you publish a book with a real publisher, it's a serious process involved

There are multiple people involved in the process and there's a marketing and sales

And, you know, once they publish a book, they already know they're going to send tens of thousands, if not more

Yeah, at least several thousand copies in different stores, different online, different whatever

If they are publishing a PDF, a digital version, they know they have some plan in mind

So they spend a lot of energy, time and money in it. So how much money you make really depends on book to book these days

People don't buy books a lot, right? You know, book writing is not a very profitable business in today's world right now because almost everything is open source

Almost all help you can find online. All you have to do is search Google

and even C Sharp Corner, I can blame C Sharp Corner for some of it that we put so much content out there

and it's free, why would I buy a book? Some books still sell, right

So if you have a topic, mind this topic it's a solution it shows you how let's say for example how to architect a you know

high performance scalable native cloud application if you write a book on it i'm sure somebody buy it

i'm sure it will sell uh but you cannot be i don't think you'll become rich from writing books these

days right so david said he made 40 this month so i don't know david is this your book published

from publisher what book you're talking about. Here we are talking about the books published

by publisher. So my book, believe it not, my book, this book was published, this graphics

programming with GDI Plus. This book was published, I think it was in 2003. I'm going to look at it

this was 2002 or 2003 but it still makes money. It doesn't make a lot of money. I still get royalty

check from from a publisher. I still get you know every year I get probably I don't know $50

$100 check because 13 copies sold somewhere and I get I think I get a couple of bucks each copy

So yeah, I still get money from it. So, and it made me good money

In the beginning, I think when my book was launched, it showed, I think 10,000, 12,000 copies

So it made me pretty good money. I wouldn't say it didn't make

but these days it's hard to make money. It's different. I'm talking about the time

when we used to learn programming from books. But if you want to write and publish a book

say saying that I want to become published author, that what I talking about And I think the PACT is one of the growing publishers they are they publish a lot of books and on topics good topics so we are also on C corner we are going to start our own

you know publishing digital books not the printed books but just more like a ebooks and pdfs we

already have books on C-sharp corner so Simon maybe you can share the link I'm sure most of you

already know that we have hundreds of books already in C-sharp. Most of them are free

Most of them are simple books. I wrote a lot of them myself. I would say, I don't know exactly how

many but I pick a topic. I'll pick a topic for example C-sharp 7.0 whatever and then I'll write

a book, a smaller book maybe you know 20, 30, 40 pages but look at that. If you go to C-sharp and

books at the header if you click on the books link we have here um i would say hundreds of books

i don't know exact number but you can see books on full stack you can books on angular

there's book on c sharp there's book on azure a couple a few of these books are also published

from microsoft right it's available free so they're available there a lot of our mvps wrote

some of these books right c-sharp corner mvps have published their own books and look at that

there's even book on knockout i forgot about knockout is it still around knockout js um yeah

some of these books are old right if you will dot net interview questions um and these books if you

look at them they're downloads there some of them are downloaded by hundreds of thousands people

um it's a lot of books they have you know i know a couple of books they're downloaded by i think a

lot. So these books are available but what we are going to do on C Sharp Corner is next extension to

C Sharp Corner is we are going to have our own paid ebooks and we have hired just a manager and

director for the program she's started working on this as well. So if you're interested in publishing

your own book you can reach out to us you can reach out to Simon you can reach out to anybody

and if you are an expert in that area and that field or that topic yeah look at that learn basics of xml um that book was written a while ago so it a fundamentals of xml yeah so if you say you

know what i want to publish my own book i want to return so you can contact c sharp corner we will

help you publish the book we will help you um sell it's gonna have price we're gonna do and

market and all that. So reach out to us. So I think with that, I think Simon, that covers my

topic of the day today. I don't have anything else to cover from this topic. If you still have

any questions, you can ask us here. With that said, I think there's a lot of things coming

up next. I want to talk about there's a .NET conference coming up in January

and I know David and Simon are working on that. So we're going to announce that coming soon

You're going to see a big announcement from C Sharp Corner and social media on .NET conference

This is going to be a big conference. I don't know how many days right now

We're still working on that. So watch out for that .NET conference coming up in January

Excuse me. um we are also going to um announce some more things we are actually going to launch a we have

a training website we tried to pilot this couple of years ago last year and it worked out good

product is good uh but we are going to launch a training website and right now we are working on

it so in few yeah in few months yeah these are all all training courses here so we are kind of

redoing this a little bit but in the next couple of you know weeks and months you're going to start

seeing more real training content here it's similar to any other online training you can

just go pick a course buy it and then just start learning online and yeah there's more things

coming up so I'm just want to give you a little preview and head start on that so keep an eye for

these these announcements. And they said that for dotnet conference call for papers is live now You can submit your proposals your speaking topics

It ends on December 20th. So there will be no more after that

So, Simon, maybe you can put a link on that. There you go. Yeah

So that's the link if you're interested in speaking at this .NET conference coming up in 2022

This will be our first conference of 2022. So that's something to think about

Oh, and we are also thinking about doing a live in-person C-sharp corner conference, annual conference in India, in Delhi

So let's see how that comes up. But I think Simon is working on it

I think we have a tentative, what, month? You think Simon will do in March

So far, we are toying, you know, we're playing around the idea of March in March 2022

we can probably do in-person conference in India. I think in India, COVID situation is under control

I don't see major issues, problems. I don't hear a lot of things, problems there

US is also under control now. I think kids are getting a little more affected

but hopefully we should be able to do or hopefully we are able to do this in-person C-Shark annual conference

again in Delhi in 2022. too. With that said, I think that is all from me today. Everybody, thank you so much for hanging out

stopping by, sharing your, posting your comments and sharing your thoughts with me

And with that said, thank you so much and I'll see you next Friday