A couple of years ago, I read Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick. This year I applied it to writing a book about tech debt. These five things had the biggest impact.

1. Imagine the conversation where someone recommends your book

This helped me narrow down my topic from many other ideas I had. I know first-hand that software developers talk about tech debt all of the time. Many of my ideas for chapters were from things I said or thought in those conversations. The ideal conversation is one where engineers are complaining that they can’t get support to pay more tech debt — nearly every chapter addresses that.

2. Make a clear promise

My title is Pay Tech Debt to Go Faster Now because I think the long-term benefits are unsure and over estimated, and there’s a way to get benefits immediately if you direct debt payments at developer productivity to deliver the current roadmap faster (which everyone wants). In that conversation above, my title is the short form of the answer I would give (the book is the long answer)

3. Write in public

I started the book in January and posted it in February. Did a rewrite in March. Posted it in April. That version was discovered by Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter who published an excerpt in September (He also graciously gave honest feedback on what did and did not work)

The article led to hundreds of software engineers signing up to get updates. I just sent them six chapters to read and am getting more useful feedback. I was approached to give a private webinar and shared a different four chapters with them. All of this is honing and shaping the book — the book that I would have written in private would have been very different (and not as good).

4. Market the book by sharing behind the scenes information

For example, this post :)

5. (not in the book): Join an Accountability Group

Rob runs the Useful Books community — https://www.usefulbooks.com/ — I meet with community members three hours per week where we spend 45 minutes of it just writing. A lot of my book got written in those sessions (~70%)