As I wrote yesterday, the core belief that drives my marketing strategy for Swimming in Tech Debt is that I truly think the book will help software developers get things done in codebases with tech debt. Given that conviction, and the fact that I care about software developers, I don’t feel shy in asking you to read my book.

On sites that I own, I just overtly write about the book and the processes that I used to develop it. This content goes out to my email list, this blog, and my podcast. Each place is slightly different.

The subscribers to my email list are expecting updates about the book. That’s the specific reason I give for signing up, so sending those updates is not only expected, but I would be not meeting my obligation if I didn’t send that update. That being said, I usually try to send something along with the update that would be interesting to people who signed up.

Similarly, readers of this blog are ostensibly expecting me to write about what I am working on because all of the advice I give on this site is based on my experience. If you are subscribed to this blog (and read it and like it), then I am sure that you’ll like the book—about 1/3 of the content is based on posts here. So, I don’t think you’ll mind me mentioning it.

The podcast is a little different because it’s only about writing and not software development. In season 4 of my podcast, I am going through the steps that I took to write the book. If you are a software developer with a blog, I think I have tips for you to turn your posts into a book. If you don’t have a blog (or even private writing) yet, then the first three seasons are about developing a writing habit that results in a corpus of work to draw from. I talk about my own book in order to explain the process of writing it, but content from the book isn’t appropriate for the podcast.

So, for places I own and that are tied to my identity, I feel free to just write and talk about the book. For all other places, I just want to be a good citizen. The way I do that is to try to use a 0-click strategy. I don’t know if this is the most effective, but it’s what I personally value.

I’ll write about that tomorrow.

I am hoping to be done with Swimming in Tech Debt in a few months. Most of the work between now and then will be getting the book through three editing passes, which gives me a lot of down time. I’m using that time to market the book via content creation. This blog post is part of that.

I don’t mind just saying that overtly because I am following the advice of Zig Ziglar in Selling 101 [affiliate link]. If you don’t know him, Ziglar was one of the selling gurus and motivational speakers of a half-century ago. I would say that it’s the exact kind of person I wouldn’t read, but he’s often mentioned by Seth Godin, so I bought the book and read it years ago. He’s not at all what I imagined—a core part of his philosophy is integrity.

This line has always stuck with me:

If what you are selling is not good enough for your friends and family, then why are you selling it? If it is good, then why would you want to keep it from those you care about most? […] The key is your conviction that you really are offering something that will strengthen the friendship.

Here’s another:

Here is the most important step [to] take when it comes to helping others. If you truly have a desire to help other people; if you truly believe in your product or service; if you truly want the prospect to benefit […] always ask for the order.

It is with this conviction that I am writing these posts to tell you about my book. I think that most of the people that read this site got here because they are software developers, and if you have come back after reading, then my way of thinking at least resonates with your way of thinking. But, I don’t just want to post an advertisement (or even an addvertisement). I want each thing I write to be useful on its own, not a pitch for the book.

So, that’s my strategy—I am telling people something I think will benefit them. To do this, I am posting on Mastodon, LinkedIn, Reddit, here on this blog and in my podcast, to my email list, and other places. I have different criteria for what I post where, which I’ll go into soon.

I’m reading a book called Nonfiction Alchemy [affiliate link] by Jordan Ring that has some advice on finding a voice. A lot of it resonates with what I wrote in Writing as Yourself to Yourself. For example, in a section called Write with Heart, he advises you to “write like you speak” to find your voice, to tell stories because “they bought your book, not someone else’s”. But the part where he talked about his title and his voice was something I had not seen before:

I debated writing a more streamlined “business type” book with an unoriginal title like “Write Your Damn Book!” I thought about using straightforward chapter titles and letting less of my personality shine through. I summarily shut down this line of thinking.

He goes on to talk about how the word “Alchemy” is evocative and that he is using it to find other (more original) words to describe his ideas. He talks about spells and potions and elixirs, and it just makes the prose more enjoyable, original, and memorable.

It reminds me of an exercise from Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg [affiliate link]. I talked about it in my podcast episode, Finding Nouns and Verbs. Here’s how I described it:

Take out a piece of paper. Divide it into three columns. In the first column, write down any ten nouns. Then, fold back it over so you can’t see those nouns and look at the second column.

At the top of the second column write down an occupation. She gives examples like chef, pilot, or doctor. Then, for the occupation that you chose, list all the verbs related it. In the book, Goldberg picked chef and then wrote down cut, slice, fry, marinate, bake, boil, etc. Write down as many as you can think of. You don’t need to limit yourself to 10. In fact, try to come with a lot more than 10.

Finally, open up the paper. Now you can see both columns. A column of nouns and a column of verbs. Pick a random noun and then find a verb to go with it and complete the sentence.

This will get you thinking of and using concrete and specific nouns and verbs that exert themselves to describe your scene. You won’t need to rely on adjectives and adverbs as much, and when you do, they’ll have more impact.

Thinking along these lines, with my title now Swimming in Tech Debt and the central metaphor being a swimmer trying to go upstream and being thwarted by debt. In my book, I show how to use the existence of tech debt as a way to propel yourself. The payment of the debt gives you energy and joy that puts you in the flow and makes you go faster. Even the word “flow” serendipitously is related to swimming and probably belongs in the subtitle.

Using the Goldberg technique, I could make a list of verbs that describe what a swimmer does: stroke, push-off, flip, wade, coast, kick, etc. This is of course, a good use of ChatGPT, which is a kind of super-thesaurus. It says: Swim, wade, stroke, paddle, dive, float, glide, submerge, surface, tread, splash, flip, scull, plunge, sink, kick, sprint, roll, breathe, and relax.

The idea is to use those words in the text sometimes instead of the obvious one. Enough that it brings some life to the text, but not so much that it seems like a gimmick.

The working title of my book has been Pay Tech Debt to Go Fast Now. I chose this because it’s the short answer about what I think you should do if you have a lot of tech debt, which is to concentrate your payment efforts on short-term developer productivity. The book is the long answer with lots of recommendations of how to do it.

But, I haven’t been satisfied with it as a title. There’s a passage in my book that seems to have resonated with a early readers, and I’m using that as a signal that it would be a source of a good title:

It’s been hard for me to talk about technical debt outside of engineering. The problems we tackle only exist inside the codebase, which is invisible to stakeholders, but it’s the water we swim in.

I don’t know how to explain that to others that don’t live in water. To us, working in a codebase with a lot of debt is like swimming upstream. It resists us moving in the direction we want to go. We eventually get there, but everyone else just sees the result and doesn’t feel the resistance. If we are slowed down, it just looks like we’re slow swimmers.

In the Write Useful Books, Rob Fitzpatrick recommends making a promise to the reader and putting it on the cover of the book. He says that it could be the title or subtitle. I overindexed on how good “Write Useful Books” is as a title, which is how I ended up with mine. But, I think it breaks down when the promise can’t be short. I think you need something easy for someone to remember and recommend. Pithiness is important.

I am also reading Nonfiction Alchemy [affiliate link], and in it Jordan Ring talks about having a central metaphor to use as a source of vocabulary in the book. “Alchemy” is his example, and the chapter titles are drawn from the same metaphor. I’ve been thinking about that idea too.

Yesterday, I was in Barnes & Noble and just staring at the non-fiction bookshelves with my wife and was telling her about this problem. We kept throwing out terms and while we were there, she came up with “Escaping the Tech Debt Trap”. I like “trap” and one of my favorite books is The Pleasure Trap [affiliate link], so I was drawn to it. I tried to think visually about the idea of a trap.

Then, I remembered that “swimming” passage in my book and thought about swimming in a river and going upstream because I needed to get somewhere, and how I could use the obstacles as a handhold, and push off them to propel myself. The visual helped me realize the physicality of my recommendations. Then, I thought of the title Swimming in Tech Debt, and I liked that it had a double meaning. There’s a play on words that sounds like it could mean something similar to “drowning in tech debt” (being overwhelmed), but what I mean is how to get through it, how to swim through it.

So, anyway, that’s the new title.