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Looking back on my journey as a published author, from Apress to O'Reilly.
Software developer since 2004. Web/front-end expert (HTML, CSS, JS). O'Reilly and Apress author. Freelance tech writer. Blogger. Bridging code and communication in tech.
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It's October 2024, and I am celebrating four years as a published author. According to Amazon, Modern CSS was published on October 7, 2020. Modern CSS actually started out as a self-published book on Leanpub (a great platform for self-publishing books).
It was actually my second book; my first book was called Using Gatsby and Netlify CMS. This was a very niche book that covered one very specific stack (one that has, since, fallen out of favor. Gatsby is not as popular as it once was, and Netlify CMS lives on as Decap CMS). The book was a little too niche and barely sold at all.
After publishing Modern CSS on Leanpub, it sold very little. I don't have much of a following online - back in 2020 it was even less than it is now - so I was trying to think of a way to get it in front of a wider audience.
I took a look at different publishers, and decided to look into possibly getting the book published with Apress. I was a first time book author and didn't know anything about the process of getting published; surely, they wouldn't be interested in an unsolicited book proposal from a relative unknown!
Luckily I was wrong. To my surprise, Apress was interested in publishing the book. I would take it down from Leanpub and rework the book for Apress's format. It only took a couple of months to rework the whole book. My first contact with Apress was in June 2020, and the book was out by October. It happened so fast, and it was all done over email!
After a while, I started getting the itch to write again. My editor from Apress had moved on and now worked at O'Reilly Media. I had a rough idea for a book about the web platform, highlighting the different APIs and technologies available in modern browsers.
I reached out to my old editor and she put me in touch with another editor at O'Reilly to discuss the proposal. Once again, I was pleasantly surprised - they were interested in the book, and thought it would be a good for their "Cookbook" series of books. It was tentatively titled Web Browser API Cookbook, and I started working on it in February 2023.
The writing process with O'Reilly was fantastic. The book was written using Asciidoc, which is sort of like Markdown but with some more bells and whistles. The book content lived in a Git repository and I wrote it using Visual Studio Code.
Getting closer to publication, it was decided to rename the book to just Web API Cookbook. It rolls off the tongue a little better than Web Browser API Cookbook, I must admit. I finished writing almost a year later, in early 2024. Then, in April, the book was published. I couldn't believe that I was now an O'Reilly author and had my own book with an animal on the cover!
Despite the books not being best sellers, I enjoyed writing them and am very proud of them. I'd love to do another book when the time is right and when there's a good topic. (Got any good ideas for a book about web development?) Or, maybe there will be a second edition of Modern CSS or Web API Cookbook someday. There is certainly enough change in the worlds of CSS and browser APIs to provide enough new content!
Do you have an idea for a book you'd like to write? Pitch it to a publisher - you never know!
If you'd like to check out my books, you can find them on Amazon: