Speaker 1 00:00:01 Join us as we gather around the hedge, where we dig into technology, business, and culture with the finest minds in computer networking. Speaker 2 00:00:20 Well, hello Rick. And tell me about these books again. What's the point here? I mean, like, Speaker 3 00:00:27 . Well, the point, the facade, they're Speaker 2 00:00:30 Gonna fall over in the middle of the fight. I know. If you hear a big boom and Rick is like, God and I Speaker 3 00:00:35 Live in earthquake country, but no, they make you look smarter Speaker 2 00:00:39 . Oh, okay. Speaker 3 00:00:40 That's, that's, and I'm not allowed to keep 'em at home, so Speaker 2 00:00:43 Oh, wow. Rid of them. Speaker 3 00:00:45 I, no, I've got your books and Eric's book here. Books here, so, you know. Wow. You know, I, I can't let these things go. Speaker 2 00:00:52 That's crazy, man. By the way, that's what Croi speaking there. Tom's not on today. So Rick's on instead of Tom's. So Rick, we'll just call you Tom. Is that okay? Speaker 3 00:01:01 That's, that's, Speaker 2 00:01:02 Yeah. Okay, fine. , Speaker 3 00:01:04 . Speaker 2 00:01:06 Tell, tell people what you do, Rick, because I, I people don't know who you are. Speaker 3 00:01:10 I, uh, well, obviously I collect books, uh, but besides that, I, I teach full-time at Cabrillo College in, uh, uh, Santa Cruz area, Aptos, California. And I also teach, uh, halftime at University of California Santa Cruz. Uh, I do some part-time work for Cisco Networking Academy and their curriculum engineering team. Uh, occasionally write a book or two. And, uh, I'm thinking about getting a paper route just, uh, for something to, something Speaker 2 00:01:42 To do. Yeah, something to do on this spare time. Yeah, that's, that would be awesome. And today we're joined by Eric Chow. And Eric, where are you used to live in San Jose, but where are you now? Speaker 4 00:01:52 Yeah, so I grew up in Southern California and, uh, live in San Jose for a little bit. Right now I'm in Seattle. I've been here for about 16 years. So I don't know, I, I, I could, I can, I guess I could say I'm from Seattle, but, you know, uh, well, originally from Taiwan, so like Oh, okay. All over the place a little bit. Speaker 2 00:02:09 Oh, okay. Cool. Well, that's kind of cool. So your family moved from Taiwan to San Jose when you were young? Speaker 4 00:02:15 Yeah, so we moved from, uh, Taiwan to Southern California in the city called Fullerton. So it's like Orange County area, um, kind of southern tip. Speaker 2 00:02:24 Awesome. Great. Yeah. Yeah. I had a friend when I was in the US Air Force, I had a friend who was in the Chinese Air, or not in the Taiwanese Air Force. I say Chinese, Chinese, Taiwanese Air Force, and I love that guy. He was so awesome. I, we all called him Jerry. I could probably never pronounce his name for real, but we called him Jerry. And, uh, he gave me red money every year for years and got me a chop and all that cool stuff. It was really, really cool. Um, he would always host dinner for Chinese New Years and all that stuff. It was so, so cool. Um, yeah. Speaker 4 00:02:53 Jerry, happy Veteran Day to you and, uh, Jerry. Speaker 2 00:02:56 Oh, thanks, . Speaker 4 00:02:58 Yeah. For, we're recording on Veterans Day for the US Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. For those of you Yeah. Who don't Speaker 2 00:03:03 Know, who don't know. Yeah. So, alright, so we're talking about technical publishing. Alright, so of course everybody knows I have this longstanding relationship with, with Pearson. So let's back up for a second though. And before we talk about my stuff, Eric, what is your, what is your experience with publishing? Like, what, where, where do you come from? Speaker 4 00:03:21 Yeah, so I'm actually here sitting with two distinct, very distinguished authors, right? So, , I figure I'm gonna keep my, my bid minimal. Speaker 2 00:03:29 probably not Speaker 4 00:03:30 Shut up and let you guys, you know, talk most of the time. But so personally, you know, I've always been a bookworm. I I love reading, this is what I do all the time. My favorite hobby. And, uh, you know, a couple years ago, you know, I wrote some blog about software defined networking, and they rank pretty high on Google. And people reached out and said, and said, Hey, you know, did you wanna write something about Open Flow? And I told them, I don't think people want to know about Web Info, right? , what about just doing Python and networking in general? It'd be like, Hey, you know, I think that'll work. So therefore, you know, I started writing about that. So that book is called Mastering Python Networking, and that is the book that, you know, kind of people know most about in the fourth edition came out this year. But other than that, I also did, uh, book reports where O'Reilly, um, I did, uh, like this co-author with Rich, my, my, uh, my colleague and friend and I also did Self-publishing, uh, on Kafka. And that's, that didn't make any money purely, uh, passion projects. So maybe less than 500, 500 copies or so. Um, so those are kind of the, the publishing background I have. I know it's not nearly as much as well, no, Speaker 2 00:04:37 Let's back up then. Neither one of you . Yeah. Well, I mean, O'Reilly, is that who you're primarily working through as O'Reilly, or is it Speaker 4 00:04:43 No. So right now the, those other books we're primarily with Pack Publishing, so they're more edgy. Uh, you kind of, you know, taking chances on kind of newer topics. Mm-Hmm. O'Reilly and Pearson as well is, uh, kind of, you know, want kind of more conservative, wants to know x amount of copies that were sold. And I'm sure you have a ton of experience with that, Ross. Speaker 2 00:05:04 Well, yeah. I was gonna say, actually, o uh, Pearson at this point largely does not encourage me to write, they encourage me to do video because the video is more edgy. Yeah. The video stuff is more edgy and can be more edgy, but, okay. So let's move to Rick. Rick, uh, what's your, what's your experience ? Speaker 3 00:05:23 Uh, yeah, it's, it's definitely something, you know, if somebody would've told me I did, you know, when I was in college that I'd be writing, I would've tell 'em they were crazy. Uh, but it's something, you know, later in life I really enjoyed doing, especially, you know, as, as a, uh, teacher. Um, it's, uh, you know, I would, I try and do, and I know both of you have the, have similar experiences putting your voice into the book or whatever you're writing, and you know, it, it, it definitely has its challenges because in teaching, at least you have students on the other side, uh, you can see by their, you know, body language or they understanding something they can get ask you questions. But when you're writing a book, it's, it's, that's it. Uh, you know, what goes out is, is it nobody's, you know, of course they'll email you and things like that, but it's not interactive. So, um, it, it is something that takes a lot of thought and, you know, a, uh, just really gotta try and cover all bases without going too deep into something, but not losing them either. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:06:34 So, I, I don't know. I mean, I've done a little bit of self-publishing. I've self-published a couple of books, one of which, well, none of which have ever done well. But I mean, that's, that's, that's okay. Uh, that's just part of the game with self-publishing. And I would, I would say, I mean, I don't know what you're, what y'all's experience is. I would say that publishers are doing less and expecting the author to do more today. Any thoughts on that from either of you? I don't know. Maybe Eric, you wanna Speaker 4 00:07:05 Yeah, I, i 120% agree. I think you're, that was one of the lessons. So right after I, the second edition came out on mastering Python networking, I actually wrote an article with Packet Pusher on the lessons learned. And that was one of the biggest lessons I've learned was you're pretty much on your own. Right? You, that's why, you know, I think the publisher nowadays go out and seek industry voices such as you and, and Rick that, um, that they only have their own audience already. So therefore they know when they publish something, there's a certain amount of people who would, who would listen and who would by the book. And they actually calculate the royalty advancement from that probably calculating backwards. So I would definitely agree that, you know, one of the lessons I've learned was once you published, you're pretty much on your own on the promotions and, uh, you know, kind of advertisement for yourself. I don't want to use the term your own brand, but that's really what it is, is that you're trying to bring the audience in. And once you have that established, maybe for the second book, the third book, that they will, you know, allocate some kind of marketing budgets or, you know, maybe even a part-time marketing personnel for you to advertise your book. But most of the time you're, you're on your own and happy to, you know, listen to what Rick has to say about that. Speaker 3 00:08:15 Yeah, no, I, I agree completely. It's, uh, you know, uh, when you're a, a name brand like, you know, a Russ White, you know, you have a certain following and you know, as Russ's name on it and, and that, but, uh, that's so good. I know, like, you know, I've kind of written two types of books. One is kind of under is my own work pretty much, and you're, you're, you're, you have to promote it, you've gotta get the word out there. Um, yeah, you're kind of out on your own. So, uh, yeah, I, I completely agree with that. Speaker 4 00:08:49 Yeah, I think that's, Speaker 2 00:08:51 No, go ahead. Speaker 4 00:08:51 I was gonna say, um, that's kind of what the biggest difference between, um, the self-publishing and traditional publisher, even though the traditional publisher have decreased the amount of, uh, reach that they have or, you know, active reach that they have, but self-publishing, you're doing that even more. Um, and that was one of reasons when people approach me and wondering if they could do self-publishing or they would go with a traditional publisher. That's one of the biggest thing that I told them is, what's your goal, um, and how much reach do you have? And, uh, what kind of channel are you looking for? So, for example, your traditional publishers still have a lot of partners for translation. So if you want your book to be translated into other, other languages, you're, you're better off working with traditional publisher. But if not, then as what Russ was saying, you know, your your kind of effort that put it in, it's gonna be, uh, more, but it's not, you know, it's, it's kind of similar effort that you're putting in, um, if not a little bit more for self publishing. Speaker 2 00:09:49 Yeah, yeah. My experience with self-publishing is you get 80 to 90% of the royalties instead of, I don't know what y'all are getting, but maybe 10, 20% somewhere, maybe 5%, something like that, depending on the publisher and the number of co-authors and stuff like that. But you are getting 10 to 80 to 90% of a quarter of the book sells most of the time is my experience with it, because self-publishing is really all on you. And for whatever reason, and maybe, maybe this is just me, but for whatever reason, it still feels like people trust a book written by an author that's on Pearson or whatever they believe the quality control is there, or something more so than something that's written through a self-publishing situation. I don't know thoughts either of you on that, because that, that's my, that's kind of my experience. Speaker 3 00:10:46 Yeah. I, I, I kind of see that, I mean, I, I even kind of do that myself. You know, if I see a book by, uh, a, a publisher, I kind of, you know, know that at least it's gone through some kind of process. 'cause I know we all know what that process is. , and, uh, I, you know, I know it's been looked at by many eyes and, uh, you know, as opposed to, uh, you know, even, you know, self-publishing or something where it's like, well, it may not have the same kind of quality control behind it. Speaker 4 00:11:21 Yeah. I think one interesting fact is that, uh, when, back when, you know, before Covid or already used to publish a bunch of books, plus they host, you know, like velocity and open source convention and, uh, many of the other, uh, events in-person events throughout the year, and that is actually where they mo make most of their money, um, as opposed to book publishing, the margin is super low. And, you know, if you're factoring the distribution, the marketing, all of that, you know, they really don't make a lot from the book publishing, however, they keep that arm going because it's a trusted brand. And that is what bring the audience over for the in-person events. And the, I think these were explained really well in the, um, I forgot who the, the lady was, but you know, just right when Covid hit and they were talking about how this was, has such a big financial impact on O'Reilly, she actually disclose all of these details on, you know, where they make most of their money. So back to what you were talking about Russ, on the trusted brand and the, the whole process of quality control and what Rick mentioned. So, um, so that was just kind of one interesting fact about book publishing. Speaker 2 00:12:29 Yeah. I, I would actually say that my experience, not only in the technical world, but in the other worlds that I published in, is that a lot of the sales of non-fiction books aren't in bookstores. They're at conferences and they're tied to podcasts and stuff like that. And the biggest thing against self-publishing that I, that I have is that it's very hard to get a self-published book into the bookstore at a conference. Speaker 4 00:13:01 Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 00:13:02 The, those bookstores are run by Pearson, they're run by O'Reilly, they're run by somebody, and those companies are selling their books. They're not selling your books. That's just the fact of the matter. And a lot of people will go to a conference like that and they'll pick up 10 books and they'll take pictures of 'em and say, I want this book. And they'll buy those books later and they won't look at self-published stuff. And so that, that is a thing about self-publishing. If you go that direction that you have to realize it's not only just on you, you are not gonna get any exposure from any of those common places. Now, as far as the editing process and the quality, Rick, I don't know. My experience is varied . Speaker 4 00:13:44 Yeah. I think it really depends on, um, your, your editor. So I, I don't know about you guys' experience, but for me, you know, there's the, um, there's a bunch of editors. One is the acquisition editor who negotiates the contract and gets you in and the realty percentage. Then you have the content editor, which is, you know, a person who is actually getting your copy, returning back to you, aggregating all the comments. Then at the end, there's actually, uh, another proofreader that goes through that whole process. And you do lose a lot of that, uh, if you do go to the self publishing route, unless you're able to pay upfront and hire your own, uh, editors. And you might not be able to edit like two or three because the, the ones at the publisher, they actually do a bulk, right. So then they have the economies of scale, that sort of stuff. And, um, yeah, happy to listen to your thoughts on that, Rick. Speaker 3 00:14:33 Yeah, I, I think you know, it, it really just depends on the editors you have and yeah. Really also the amount of time you have. I, I know I really appreciate the technical editors I've had, especially on the IPV six books. Uh, they've been fantastic. And, and nothing against the copy editors. The, the only thing, you know, reminds me of when I was in like sixth grade and having my teacher, you know, uh, mark up my paper . Uh, which is fine, but you have to be very careful because that can also take away your voice the way that you wanna explain something, and then the way the manner you wanna explain it. Uh, so it's, you have to read those edits and those comments very carefully and have the time to do it, not just accept them or not just reject them. 'cause some of them are, oh, yeah, I, I, I, I meant the affirmative and not the negative of that set sentence. That would've been completely wrong. But if you're not careful, it takes your voice away. It can even change the technical meaning of what you're trying to say. And, uh, so that, that process for me was always the hardest. 'cause it took the most time. Yeah, Speaker 2 00:15:44 I think, I think that's a misconception about publishing, by the way, is the time taking. But let's go back to editing before we jump into that, is that I find that the editing process often does destroy my voice. Speaker 4 00:15:58 Mm-Hmm. Speaker 2 00:15:59 and I, and it really, I find it very annoying often just to be flat out, honest. I find the entire editing process to be annoying to a large degree. Speaker 3 00:16:07 Yeah. Speaker 2 00:16:08 Now, on the other side, I am very, I use Grammarly. I'm very grammatically, you know, I have a PhD in philosophy, so I'm very well-trained on writing. I've been beat the crap out of on writing for 20 years now, doing way beyond technical writing. And, you know, I even went to the point, I wrote a fiction book once, and I wrote the fiction book for one reason. Because first of all, well, two reasons. First of all, I had a thought, I had a cool idea, and there aren't many mystery books around network engineering. So I thought, what, but why not just go do it? The other reason was, was because I always felt like I struggle to build a storyline. I struggle to tell a story technically, and that's what you have to do. So much of technical writing is just information dumps, it's useless, it's configuration, it's blah, blah, blah. Speaker 2 00:16:56 You're not telling a story. And because I wanted to understand how to write a story better, the only way I could think of doing it, oh, than reading books on telling stories, which is not necessarily very helpful in my opinion, was to go write a fiction book and tell a story, and then go hire a public, go hire a really high end editor. And I paid a lot of money to do it, and half her just beat Thenot out of my writing and force me and like, tell me, no, don't do this, don't do that. Don't do this. And just see it in my own writing, how I was doing information dumps, how I was not doing very good with putting the elements together to create a storyline. I think that made such a huge difference in my writing, writing that fiction book, just to do the editing bit. Speaker 4 00:17:44 I really admired that. Russ. I mean, you know, something that I've always wanted to do was, ever since I read The Phoenix Project, um, was to do something like that, right? To tell a story, but yet technically accurate. Um, what was that movie called? The, the movie with Matt Damon with the actual physics, physics, you know, Nobel Prize winning Physics? Ah, yeah. On the, that being, um, was it inter Speaker 2 00:18:09 Yeah, I don't remember the name Speaker 4 00:18:10 Of it. Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll, it'll come to me. But, um, but yeah, no, I admire that. I'm very interested to hear your, your whole experience on, on writing a, uh, I guess a realistic eviction or like a, a purely fiction Speaker 2 00:18:22 Book. It's, it's, it's a purely fiction murder mystery, totally invented, just went off and wrote it. Um, and it's, it's from where I live. I mean, it's set in an area I lived in for many years, and so therefore I kind of know the geography and I knew how to do things there. And it's about a network engineer. So like, I was actually pushing, you know, and not many people know this about me, but I shot competitively for years. So any of the parts that were related to that, that part of the thing were like, I researched those very carefully and made sure I wasn't like, being totally crazy and stuff like that. And so, you know, it, but it was a good process for me. And I lost a lot of money on the book, but on the other hand, I wasn't losing money. Speaker 2 00:19:05 It was like taking a college class, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna go take a degree in writing. It's gonna cost me two or $3,000 or $5,000 to go get some class. That's really good. Why not just go hire an editor, write a book, make sure the editor's really interactive and really good, and just treat it as a college class. I'm just gonna spend a year with this person learning to write a story. And, you know, sometimes that's what you gotta do as a writer. You just gotta go do stuff and figure it out. And if you're not selling any books, well, you know, you didn't sell any books, whatever, . Speaker 3 00:19:42 No, I really like that idea. What you, that story. I use that all the time. And, you know, and especially my, my, my work with the, uh, the Cisco team in writing curriculum, and I say, you know, I'm always, you know, we're, we're telling a story. Yeah. You know, uh, each, the, the whole book, the course is a story. Each chapter, you know, has to be a story where, you know, uh, 'cause that's going to keep the, the reader engaged, keep them interested. Uh, I even look at when I'm writing kind of a, I think of things like, like a storyboard, you know, where we're headed and a, uh, kind of a roadmap like you do for maybe writing a book, a fiction book, you know, the characters, how you're gonna get there, uh, developing the story, that sort of thing. Speaker 2 00:20:32 Yeah. I think it's critically important to writing e even for blog, everything from blog posts to like people, I mean, we're not just talking about books here, by the way, blog posts to everything. It's all like, it's all based around stories, giving presentations and doing online training and everything. It's all, you've gotta tell a story. You gotta start with a story. So, yeah. Um, Speaker 3 00:20:53 It's also storytelling. I, you know, I mean, I, you know, a lot of times in class I'm like, you know, you know, I, I start to tell a story and that really keep keeps the, the, the, the students more engaged and engaged. I've just read, you know, a book, um, on data centers that I liked just how the author, I think it's, uh, I don't want Danish, uh, Speaker 2 00:21:18 Danish Speaker 3 00:21:19 Nh Yeah. That just, and I just loved how his style, his conversational style of, of, um, you know, telling a story. And you could tell it was more of a, you know, it wasn't just as if he was sitting there next to you telling you how this worked. And I really enjoyed that style. Speaker 2 00:21:40 Yeah. Well, Speaker 4 00:21:41 Here's the, here's the challenge for you, Rick, right? 'cause you wrote the CCNA book. So how about if you write a fictional book that is just the enjoyment, right? Like just the joy to read, but also get people over that hump to get certified in cc NA . How, how about that? Like, you know, I don't care if it's 500 pages, right? Like, you just zoom by if it's entertaining. So, um, well, Speaker 3 00:22:01 Yeah, thanks. I I, I actually have to make a kind of disclaimer here. A lot of the, uh, the Cisco Academy books, I'm part of a team that writes the curriculum and Mm-Hmm. And part of that for over almost 25 years now. But I'm, so, they make me one of the companion officers. 'cause my voice is, and my writings in a lot of this stuff. But, uh, I am Speaker 2 00:22:23 Okay, but that's, that's another, that's another misconception about writing, is that you write alone. Speaker 3 00:22:28 Yeah. Mm. Speaker 2 00:22:29 That's a total misconception. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's totally unusual to write things on your own. It happens from time to time. I mean, I wrote my dissertation on my own, but I had to write my dissert. I mean, you know, what are you gonna do? You're getting a grade for it. So it is what it is. You're gonna pass fail. But like almost every book until the last one has a co-author. Hmm. And that's not a mistake. That's like, uh, it's not just you and the editor and see people say, well, you know, your co-author may not have written, but two chapters out of the 10 or 12 or, that's not the point. The point is they're acting. Your co-authors often act as a first line editor that's technical and understands the point of what you're trying to do better than any of the editors at the company that you're writing with are ever gonna understand. And they have their own vision. And so they're trying to shape the vision as well. And so I think there's a lot to be said to work with other people, whether or not you call them co-authors, but you should never, you don't pe you don't write alone. Nobody does. It's also Speaker 3 00:23:34 The time it takes. Yeah. The only time I did write, you know, the I PV six fundamentals, but I was able to write that one on my, by myself on my own, only because I was on sabbatical. And, uh, I actually went to Italy foreign country where, you know, no place better to write where you don't know anybody and can't speak the language. Speaker 2 00:23:53 That didn't work out for you, by the way. Speaker 3 00:23:55 Yeah. And, you know, , you know, and, uh, I did know people, but, uh, uh, it's, uh, that, that doesn't happen very often where you get time as a technical writer to just not worry about any, you know, your work, job, whatever, and focus, you know, eight, 10 hours a day on, on writing a book. Speaker 2 00:24:19 So I'm gonna turn that around a little bit and say, as a writer, you have to be fast. So Yeah. So there are, there are stories about like Stephen King Yeah. And being and writing things. And somebody will say, or in an interview or something, and somebody will say, well, you know, I can write a book in a year or whatever. And he is like, I write six pages a day, or whatever. It's, I think it's six pages a day for him. And they're like, you write six pages a day. Yes. 365 days a year. I write six pages. I get up every morning, I write six pages. That's what I do. And people think that's incredible. But the reality is, if you really get down to it, you can write a lot of material very quickly in short periods of time. But you've got to learn to be fast, which is all about environment. Speaker 2 00:25:10 It's all about, like Rick says, a different country. For me, it's all about tools. I mean, it sounds really dumb, but like, I used to have people beat up on me, you need to stop using Microsoft Word, you need to use markdown. I'm like, fine. But it's going to, but the way I have words set up is not the way you have words set up. I have a very skinny set of menus that I have customized where I have access to exactly what I want every time I want to. It takes me very small number of clicks to get to anything. Furthermore, I know all the keyboard shortcuts. So like, I can write in word very quickly. And I'm not saying I couldn't write as fast in markdown. I don't think I could write any faster in markdown. I just don't think I could. It's the same thing with diagrams. Um, like people joke, because I use choral draw. Okay. But I've been using choral draw since I got the first copy of Cho Draw. When I was in the US Air Force, there was not a version number on the box. That's how long I've been using Coral, draw my fingers in my brain, no choral draw. Mm-Hmm. I could switch over to Illustrator and I'm sure I'll be just as good an illustrator, but it would take me five years to get back to that level of, of just being able to just flow and just do it. And it's just not worth five years for me to switch to Illustrator , honestly, you know? Yeah. Speaker 4 00:26:36 I, I think, I think, um, I think I know what you're talking about, Russ. 'cause I read the same book on, uh, from Stephen King. I think he wrote over 62 books in his, you know, long career. Um, but he only wrote two nonfiction and only one non-writing. Yeah. And that was what you were talking about. He's, it is all about consistencies, about comforting. And, uh, I roger that on you. Um, I mean, what Rick did was, you know, right on, you know, getting into an environment that he could write and be isolated, kind of be to his own thoughts. But for me, I'm, I'm the same way with you. It's all about comforting. It's getting to that rhythm. Um, so, you know, one of the things that I did when I'm writing a book is always write at the same time with the right amount of words. Speaker 4 00:27:20 So I always wanted to do about a thousand to 2000 words a day, which, um, I might just end up deleting all of them. But just the fact of like that writing process and establishing a habit, getting up at the same day, then that makes everybody around. You know it too. Right. The kids, kids know not to disturb me from, you know, 5:00 AM to six 30, because that's always the time I'm writing. And they know upon six 30 they could come in and we'll, you know, have breakfast, I'll take them to school or whatnot. So, um, yeah, that's a great book. I was actually looking at my bookshelf. I'm, I'm just such a messy person, but I was gonna pull up that book and say, Hey, here it is. But it's like very somewhere I'm afraid, you know, just like what Rick has in the background, I'm afraid if I pull something out, like everything will fall down and you won't see me for another month. Speaker 3 00:28:06 Eric, how, how, how were you under any sort of press, you know, what was your, I guess deadlines, I don't wanna say pressure, like to Yeah. Get, you know, the, the work done in a certain timely manner. Were you, did you feel that or, Speaker 4 00:28:20 Yeah, you know, I was actually kind of self-imposed on that first, first book , because I would try to write it before they realized they, they found the right wrong person to, to write that book. I'm like, okay, you know, let's just do it. And, um, because at the time there was no very little book about network automation and there was no, you know, Python or, I mean, this whole topic was kind of, kind of niched and I didn't think there was going to be a lot a big audience for it. Much like all of my other books, , it's just, just not gonna sell. So, um, so what I wanted to do was just write it really quickly, get out there and get some feedback, uh, getting that fee. And then that's another, I mean, I wanted to go more about like self-publishing, because I thought it's, it's kind of in a very interesting space. Speaker 4 00:29:07 But to, just to wrap up that thought of what you brought up is, yeah, it was like a self-imposed deadline. I wanted to write about three to 5,000 words per week to just so that I could accumulate and, you know, do fast editing, like what Russ was saying on that consistency. So I finished the book in about, uh, four and a half months, and then took about another month to do all the final editing, another month to do the final, uh, like book cover, that kind of miscellaneous stuff. So the whole project gave about six, seven months, which was relatively fast. But, um, but yeah, you know, interesting. You brought up that point, Rick. That was like a self-imposed deadline. Speaker 2 00:29:44 Yeah. Yeah. I would say, I mean, I don't know. I would say the average book takes a year. Speaker 4 00:29:51 Yeah. Speaker 2 00:29:51 That's, that's my guess. At an average. There are books that are faster. There are books that are slower. Um, and by the way, the more co-authors you have, the more, the more slowly the book is gonna be Speaker 4 00:30:03 . Yeah, for sure. Right. I'm Speaker 2 00:30:04 Just, I was just like, get over it. It's okay. , but yeah, so I Speaker 4 00:30:08 Know. Yeah. So this one, uh, maybe twice as though if you're right, Laura, I, I'm holding up the book. You with? Uh, Ethan. Ethan, yeah. Well, Speaker 2 00:30:16 So, okay. It's a great book, but that was actually very fast. Mm-Hmm. , that one. And the last one I read on CCST were both very fast. I mean, we're talking eight months for that book and then, and then six months for the CCST book, basically from, from from empty page to final manuscript. Now, you know, it takes them five months to publish it after it's out, or four months or whatever it is. Right, right. But the manuscript for the CT CCST book has been done for 45 days. It's not published yet. So it was seven, eight months, um, total. And so, and I started in mid-January writing that. So 7, 6, 7 months, seven, eight months, whatever that is. But that's fast. Typically, if you're going into a book project, just count on it being a year or maybe a bit longer. Dissertation was the other end. Took me three years Speaker 4 00:31:08 Hmm. Speaker 2 00:31:09 To get through it. Right. But it's a little bit different 'cause I had to do a lot of research and I had to do a lot of backing and understanding and reading stuff and thinking about it. And I had a lot of pushback from my major professor on different points and stuff like that. It was much more iterative, interactive process than other things that I've done. But yeah. Is that your experience too, Rick? Is it like a year, two years? Speaker 3 00:31:32 Yeah. You know, for, for me it depends on the type of book. You know, like the, the IPV six books was kind of able to go not at my own pace. They, they want them out fairly quickly. I think one, one they, one of them, they wanted out before Cisco Live. You mentioned selling at the conferences. Yeah, yeah. Uh, for the curriculum type books, you know, you're kind of other, under other deadlines. They get in the online course curriculum out, they want the books to come soon after, try to get them, you know, they can before a typical whatever that is anymore school, school year begins. So, uh, those are usually kind of di you know, you have different kinds of deadline pressures for that. Speaker 4 00:32:20 Yeah. I think that's a, that's a good point about, I mean, we're all kind of pretend we live in this vacuum on, you know, we, writing is just by itself, it's writing, but there's a lot of other, uh, you know, factors that factor in, such as, you know, your business deadlines, your conferences, and your, um, you know, your editors have done their market research and say, these are the topics that people showed the most interested in. So you should include some security, you should include some, you know, monitoring or whatnot. Um, which is, you know, all play into the role. So you don't really have a hundred percent unless you're self-published. Um, a hundred percent of the control over your projects, as you mentioned, as both of you mentioned. Speaker 2 00:33:01 Yeah. Yeah. And, and let's talk about time a little bit because we've kind of skirted around this. It came up a couple of times, but like I, it takes I'll, to be honest, in writing, it takes me longer. The, the thing that takes me the longest is the editing process. Mm-Hmm. The second longest for me is always figuring out how to make the flow work. And, um, you know, I've had editors tell me that my, my writing is very chaotic. And, and that's because I'll write things like you said, Eric, I'll go write 10 pages. Yeah. And then I'll be, I'll, I'll get it all put in place and then I'll be reading back through it and I'll be like, yeah, that doesn't fit there. That's gotta go someplace else. And I'll cut it and paste it in another chapter. Right? Mm-Hmm. . And like, things get moved all over the place and then you've gotta go back and rewrite your, your, your filler, you know, your transition pieces and stuff like that to make it work. Speaker 2 00:33:57 Um, and I think probably the third longest thing is doing illustrations. Now, I don't know how you two do illustrations, but the illustrations you see on my books or my illustrations, I don't like. Oh, okay. They don't, they don't redo my illustrations for the, I mean, I guess they redraw them or whatever, but you can't, I, I look at them and I can't tell the difference between my illustration and theirs . And so it takes a lot of time for me to sit there and think, how am I visually going to represent this in a way that somebody reading the book is going to get it? What goes in the text, what goes in the illustration? Um, those are real time consumers for me. But, but editing is really bad in my opinion. That takes a long time. You Speaker 3 00:34:40 Know, you mentioned illustrations. The, uh, just even thinking about, you know, you, you're limited to at the best gray scale. Uh, so you can't use different colors. You're limited it, you think, I have to think about the size of the illustration may look really good on what I'm doing, but you get that on the page and how big is the print? Yeah. Uh, how much of the page does it take up? Uh, and all that? Speaker 2 00:35:03 The whole thing. The whole thing. Yeah. Speaker 3 00:35:05 The whole thing. Yeah. make it a comic. There we go. Yeah. We, we can go. So an IPD six comic book , maybe that's what we need to do. Speaker 4 00:35:15 Yeah. I, I think, um, for me it was kind of all, all in because I'll write a chapter, do all the illustration, um, and then turn it over to, to the editor and start on the next chapter. So I wasn't able to kind of differentiate between the time that I make, you know, the, the flows or the, the final, um, correlation between chapters. I separate from the whole writing process, but I could totally see what you guys' were talking about. I think it also depends on the publisher for Pearson or for O'Reilly in particular. They actually have in-house illustrators, right. So they're able to, if you give them a high quality resolution picture, they're able to, you know, translate it and you know, modify it as accordingly. But for somebody like pact, they usually want the authors to have a certain standard a her two and, uh, they do minimum amount of, you know, modification illustration. So I could totally see, uh, what you guys were talking about. So fortunately for my book, you know, usually have like coding so the codes don't really, you know, impact that much, whether it's, you know, darker or lighter I guess. Speaker 2 00:36:19 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What I always run into is I wanna show five different packet flows and you, you don't have color . Oh my goodness. Does that stink? Do you do it as like five different images and suck up all that space in the book? Or do you try to find five different ways of doing dash lines and different gray scales and like how do you do this? Like, this just takes forever to just sit there and look at it and go, alright, I'm gonna split it into two figures. 'cause I'm gonna make the trade off of taking twice as much space, but that way I can only use three different dash lines like . I mean, that's really crazy. Speaker 4 00:36:54 The dash and the dash, dash dash, the dash, dash, dash dash . Speaker 2 00:36:57 Yeah, exactly. And so that's, that's really, that's really a thing. That's, that's a hard part of this. Yeah. So I don't know, but for me, the time, the most time consum, I always forget when I go into writing a book, it's the time, the time consumption is not writing, it's in editing. That's, that's where it sucks up all my time is sitting there looking over the editor stuff and, and you know, you were saying Eric, you do chapter by chapter. Yeah. And the way I typically work is I'll turn in, if the book has four sections or five sections, I'll turn the whole section in. Oh, I see. Like I'll turn in four or five chapters at once and those four or five chapters have been munged and the outline has changed two or three times between the proposal and the time that that section spits out. So I don't like Speaker 4 00:37:40 That's interesting, Russ, because, well, you know, of course you back when you're talking about that has to do with your style, right? Because in your teaching on the O'Reilly live learning classes, you have some good animations where you're illustrating like this packet flow and then you start from scratch. You should illustrate this other flow for, you know, di extra algorithm or whatnot. Um, so I can't imagine how you could, you know, kind of translate that into a static, you know, two dimensional writing. Right. So I think that has to do with your style and you know, your whole holistic thinking about the book is a collection of four or five different sections versus, you know, 12 chapters. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:38:17 Yeah. And that is typically the way I look at it. I don't typically look at chapters. Chapters are just kind of like, it's 10 pages, it's time to quit, or it's 15 pages, it's time to quit. Right. They're not exactly topical as much as you might think. That's, that's more of my thinking on it. So I don't know. So I don't know. Alright, so we should probably wrap up. 'cause we've been running at this for 40 minutes and people are probably tired of us listening to us talk Speaker 4 00:38:42 About . Talking about time. Yeah, Speaker 2 00:38:44 Talking about time. Um, yeah. But I mean, what we should do is maybe do another one of these at some point and talk about podcasting, blogging and other, we've talked about books a lot, but that's only one little slice of the publishing world. Honestly. There's the whole thing with building classes. I mean, Rick teaches, and, you know, we should talk about like, how do you build classes and stuff like that. 'cause those are all forms of publishing to me. But I feel like we don't really have time to jump into all that today. So let's, let's find some other time and do this again and talk about classes Speaker 3 00:39:16 And yeah, I'd like to talk more about, you know, hear from you guys about, you know, who you're talking to, the audience. Speaker 2 00:39:22 Yes, yes. Audience and stuff like that. Speaker 3 00:39:24 Different levels and how do you, who are you trying to reach and are you aiming too high, too low, or are you're losing everything. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:39:32 Yeah. There you go. , Speaker 4 00:39:33 I, I I'm holding up, I mean, interesting Rick, what you're talking about, right? Because I'm holding up this 3D printed, um, little robot. And when you're conducting, like, when you're making online courses, it's very isolated, very lonely process. And I actually look at that robot and say, that is my target audience. , . I pretend I'm talking to that little 3D printed, uh, robot. But I'm telling you like, yeah, that's a whole other story. And that's, I'll be interested to hear what, what you guys have to say about that. Speaker 3 00:40:00 Same here. I'd be interested to hear what you guys have. Speaker 2 00:40:03 So let's, let's send that around an email and figure out what we can do about getting that set up. So, okay. Before we jump off, um, Rick, where can people get in touch with you or follow you or poke at you or? Speaker 3 00:40:13 Oh, the, the, the, the easiest is just on LinkedIn and can connect with me there. And that's kind of where, you know. Okay. And I'm always happy I have all kinds of, speaking of videos and stuff, I try and put out everything I can on YouTube, just give everybody any, anybody that caress to, to watch or listen, give access to anything I do PowerPoints, all my course material. I don't care. I didn't invent networking and I didn't invent PowerPoint or anything like that, or YouTube. So , the LinkedIn is way to get ahold of me Speaker 2 00:40:46 And Eric, I think you have a blog, right? Or something. Speaker 4 00:40:49 Yeah, so I have, uh, the podcast Network Animation nerds podcast. Oh, that's right. Yes. Um, LinkedIn, uh, is probably the, the best way to reach me at, however, you know, I'm trying to wind down a little bit on Twitter, but you can also find me on Twitter, which is my full name, E-R-I-C-C-H-O-U. And I'm not hard to find on LinkedIn where, uh, you know, like LinkedIn Learning, right? Like those are kind of two in one where I could be able to post some updates and maybe translate that to some of the, uh, reach I could do on LinkedIn learning as well. So those are all areas you could find me. And I just wanna thank you again for inviting me. Such an honor to be here, , I'm a longtime listener, and uh, now I'm kind of part of that story. I'm excited. Sure. Speaker 2 00:41:27 That's right. Well, for all of our audience out there, thanks very much for listening. We know your time is really valuable today and it's a crazy world and you're in information overflow, so we hope to give you really good information here on the Hedge rather than all the information overflow that you might get elsewhere. But, um, thanks for listening. I'm Russ White. You can always find me here at Rule 11 Tech at the hedge on LinkedIn. I do log into Twitter every now and again, but not very often. So you're better off reaching me on LinkedIn if you want to get in touch. Um, again, thanks for listening and we will catch you next time.