alt Hacker News> I kept going because I wanted to understand the BEAM properly. There’s value in following the real logic, not just the surface explanations.
This resonates with me. That's the kind of drive that results in great output. Buying it just for that.
I've been approached by publishers several times throughout my career. Each time the process was similar: they had an idea, I had an idea, we tried to come to common ground, and then the deal fell through because we couldn't find any. E.g. I didn't want to write a Java book aimed at 14 year olds. They didn't want me to write about classloaders (or whatever niche subject I was diving into at the time).
Would love to learn how people find (non-empty) intersections of their passions & what readers want.
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> I kept going because I wanted to understand the BEAM properly. There’s value in following the real logic, not just the surface explanations.
Teaching is the best way to learn. I found that out when I started tutoring classmates for math in high school.
Same thing with writing a book. Something about learning a subject and turning around to speak/write out about it that really crystallizes the in-depth understanding beneath the surface.
Don Knuth finally sells out
https://nerocam.com/DrFun/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jp...
Shameless self promotion but this is exactly how I ended up writing a book on strength training for climbing, just pursuing every rabbit hole I could.
I was ready to self publish but found a publisher who was interested. I had to make some changes to make it more readable, but you might have luck approaching publishers yourself
Do we need to depend on Publishers? Can’t we write books independently? Or is it because of the “Brand” and other perks that come with Publishers?
If you have something interesting to say then people will figure a way to understand it. Early in my career I remember coming across “Essential .Net” by Don Box and I don’t think Don Box had a particular audience in mind. He just unwrapped what’s under the hood in Common Language Runtime (CLR). It took me multiple times to really understand “essential .net”.
Having written three books, what I found was that you either self publish or you write books that publishers want. Some of that is choosing publishers that specialize in certain types of books. Some publishers want “Learn AI in 21 Minutes with Python,” while others want “Deep Dark Secrets of Java Class Loaders.” O’Reilly is the best for niche technical stuff. Most of the rest of the industry wants beginner stuff because that’s where the volume is. Fortunately, self-publishing is easier than ever and various sites make it easy to sell copies online, so you don’t necessarily have to just give it away for free. But yea, there’s no magic formula here. If you really want to write something niche, don’t expect that a publisher will be interested in. Expect that you’ll have to self publish and promote it yourself.