> Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don't expect much.
I think that's good advice.
I'm writing my first book, right now, at 24, on HTML5. (any advice or other articles like this by the way are vastly appreciated) My advance is larger than Resig's (!? what?) but I'm not doing it for the money. Money merely justifies a deadline, not the end product. The end product, to me, is justified by two things:
1. Seeing my name "in the wild", in a bookstore, would make me pleased as punch
2. If just one person, somewhere, at some point, sends me an email saying they enjoyed the book then that's enough. That's the only encouragement I need to help others (for free) on StackOverflow [1], and its the only thing I need here.
The #1 justification for authoring any sort of technical tome – and this has been the case for decades – is that it gains you credibility and respect in a field. If you want to consult, or are looking for senior positions, etc, get a book with your name on it out there and you have a foot and a half in the door. At least with many who are suckers and are looking for short-cut filtering, which I say because the vast majority of technical books are terrible.
On the other hand, essays like Philip Greenspun's "The Book Behind the Book" make book publishing seem less prestigious, rather than more (at least in many instances): http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html , but then he also points out that a lot of the problems come from publishing models more than the authors themselves.
I think that's good advice.
I'm writing my first book, right now, at 24, on HTML5. (any advice or other articles like this by the way are vastly appreciated) My advance is larger than Resig's (!? what?) but I'm not doing it for the money. Money merely justifies a deadline, not the end product. The end product, to me, is justified by two things:
1. Seeing my name "in the wild", in a bookstore, would make me pleased as punch
2. If just one person, somewhere, at some point, sends me an email saying they enjoyed the book then that's enough. That's the only encouragement I need to help others (for free) on StackOverflow [1], and its the only thing I need here.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png