55 - book sprints

While surfing the Interwebs (looking at private cloud solutions - I plan to give a talk about that later in the year), I also looked at OpenStack. On their blog I stumbled upon the Zero to Book in five days post. A team of people had managed to write a 50'000 word book in just 5 days. As some of you may know, I have written a book too, but it took me 13 months to do so. Naturally I was intrigued and tried to find out more. The people used a process called BookSprints, a facilitated, structured process that takes the group from idea to finished book.

I like the idea very much, and it sounds like a more healthy way of writing a technical book. After my book project (and the failed 2nd edition effort), this is a way I think could work.

One major problem of course is that books hardly pay (at least if you publish them in german). I have a few ideas for new book projects, but I am very weary of starting another one - the scars from a few years haven’t quite healed yet…