Pete Freitag Pete Freitag

Scott Meyers: Advice to Prospective Book Authors

Updated on December 06, 2023
By Pete Freitag
books

Scott Meyers, author of Effective C++ has put together a guide titled: Advice to Prospective Book Authors.

It has lots of good advice for people considering writing a book. Here are some excerpts from the section on royalties:

You should have some other reason for writing a book than making money from it. A very good reason, I think, is to help establish your credibility as a consultant, or to otherwise use it as a kind of business card. ...authors should never keep track of how much time it takes them to write a book, because if they do, they'll be able to calculate how much they made per hour, and the result will almost certainly be depressing...

In general there are a lot of good tips and guidelines for working with publishers in this article. Some of these points would have been useful for me before writing The ColdFusion MX Developers Cookbook.


Scott Meyers: Advice to Prospective Book Authors was first published on December 17, 2004.

Discuss / Follow me on Twitter ↯