How I wrote a technical book in under 200 hours
Mar 19
Earlier this month, I published the book Level up with WebAssembly 🎉. It aims to be a practical guide to using WebAssembly, a new programming language that helps you port existing C/C++/Rust code to the web (click here to learn more). I wrote the book because I found that while WebAssembly had a lot of potential, the learning curve was quite steep.
The last time I wrote a book (Adventures in Data Science with Bash), the most common question I got was: “How long did it take you?”. While I didn’t have a clear answer then, I do this time!
From the moment I decided to write a book about WebAssembly — 6:22pm on November 11 2018, to be precise — I kept track of how long I spent on every aspect of the book, including research, writing, editing and marketing.
From idea to publishing, this book took a little over 185 hours to complete. The book features 85 pages organized into 11 chapters, and the top package includes cheat sheets, screencasts, a capstone project, and a case study, for a total of ~125 pages worth of content. Of course the clock didn’t stop once I published the book! There is always more marketing to be done, blog posts to write, and reader comments to respond to.
The following chart shows how many hours I spent working on the book every week from start to launch, between November 2018 and March 2019:
Number of hours spent on the book every week from start to launch.
Although I spent an average of 12 hours a week on the book, there is quite a bit of fluctuation since this is a side-project that I tackled outside my regular 40hr work week.
Surprisingly, my three most productive weeks all capped (unintentionally) at 21 hours, with a standard deviation of only 10 minutes! I only have an n of 3, so this could be a coincidence, or… it suggests that there’s only so much WebAssembly my brain can handle in a week 😉.
And in case you’re wondering about the December 3 outlier, I was packing and moving that week!
To get some more insight into what exactly I spent my time on, let’s break down the 185 hours into categories:
Breakdown of time spent on the book into categories