Just recently, my first book Scrum - Einführung in der Unternehmenspraxis: Von starren Strukturen zu agilen Kulturen was published (it's only available in German so far). I decided to share some of the experience I gathered in the course of that endeavor. Please be aware, that those are just my personal insights; you might face different issues and different learnings when going for your next publication. You should also note that I am only talking about Germany - other countries might be different.
Before we dive into details, let's say that publishing a book is not exactly easy. I mean, it's up to you if you can write a book, but it's completely up to others, if you will manage to publish one. Of course, you could use a print-on-demand supplier or just put it on infoq, but this is not what I am talking about. I am talking about renowned publishers like Springer, Wiley, Jossey Bass - you name them. In my case, it took more time to get published than to write the book. Here is why:
Before I started, I decided that I wanted to publish my book with a well-known publisher. In my opinion, it means less money but greater respect. I made my first mistake shortly after, just before I really started the project (oh yes: writing a book is a project, and a large one at that): I decided to write the book before contacting publishers. What I know now is, that some (not all!) publishers prefer to get a well-designed abstract and discuss it with the author. That way, they have greater influence. Well, I assumed that editors (those are the people who read your work, sometimes help you adjust it, and decide if it's published) didn't have deep knowledge about Scrum. Especially not about changing organizations with/towards Scrum. So how should an editor be able to judge my abstract? On top of that, I had never written a book before. I didn't know if I was able to and how long it would take. In addition, I am not a "guru" person like Ken or Jeff. So people wouldn't buy my stuff because of the author's name. Which again is difficult, if you want to partner with a publisher. After all, they want to earn money with what you write - a good name certainly helps. Why should they waste time with a less-known person?
So I wrote the book. This took quite some time (I estimate the effort to approx. 500 hours). Once I was 95% done, I decided to contact a publisher. What you usually do is to send them an exposé. That is a summary of your book with important information for the publisher. Many publishers have their own format and templates for that - you are well advised to use them. I discovered that I had to do a great deal of market research and self-marketing in order to fill in those forms. The reason for me to write the book was to get a short and easy to understand "bible" of how to transform an organization to Scrum. I didn't know of such a publication, so I wrote it myself. However, I had not conducted a full market research. Of course I read a lot - but I don't know every book out there! This gap had to be closed, so I lost several weeks reading books of other people (and I still didn't read all relevant books). Once I had a good enough market evaluation, I sent my exposé to the first publisher and - waited. Waited some more. And even more. After six weeks, I got a reaction: "This looks interesting, send us the manuscript." Darn - six weeks are an awful lot of time for an agile practitioner like me. But what could I do? So I waited. After another six weeks, they told me that they needed just a little more time. Four weeks later (hooray, the Sprint length was reduced!) they told me, that this topic would not fit their program. At this point in time, I had already waited three months to get a simple "no" - this was frustrating. So I went to the second publisher on my list, who immediately (after three weeks) declined the offer. Number three was more like a dejavu: Three months total waiting time to get a response. Somewhere during the waiting for that publisher, I was furious and changed my approach: I contacted four publishers at the same time. Two of them personally (one at a conference, one with an appointment after they had signaled basic interest). While this finally led to success (two publishers were honestly interested), it led to some conflict as well: A third publisher signaled interest and even arranged for a place in their books lineup, which I had to decline because I already had agreed on the offer of another publisher. I learned the hard way that it is not common in the publishers' branch to contact several publishers at once. I certainly feel sympathetic with the disappointed editor - but what could I do?
One of the other two highly interested publishers took quite some time and asked a number of Scrum people to review my manuscript. After three months without much communication from the publisher's side, I told them that I would not proceed with them. 11 hours later (this is like the speed of light for this branch) I received a friendly email, phrasing joy that I found a publisher (but not trying to change my mind) and sharing the comments from the Scrum reviewers with me. I then understood, why they had been so silent: The reviews were mediocre. Praising style and some ideas, smashing other details. Before contacting any publisher, I of course had asked several professionals to review my work - and it had improved the quality quite a bit. However, those "other" reviewers had verbally ripped some parts of the manuscript to shreds. On a second glance I noticed that they had not read it completely (none of them!). One demonstrated clearly a lack of Scrum knowledge in his/her answer - but dared to provide a bad review anyway. On top of that, some important information - like the target audience - had not been distributed to them. The main content-related feedback point was about missing pictures (I had none in there - it was the 95% version) and missing depth for the target audience (which was not known to them). From those reviews I got the impression of a development team delivering too fast at the end of a release - incomplete, unsatisfying quality and low motivation. Of course some useful thoughts were in those reviews and I adapted the script accordingly. The names of the reviewers are not known to me, so I could not get back to them and discuss their thoughts in detail. This made me fully understand Dean Leffingwell's remark: "Writing a book is the least agile thing you can possibly imagine!" - Bad communication, huge feedback cycles, a gigantic batch size (there is just one batch with everything in there), hardly any chance for inspection and adaptation, no transparency. If by any chance you were one of the reviewers of my manuscript, please get in touch with me. I would be happy to discuss your thoughts and learn for my next book project!
Another notable experience concerns the quality you have to deliver as an author. When I started I had the idea that I would write some 80% version and then would work together with my editor to make it perfect. I was mistaken. You have to provide the 100%, including the elimination of all typos. Even the pictures have to be provided by you (but they will be recreated by the publisher). Only one editor actually made recommendations to me how to improve the book. Those were good, but too late: I already had spotted and corrected those taints myself.
When the contract was finally signed, I had to fill in a couple of forms again (I love administrivia). The publisher took care of the rest and I only had to double-check the final version going into print. The whole process speeded up a lot and I got my first copies a day before Christmas, two months earlier than anticipated. That's where we are now today: 11 months after I finished the 95%-version of my book, three weeks after I received the first copies of my book, one week after Amazon started delivering orders.
As always, I am happy to discuss your thoughts with you. Just post a comment here or drop me an email. Let me know once you have read the book - I yearn for your feedback!
Tuesday, January 8. 2013
Experience in writing a Scrum book
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