I was really excited when my publisher, SitePoint, contacted me and asked me to write a book about scrum for mobile and web development teams. I’ve been writing articles about web development and scrum for SitePoint for a little over a year now. And when I did the math, it turned out I have over 10,000 hours of experience leading and participating in scrum engineering teams doing web or mobile development.
What really impressed me was the way the process was structured to make sure the book got written and edited efficiently. SitePoint uses Github to track changes and manage feedback. The entire manuscript is written in markdown and submitted through pull requests for each chapter. Editors for content, copy, and overall project management are assigned at the start, and an agreed schedule breaks down the writing time separately from the revision time.
Writing long-form pieces is always challenging, but a structure like this seems more likely to result in a finished piece and a predictable timeline. Every chunk is clearly defined before starting, and seems do-able.
Wish me luck!