(a) It takes me about 20 hours of work - and 1 week calendar time - to finish a chapter. A typical book is ~10 chapters.
(b) Hard to say. Some weaknesses (wrong topic) are unrecoverable. Blogging well is way more work than, say, tacking on interviews to an already-great course.
shelf life: longer than you'd think. we wrote ng-book in 2015 and it still brought in thousands last month. (To be fair, I have been releasing updates.)
I don't do consulting. It's the worst of both worlds: the unreliable income of entrepreneurship, but you still have a boss and don't get to accumulate any long-term value.
Re shovels: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." - It's more fun with friends, and we can teach more topics than just whatever I'm an expert in
I assume writing books is a full-time job for you. How do you maintain enough in-anger technical expertise to keep writing books that people find useful? Or do you learn as you write?
I've started to collaborate with other folks to sort of semi-self-publish. Meaning, I have structure, a process, and an audience and I've been working with other folks who want to teach, but don't have an audience yet.
So I maintain my technical expertise by just asking a lot of questions. It's pretty great because I have a personal tutor to learn some of the most interesting technologies.
Andy Weiss (Fuschia at Google) taught me rust as he wrote Fullstack Rust.
David Guttman (Js.la) taught me advanced Node with Fullstack Node.
Amelia Wattenberger (the Pudding) with Fullstack D3 etc.
Having such awesome personal conversations - that were essentially lost to the ether - was actually the inspiration for us to launch our podcast: I just wanted everyone to learn what I was learning.
While it's great you're sharing your success and formula one must consider market saturation. Once that point is reached there may not be enough underserved demand to support similar gains for others.
You're right in theory - you can't write dozens of books about exactly the same topic, but I feel that scarcity mindset may miss the broader trend that programming isn't slowing down.
We're sort of the inverse of Web Development (programming) fatigue. We'll run out of products when developers stop creating new web frameworks (and programming languages and platforms and and)
(b) Hard to say. Some weaknesses (wrong topic) are unrecoverable. Blogging well is way more work than, say, tacking on interviews to an already-great course.
shelf life: longer than you'd think. we wrote ng-book in 2015 and it still brought in thousands last month. (To be fair, I have been releasing updates.)
I don't do consulting. It's the worst of both worlds: the unreliable income of entrepreneurship, but you still have a boss and don't get to accumulate any long-term value.
Re shovels: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." - It's more fun with friends, and we can teach more topics than just whatever I'm an expert in
see also: https://twitter.com/fullstackio/status/1225462654174744576