As I wrote and released a book on developing games for iOS

Last year iOS7 came out. It had a number of innovations, including a new library for game development - the Sprite Kit. Gamedev is my little hobby that I do after work as much as possible, and of course he interested me.

I wrote a couple of small projects on it to study the framework, out of habit, I put it in a github, I began to make my full game on it.
And some time after these events a letter from an English-language publishing house came to my mail. In the letter, the search manager of the authors wrote that he had seen my small projects on the githaba, and since they were looking for an author for a book on the Sprite Kit, he suggested that I write a book.

Of course, as a developer who never wrote any books, I thought it was difficult, impossible, and even when combined with the main work, I wrote to the manager that I don’t mind at all, but I’m not sure that I will succeed. He assured me that they have enough authors who write fulltime and that all this is not as difficult as it seems.
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I thought I had nothing to lose and agreed. Fortunately, there were no problems with English - thanks to the school and non-core institute.

The manager introduced me to the editor responsible for my book and said that now I communicate with him. There was a young nice girl who suggested I first write a plan of the book (outline). This is a document that lists the chapters and their approximate content, in a short paragraph from several sentences.
Agreed that the book will be written for developers who are familiar with the development of iOS, although superficially, they have never seen game dev and a sprite whale. That is a book for beginners.

It took me one evening to write the plan - an exemplary list of chapters lined up by analogy with other game development books.
After sending the plan for approval by the drafting committee, they proposed minor changes, for example, to add a chapter on publishing the game to the app.

After the plan was approved, I was offered to sign a contract. The contract is quite large, but there wasn’t anything that severely curtailed my rights as an author. From the interesting - if the author refuses to finish writing the book, they can attract another author, without the consent of the first author.
The same with the second edition and further, if the author refuses to write it, they can attract another.
Of the most interesting about the contract - half of the amount paid for writing all the chapters in draft form, and half of the book in the publication. There were no penalties or penalties for delaying the deadlines.

The amount is relatively small - about the average developer’s salary per month in Moscow, and some (small) percentage of the book’s sales, and the amount of the advance payment includes sales, that is, until sales are made for the amount that is paid to the developer right away, the developer is not paid a percentage.

The contract was signed with the Adobe Echosign service, we go to the site, our contract is there, we sign with the mouse, the publisher does the same, and the signed contracts are sent to both parties.

Strict deadlines were set up in chapters - about a week per chapter, or even less, the last chapters were written in 4–5 days, since the publisher wanted to release the book as early as possible in the wake of the popularity of iOS 7 and the whale sprite.

The book in a series of mini-series, a total of 120 pages.

So, I started writing a book around mid-October. The book was written in the evenings, nights, and after a working day, forcing myself to sit down and write was rather difficult. But I was motivated by the idea that my own book is cool, and the strength was there.

Writing a book from the technical side was incredibly inconvenient. The publisher has its own template with styles for Word, styles in the region of 50, for headers, code, lists, and heaps of other elements. In my Word on a poppy there was no adequate possibility to choose these styles, for example, on the panels above. All the time when I had to switch to a different style, and this is about every second or third sentence, I had to go to menus, find a style there, apply it, etc. etc. By the end of the process, I had already become accustomed, and my manager could not help me.

I tried to strictly observe deadlines, I sent chapters one day before the end of the term, for which my editor was grateful to me. By the end of the writing of chapters another editor connected. They read chapters for errors, both semantic and stylistic and spelling. It should be noted that the editors understand the subject, often received comments on the code, asked to write more clearly and expand some points, which is quite surprising, given that the publisher publishes highly specialized books in almost all of the IT field.

All editorial work was carried out through comments in the Word. The editors never ruled the text itself, just wrote in the comments - maybe we rephrase it, or we advised to write it differently.
The writing of the chapters ended around the end of November. It took some time to edit the chapters. Then I thought that here it is, the book is close to completion.

How wrong I was. After the text was arranged by the editors, it was sent to the technical editors. These are people who understand directly the topic, iOS developers.
Then I received another wave of comments on the code and the text. Another couple of weeks took the rewriting of controversial points to satisfy them. And on some points we argued, but came to a consensus on all issues.

In late December, the text went to the layout. Here it was laid out for printing. These are the most final texts, there it is undesirable to make changes only if correcting mistakes.
These texts came to me somewhere in early January. There were some mistakes, they were quickly corrected.

And then came the beautiful day of January 20th. My editor wrote to me and happily informed me that the book was published. It became available both on the website of the publisher and in a number of other online stores, including Amazon.

In general, the process of writing a book is not too complicated, the only thing - it takes a lot of time. But the satisfaction that I experienced after my book came out worth a lot.

FAQ:

1. Why the book did not come out in Russian? When? How long will all normal books be in English?
I was contacted by an English-language publishing house that does not work on the Russian market. Exclusive rights to the book with him, even if I wanted, the book would not have been published here. The second reason is that specialized books do not buy from us. While they translate the information hopelessly outdated, and quickly find information on the Internet.

2. Has the author become a millionaire after writing a book?
No, the author enriched by about one salary.

I will be glad to answer your questions. I do not give a link to the book, therefore I do not write in “I am promoting”.