How I wrote and released a game development book for iOS

IOS7 came out last year. It had a number of innovations, including a new library for game development - Sprite Kit. Gamedev is my little hobby, which I do after work whenever possible, and of course he interested me.

I wrote a couple of small projects on it to study the framework, out of habit laid out in github, started to make my full game on it.
And some time later, after these events, a letter from one English-language publishing house came to my mail. In the letter, the author search manager wrote that he saw my little projects on the github, 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, in principle, did not mind, but I’m not sure that everything will work out well. He assured me that they have enough authors who write full time and that this is not as difficult as it seems.

I thought I had nothing to lose and agreed. Fortunately, there were no problems with English - thanks to the school and non-core institution.

The manager introduced me to the editor in charge of my book and said that I now communicate with him. There was a young nice girl who suggested that I first write a plan for the book (outline). This is a document which lists the list of chapters and their approximate contents, according to a small paragraph of several sentences.
We agreed that the book will be written for developers who are familiar with iOS development, albeit superficially, but have never seen a game dev or sprite kit. That is a book for beginners.

It took me one evening to write a plan - a rough list of chapters was built by analogy with other books on game development.
After sending the plan for approval by the editorial commission, they suggested making minor changes, for example, adding a chapter on publishing the game in appstore.

After the plan was approved, I was asked to sign an agreement. The agreement is quite large, but there was nothing to infringe on my rights as an author. Interesting - if the author refuses to finish the book, they can attract another author, and the consent of the first author is not necessary.
The same with the second edition and further, if the author refuses to write it, they can attract another.
Of the most interesting things about the contract, half of the amount is paid for writing all the chapters in draft form, and half for the publication of the book. There were no fines or penalties for late delays.

The amount is relatively small - approximately the average salary of the developer for a month in Moscow, and some (small) percent of the book’s sales, and the advance amount includes sales, that is, until the sales amount is paid to the developer immediately, the developer is not paid a percentage.

The contract was signed by the Echosign service from Adobe, go to the site, there we have our contract, put the signature with the mouse, the representative of the publisher does the same, and the signed contracts are sent to both parties.

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

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

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

Writing a book on the technical side was insanely inconvenient. The publisher has its own template with styles for Word, styles in the region of 50, for headings, code, lists, and a bunch of other elements. In my Word on the poppy there was no adequate opportunity to select these styles, for example, on the panels on top. All the time when it was necessary to switch to a different style, and this is approximately every second or third sentence, I had to go to the menus, find the style there, apply it, etc. etc. By the end of the process, I was already accustomed, and my manager could not help me with anything.

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

All editorial work was done through comments in Word. Editors never corrected the text itself, only wrote in the comments - maybe it is rephrased, or advised to write this in a different way.
Writing 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 suited the editors, it was sent to the technical editors. These are people who understand the topic directly, iOS developers.
Then I got another wave of comments on the code and the text. Another couple of weeks took the rewriting of controversial issues to satisfy them. Moreover, we argued on some points, but came to a consensus on all issues.

At the end of December, the text went to layout. Here it was laid out for printing. These are the final texts, it is undesirable to make changes there only if mistakes are corrected.
These texts came to me somewhere in early January. Some errors were found, they were quickly fixed.

And then came a beautiful day on January 20th. My editor wrote to me and joyfully informed that the book was published. It has become available both on the publisher’s website 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 is that it takes a very long time. But the satisfaction that I experienced after my book came out is worth a lot.

FAQ:

1. Why the book did not appear in Russian? When? How long will all normal books go in English?
I was contacted by an English-language publishing house that does not work in the Russian market. He had exclusive rights to the book, even if I wanted to, the book would not have come out here. The second reason is that we do not buy specialized books. Until they are translated, the information will become hopelessly out of date, and it will be faster to find information on the Internet.

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

I will be glad to answer your questions. I don’t give a link to the book, so I don’t write in “I am PR”.