People quite often ask me how long it took me to write https://prodotnetmemory.com/  book and whether it was worth it. As almost a year has passed since the book was published, I've decided to start this thread as a kind of an answer and retrospective to myself also.

As the first question is simpler, I will start from there. Everything started around 9th March 2016 when I wrote an initial book proposal to @apress. And ended on 28th October 2018 when I did the very last book correction. 32 months in total, so around 2.5 years.

But such a single number does not show the whole picture. Mostly because during this time my work was not evenly distributed. I had very intensive times, while there were times with little no work done. The story behind how I tried to organize my work is interesting by itself.

My first approach was to work on the book while having a regular, full-time job. However, the first three months (March-May 2016) clearly showed how cumbersome it is. Having no free evenings and weekends was too costly for me and my family. The work went very slowly.

My idea for speeding up the work was a three-month unpaid leave (June - August 2016). I've done a huge amount of research then (mostly analyzing and debugging gc.cpp) but this time passed VERY quickly and it turned out to be simply not enough. I barely started writing any text!

I didn't track precisely my time spent on the book at that time, unfortunately. However, I estimate it to be about 8 hours a week during a full-time job and 6 hours a day during an unpaid leave (while some days/weeks were off due to other activities) - 336 hours in total.

My second approach was to reduce to a part-time job (4/5 so every Friday off) because I knew how huge amount of work is still ahead of me. So, next three months (September - November 2016) worked pretty well. The book has progressed. However, the pace of work was still too low.

I estimate my work like 7 hours each Friday then, so 84 hours in total. At this rate, writing mainly on Fridays, I'd be writing a book a few years more... As a rescue plan, I took another month of unpaid leave (December 2016) but it helped a little, as you can expect.

At that time, however, I took seriously the measurement of time working on the book ( @toggl & Excel spreadsheet). From the end of November 2016 I know exactly how many hours I've spent, how many new words (per chapter) and pages I've written each and every single day.

As a result, I can plot a detailed graph of my work progress and time engagement. From there it can be also clearly seen that my work quite stalled at the beginning of 2017 (besides pretty successful March). That's because in the long run, even 4/5 job consumes a lot of energy!

Although I tried very hard, very often I was just too tired to work on the book. And Fridays often melted into "catching up" everything. Is that a problem of poor self-organization? I dare say that it's not and in the long run it can't be done with such a heavy, technical book.

So, as such stalled status sustained till May 2017, I had to make the final decision - either I abandon the project (discarding so many months of struggle) or go all the way and finish it. As you know, I chose the latter. I left my full-time job and became self-employed.

Thus, it was my third approach. Since June 2017 I had no regular job, I could dedicate a lot of time to the book. But I had no regular income neither so I've tried to fill the budget gap with occasional training and consultancy. That was and is the plan for me so it was good.

BUT... do you see those gaps around October 2017? "Occasional training and consultancy" again distracted me from the regular work on the book. Fearing that I would NEVER finish this book, eventually, I put aside all other jobs (yeah, no $$$ at all).

So the fourth approach was just to work full-time on the book, without any additional distractions, day by day, often 8-12h per day. That lasted from November 2017 to 16 July 2018 (9 months!). Tremendous amount of work has been done then, as an investment without on-going income.

The total time tracked by Excel (from December 2016 to 13 July 2018) is 1362.5 hours - pretty much! But that's not the end because from 16 July 2018 to 28 October 2018 I was pretty involved in corrects/final proofs - I've tracked that only in @toggl.

That gives an additional 141 hours (where ~60 was about marketing like preparing landing page etc). So, with a high level of certainty, I estimate the total of hours spent on the book to 1923.5 hours. That's about 240 business days spread over a 2.5-year period.

I hope this shows how hard it was to write such a one-thousand pages, technical book. I assume this as the upper limit of effort - every aspect could be smaller (less technical, fewer pages, fewer examples) which would probably shorten this time significantly.

Maybe someday I will make a talk about all this, including practical topics like - how to organize work, what are my findings, common mistakes, and best practices. And whether it was worth it, thus moving to the second question. But here the answer is not straightforward.

Direct income from sales is pretty low and it completely does not reflect the effort put into writing this book. But that's because I've decided not to self-publish. My goals were to build a personal brand and recognizability with the help of a well-known, prestigious publisher.

But how to measure such a goal? How to measure all indirect personal and professional benefits coming from a brand? How to measure your own satisfaction and your dreams coming true? For me, it was worth it because this book is a part of a much wider plan for my professional life.

That was a single story of mine. Probably every book's author has its own, completely different one. I only hope you've learned something interesting, especially if you think about writing your own book. As you saw, I do not have any real conclusions or advices, just plain facts.

THE END. Please retweet if you found it interesting

Post Scriptum, such a HUGE amount of effort and energy will for sure influence you and your whole family. Consider it as an investment but agree everything with them, explain everything and don't fool yourself and them - sometimes it will be really, really tough.