What We’re Looking for

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an established author or a first-timer. The most important thing is that you care passionately about something that you understand deeply, and you want to share that passion with other people.

Our books are, well, pragmatic, so you’d better to be ready to help people understand and adopt your topic. Our style is approachable, hands-on, unpretentious, and direct.

We’re currently looking for full-length book or screencast proposals. We publish technical books, with a bias toward open-source technologies.

Interested?

When sending us a proposal, please include the following:

  • An overview of your proposed book. Tell us what you’d like to write about and why we should consider publishing on this topic. Explain what you’ll cover in your book and how you’ll organize it. Describe your book’s audience and why they need this book. Why is your book different? Having purchased this book, what will readers be able to do that they couldn’t do before? Most importantly, tell us why we should get excited about your topic.
  • A draft outline. Take the ideas from your proposal and organize them into chapters. Then, for each chapter, include a few sentences explaining what subjects you’ll cover in that chapter. Give us a sense of how many pages you plan for your book to be.
  • Competing books. Let us know what books compete with yours, and how yours would be different and better.
  • Market information. Tell us about the audience size for your idea. Give us a sense of download statistics, number of users, or the level of interest in the community.
  • Promotional ideas. Our authors actively promote their books when they’re published. We’d like to know how you would plan to promote your book.
  • Your bio. Tell us about yourself. We don’t need to see your resume; instead, tell us why you are the best person to write this book.
  • Sample chapter. We’d also like to review a 20-page writing sample from your proposed book. Instead of sending us Chapter 1, please send us a sample from a later chapter that gives us a feel for the style and content of your book. Make sure your writing sample is written in our style: approachable, friendly, and tutorial-focused. Have a look at these samples from our books to get an idea of the writing and the tutorial style we’re looking for.
  • Format. Write your sample chapter and other material with whatever tools you are comfortable with—if you sign with us, you’ll be using our custom toolchain, and we’ll get you set up with it then. Plain text is fine; keep your chapter simple and there’ll be no wasted effort moving across to our tools later.

Screencasts

If you’re proposing a screencast, include the following items as described above:

  • An overview of your proposed screencast.
  • A draft outline. If you’re proposing multiple episodes, please give us an overall outline for the series, and at least one detailed outline for a particular episode.
  • Competing products. Including books and video products.
  • Market information.
  • Promotional ideas.
  • Your bio.
  • Sample video. We’d also like to review a minimum of 5-minute sample from your proposed screencast, with full video and audio. Instead of sending us the introduction, please send us a sample from a later section that gives us a feel for the style and content of your video. Make sure your sample is in the same style as our books: approachable, friendly, and tutorial-focused.

Contact Information

Send all proposals to proposals@pragprog.com

What It’s Like to Be an Author with Us

When you sign with us, you become part of a team that’s committed to making your book the best possible. We have the highest editing standards in the industry, and we work with you to craft a book we can all be proud of. We’re a small publisher without the massive overhead and dependencies larger publishers have. We’re agile and author-focused and care deeply about the topics we publish on.

Our authors return to write for us time and again. They often tell us that they wouldn’t dream of writing for another publisher once they’ve experienced working with us. We think you’ll feel the same way.

What You Get

  • A great deal! We pay 50% royalties for our books. You get more in your pocket. Period. We take what we receive for a book, subtract direct costs (printing, copy edit, artwork, and a few other things) and split it with you. We have a thriving market for translations and international sales as well. Compare that with 10% from many other publishers. Oh, and we give you a royalty statement each month, and pay royalties quarterly (for more information, see this blog post). (Please note that royalty rates for screencasts are a little less than the rate for books).
  • The most agile editorial process in the industry. No one really writes a book chapter by chapter, so we don’t understand why other publishers insist authors deliver that way.
  • Editing professionals. Our editors have many years of technical editing and writing experience. You’ll work with your editor, not for him or her.

How It Works

Your development editor will work with you to guide your book from its initial outline through completion. You’ll get content, style, and organizational feedback from your editor throughout the process, and you’ll receive technical suggestions from reviewers experienced in the topic you’re writing on. You’ll write in a realistic timeframe without the artificial, rushed deadlines other publishers impose.

When your book is about 75% complete, we can offer it as a Beta Book: we make it available for purchase as a PDF while you’re writing it. That means you get continuous feedback from the best group of readers in the world, and you start receiving royalties even before your book is published.

You’re our partner in the publishing process, and we consult with you on all aspects of your book, from finessing your initial outline to working up a marketing and promotion plan. You’ll give us feedback on cover image ideas, your book title, and your book’s marketing copy. We’re always open to suggestions for improving our tools and processes as well.

As an author, we hope you’ll stay involved even after your book is completed. Your book will have a forum and dedicated web page through which you can interact with readers and review errata postings. In addition, you’ll have opportunities to review manuscripts by other authors and critique book proposals.

Our Tools

We’ve got a unique writing toolchain designed by techies for techies—none of this “write it in Word” crap. You’ll use programmer’s tools to write books for programmers:

  • When you sign up, the first thing you’ll do is check your book project out of our Subversion repository.
  • You send stuff to us by checking it in (just like a real project…)
  • Our continuous build system will let you see your book formatted as it will be printed.
  • And, if your book contains code, there’s no more cut and paste into the document. Keep your code in source code files, and our build system will include the extracts you want directly into the formatted book (and it’ll syntax highlight them along the way).

If you’re writing on a non-technical topic, we have special tools for you too! We’ll work with you to set you up with our tools and systems and guide you every step of the way.

Testimonials

Writing is not easy, but the rewards can be sweet. I remember the thrill of seeing my book on the store shelves for the first time, and then at the top of its category at Amazon. It even helped me land a job as manager of an Android development team. After all, the boss was looking for an expert, and I had literally written the book on the subject.

Ed Burnette, author of Hello Android

For an author, it’s exciting to see your book listed on Amazon or sitting on the bookshelf at B&N. But it’s far more exciting to see a dog-eared copy in actual use in a software development team room. Knowing that you’ve produced something that will actually help people in their day-to-day work is extremely gratifying.

The biggest thing about publishing something is that it lends some level of instant credibility—when trying to land a contracting gig or full-time employment, there’s nothing better than having them know who you are before you walk in the door.

Jeff Langr, coauthor of Agile in a Flash

Since writing The Agile Samurai, I wish I could tell you that my kids suddenly started to listen to me, or that I no longer have to get up and go to work in the morning. Sadly, neither are true.

What I can tell you is that since writing Samurai I have found it easier to speak at conferences, find work, and take on new challenges.

Jonathan Rasmusson, author of The Agile Samurai

What motivated me to write was a genuine interest to share my knowledge and experience, and to help fellow developers learn from a few things I have learned. But then, something happened.

I got emails, from near and far. One manager said, “I read your book, I want you to come spend time with my developers, help them improve their technical practices.” That was a few years ago. In 2011, I traveled over 200,000 miles, spoke at well over 30 conferences and 20 user groups around the world, and interacted with some of the brightest developers on this planet.

Venkat Subramaniam, author of Programming Concurrency, Programming Groovy, Programming Scala, and coauthor of Practices of an Agile Developer

I’ve worked with a number of publishers in various capacities and the difference between Pragmatic Bookshelf and the rest can’t be overstated. I can’t imagine writing for another publisher again. When you work with Pragmatic Bookshelf, you have the support of a team that really understands the impact of the tools and technologies you write about. On top of the killer team, Pragmatic’s publishing technology (PDFs on demand!) makes the standard word processors look like the writing equivalent of sharpened stones and sticks.

Chad Fowler, author of Rails Recipes and Passionate Programmer

Working with The Pragmatic Programmers has been fantastic. Simple and fair contracts, responsive staff, top-notch editors, aggressive marketing, and powerful book construction infrastructure.

Terence Parr, author of The Definitive ANTLR Reference and Language Implementation Patterns

Until I got in contact with The Pragmatic Programmers I never thought I could write a book, much less an English one. But the whole team is unbelievably professional and encouraging. The PragProgs practice what they preach in their books, and you’ll find best practices everywhere, from the initial setup to the final product. I cannot imagine writing for any other publisher.

Maik Schmidt, author of Arduino: A Quick-Start Guide, Enterprise Integration with Ruby and Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails

One of the best things about working with the Pragmatic Bookshelf crew was that the process felt so familiar and comfortable. They have hit on a way to take the practices that make for great software development projects and apply those to book development. It is truly a team effort, where everyone contributes and is committed to a successful release.

Lyle Johson, author of FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby

I used to think that I would prefer to just write a book and give it to the publisher as a fait accompli. But now I realize that without a development editor that is very involved with ideas and grooming, it’s easy to produce a book that sucks! My editor was just awesome… I can’t imagine writing a book without her.

Best selling, serial author.

Can Your Publisher do That?

The beta of “Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer”, with the first 10 chapters, was published about one month after I went to the Pragmatic Bookshelf with the initial draft. Tell me, can your publisher do that?

Venkat Subramaniam, award-winning author.