Write For Us

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.

We’re looking for both full-length books and shorter PDF-only Fridays.

What You Get

• A 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 Subversion.
  • You send stuff to us by checking 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).

• A great deal! We currently pay 50% royalties. 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. Compare with 10% from many other publishers. Oh, and we give you a royalty statement each month, and pay royalties quarterly.

• 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.

• Our editors are technical folks who know about writing, not marketing people. Work with your editor, not for him or her.

• If your book material is appropriate, we can offer it as a Beta Book, which means you get continuous feedback from the best group of readers in the world.

Interested?

Please send an outline, a sample of your writing and your professional credentials to proposals@pragprog.com.

Folks compete to write for us, so make it good! :)