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. 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), and we also publish on career and lifestyle topics through our newly launched Pragmatic Life series.

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. Most importantly, tell us why you’re 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.

We’d also like to review a 20-page writing sample from your proposed 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 style of writing we’re looking for.

• Programming Clojure
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
• The Passionate Programmer

Contact Information

Send proposals to:

• Technical Topics—proposals@pragprog.com
• Career & Lifestyle—lifeproposals@pragprog.com
• Screencasts—screencasts@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 technical books. 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).

• 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