Quick Update on the Next Book

I haven’t settled on a name yet, but it looks like the next book—a technical history of Windows—will be quite lengthy, as expected. And I’d like it to get even longer.

Earlier this week, I wrote about my work turning the epic Programming Windows series into an ebook that I will sell on Leanpub (and, I think, on Amazon as well). When I started this project in earnest, which required about a week-long pause to my work on the Windows 11 Field Guide, I knew it would be substantive from a page count perspective. I just wasn’t sure how substantive.

At the time of the first post about this book, I had converted 55 articles into all-text chapters (no photos or screenshots) that occupied 226 pages in PDF format. Yesterday, I completed this text-based conversion, and unless I’m counting this wrong, it looks like the final chapter count is 112 not including introductory and reference material. And the page count in PDF format is 675 pages.

That’s big. I wish I knew what the word count was, but I’ve only been previewing it so far and Leanpub doesn’t report the word count to me until I publish the book. By comparison, the Windows 11 Field Guide is currently 687 pages long, and the word count is over 107,000 words, but it’s padded with lots of screenshots. I assume this new book is at least four times as long, possibly more, from a word count perspective.

I’ll find that out soon. But in tandem with the initial page count, I wanted to provide a few updates on what I’m thinking for this next book.

First and most obviously, I need a title as Programming Windows is already taken by Charles Petzold. Thanks to everyone who has chimed in with suggestions, in comments and via email. I hope to arrive at something that makes sense soon, but it’s a bit tricky because of the subject matter, which is loosely “the history of Windows as seen through the eyes of an app developer.” But if you read the series, you know that it veers between straight-up history and more technical topics.

Which leads me to another idea I was discussing with my wife the other day. Maybe there are two versions of the book, which are bundled together (not two separate purchases) where one is the full book with coding chapters (Hello, whatever) and the other, shorter version leaves those out and is thus more of a straight-up narrative. Just a bundling idea, I guess. We’ll see if that makes sense.

From a publishing perspective, I think it can follow an interesting path that mirrors how I’ve been publishing the Windows 11 Field Guide. That is, the initial publication will be the entire book, but only the text. And then I’ll add the photos and screenshots chapter by chapter. And then add other materials, like a terminology list, reading list, and so on. And then, ultimately, I’ll add more content.

I have to try and avoid doing that last bit first: in putting this together as a book, I’ve noted some additions I’d like to make in the form of new chapters covering topics that aren’t addressed or maybe aren’t addressed enough. And that will be interesting to work on. Some day: I will do all that other stuff first.

And I need to finish the Windows 11 Field Guide too, obviously. I won’t take this much time off from that book again, though this was a nice break because I’m stuck with some of the grunt work of that project right now and it’s a bit uninteresting to get through. But I will.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at. I’m hoping to make the first pre-release version of the book available via Leanpub later this coming week.

More soon.