On Writing: Windows, Eternal Spring, and Books (Premium)

I spoke recently with Tony Redmond, a long-time friend and the primary author of the highly recommended ‌Office 365 for IT Pros: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Microsoft’s Cloud Office System, which he self-publishes using Gumroad. I had been wanting to pick his brain about book writing and publishing for a long time, in part because my wife and I are writing an Eternal Spring guidebook to Mexico City, an interesting departure from my books to date. (More on this below.) But also because I wanted to know how he manages such a large project: His book is over 3,300 pages (!) long in print form.

It was a terrific conversation, and quite helpful. Tony handles his tome far more responsibly than I do my own books, the Windows 11 Field Guide, Windows Everywhere, and the Windows 10 Field Guide: ‌Office 365 for IT Pros is released in a new edition each year, and he and his coauthors issue monthly updates (free to users of the current edition) and a separate annual update to entice readers to buy the next edition.

My support policy has been looser but also more uncertain, though readers have at least benefitted from longer periods of free updates. Tony long ago advised me to move to a more finite (and transparent) updating model, but I am conservative by nature, and my chief aim has always been to help people with a product that is paradoxically important to their daily work lives but also something which most might not even consider paying for such a resource. So I’ve kept the books cheap ($9.99 and up, thanks to variable pricing) and amp up the value with years of free updates.

Whether that ever changes is … well, up in the air. I supported the Windows 10 Field Guide with free updates for 6 years, and so far, I’ve supported the Windows 11 Field Guide with about 18 months of free updates, and I don’t see ending the support timeframe for this book anytime soon. But Windows Everywhere is a different kind of book, and I have many ideas for future updates. (Too many, perhaps.) I could see doing a second edition as a “new” title, though I will at least go through another editorial pass on the current version and try to clean up any remaining grammar and style issues first.

The Eternal Spring book is likewise a (very) different kind of book, and there, too, I could see a different support model, perhaps with annual releases, similar to guidebooks by Rick Steves and others. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. When it comes to books, the Windows 11 Field Guide is my primary, ongoing concern. And it needs a lot of help: Not only is the book too long—really, too big—but there’s a ton of content I still want to add, and more coming as we move into 24H2 and then future updates. (More on the Eternal Spring book below.)

If you look at the web version of this book on Thurrott.com, you might understandably believe that I’ve taken some kind of break in recent weeks, as the last new (updated) chapter was added on March 8, almost one month ago. But that’s not the case: I’ve spent much of the intervening time grappling with the size issue I first raised back in February. Part of this involved implementing the organizational changes I discussed in early March, which (ironically?) includes additional content on the previously-blank section break pages and at the start of each chapter. But I also wanted to cut down on the book’s size, which can be viewed as a page count problem, but also a download size problem. I still want to do this.

On that note, much of the work I’ve done in the past few weeks, including, most recently, much of yesterday afternoon, has been reusing some old tricks I previously implemented for the Windows 10 Field Guide, which is amusing given that that book is only 489 pages long. (More on that in a moment.) The most obvious was reducing the amount of (physical, on-page) space taken up by the images in the book, and for that title, I at some point reduced the magnification of full-screen images from 100 percent width to 75 percent width.

That made a big difference for the Windows 10 book, but because that was so successful, full-screen images have been set to a 75 percent width since the first version of the Windows 11 Field Guide. So there are two obvious next steps that build off that idea: Reduce the size of other images (which, depending on the image, are set to 40, 50, or 60 percent widths) or just reduce the number of images overall.

And that was a lot of the work I was doing yesterday, mostly by reducing images sizes, though I removed some images too. Probably not aggressively enough. After editing the shots in the first 20 chapters of the book, which is just the tip of the content iceberg, really, I had reduced the length of the PDF version of the book from 1,113 pages (366.6 MB) to 1,097 pages (364.8 MB), a saving of just 16 pages and a negligible 1.8 MB. (That version of the book is live now if you own it.)

That doesn’t sound like a lot of progress because, well, it isn’t. But there are roughly 80 chapters in the book, so if similar work on the remaining chapters has similar results, the total savings might be over 60 pages and 7 MB. Which also doesn’t really move the needle a lot, especially since I plan to add content, sometimes in the form of entirely new chapters. There’s no good answer here.

Tony, as he has in the past, advised me during our conversation to more aggressively cull images. The readers of these books aren’t idiots, after all, and maybe they don’t need so many visual cues. I agree with that in theory, but I also want this book to be useful for someone learning to use Windows 11 who wants to go from a casual user into more of an expert. And I just really like being visual. (And, perhaps, a bit more wordy that is necessary.) This creates bulk.

So I may work on that, painful as it is. Before then, however, I have to finish my organization changes into the latter half of the book, and as I do that—this involves updating the section break pages and adding a “Key points” section with links at the start of each chapter—I will continue editing (and, where possible, removing) images. And we’ll see where things land when that book is done.

In addition to working on new content, which is always ongoing, I am also wondering whether I could reduce the quality of the images I’m using in the book. This would impact the disk size (in MB) of the book, of course, but I want to ensure that it’s not noticeable, or at least is not terrible, before committing to that. I will experiment with this. It’d be neat if it worked out.

Moving on.

Last week, I wrote about installing Windows 10 on a PC for the first time in a few years, and that experience was interesting for many reasons. It’s not as enshittified as Windows 11, most obviously—not yet, anyway; with Microsoft actively updating Windows 10, it could get worse now—but it’s not a slam dunk: I still prefer Windows 11 overall, though there are some aspects of Windows 10 that I miss as well.

Reviving Windows 10 also inspired me to look at the Windows 10 Field Guide for the first time in a while, and I was vaguely wondering whether it was worth bringing that book up to date. I couldn’t recall when I had stopped updating it, let alone which version it covered, so I was interested to (re)discover that it was last updated in mid-2021, almost three years ago (timed to the original Windows 11 announcement, go figure). And that it was current through Windows 10 version 21H1.

21H1. Hm. I had apparently also stopped thinking about how Microsoft used to release two Windows 10 Feature Updates each year, and so I needed to reacquaint myself with that schedule. And in looking it up, I (re)discovered that Microsoft released Windows 10 version 21H2 in November 2022 and then Windows 10 version 22H2 in October 2022. That release was eventually billed as the final version of Windows 10, though Microsoft reversed course on that in the AI mania of 2023, announcing that it would bring Windows 11’s Copilot feature to Windows 10 as well.

So, does it make sense to update the Windows 10 Field Guide?

Maybe. Windows 10 21H2 introduced no new features that impact the book, so that one was a wash. And Windows 10 22H2 was even more mysterious, with no new features at all. So it’s pretty much just Copilot, plus whatever app updates. Some of that may be worth covering as some apps, like the Microsoft Store and Photos, have since been updated to the versions that appear in Windows 11 as well. (And Edge. Let’s not forget Edge.) It’s not a priority, I guess, but I vaguely like the idea of a “final” update to the book in the platform’s last year. We had a good run, after all.

Before moving on, I wanted to touch on the Eternal Spring book too. We’re still not sure what to call it—something imaginative like Eternal Spring with an equally obvious subtitle like Our Guide to Mexico City, I guess—but I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on this since we first announced it. There’s a lot to unpack here, but I will try to keep this brief.

My wife and I have wanted to write this book since we fell in love with Mexico City, and there’s a need, too, as no one has emerged as a sort of Rick Steves-type expert for Mexico generally or Mexico City specifically. We put it off out of worries that we’re just not qualified as subject experts, that takes time, but conversations with several other couples during the most recent trip convinced us otherwise. And the more we started listing out what we wanted to cover, the more obvious it was that this could be useful, thorough, and unique. The book will only improve over time.

I would like this book to be more graphical and pretty than my Windows books, but we’ll see how that evolves. There will have to be some sort of basic eBook/PDF edition, but I am very interested in better, magazine-style layouts and have been experimenting with both. It may be something that ships in annual versions, like other guidebooks. We’ll see. There are still many questions.

To get started, my wife and I began listing and then organizing the topics we want to cover. That list keeps evolving, as we keep adding to it, but at some point, I created a top-level table of contents that includes top-level chapters like Before you go, Orientation, Sights, Walks and tours, Eat and drink, and so on, and started plugging the topics in where they might belong. My wife would then go through what I had done and make additions and changes as needed.

But it was important to me to start writing too. And I’ve been actively writing the book now for a few weeks. I write in the off-hours—before work in the morning and after work at night—which is how I’ve long structured my time for side projects; most of the digital decluttering work I did in late 2023 occurred during these times, for example. (I work on the Windows 11 Field Guide during work hours, almost always in the afternoons, by way of comparison.) I’m pretty happy with what I’ve written so far, mostly in the Before you go and Orientation sections, and while my wife hasn’t contributed any original writing yet—she will—she’s been reading, editing, and providing feedback to my work. It’s interesting to collaborate with her on this.

We will begin posting short tips videos on the YouTube channel tied to the book content soon, alongside our normal (longer length) content. And we’ll make this call for feedback there as well. But I wanted to see whether anyone here is interested in getting very early versions of the book so they can provide feedback. This would be informal, probably just an email list. And it should be ready to go by the end of the month based on the progress so far. So let me know by emailing me at paul at thurrott dot com. Obviously, familiarity with Mexico City is ideal, but I think it’s useful just to have eyes on it, and if you’ve used or are familiar with similar travel guides for other locations, that’s helpful too. We want this to be as complete as possible.

This won’t be the last time I write about the Eternal Spring book on Thurrott.com per se. But for the most part, I will be reaching out and providing updates elsewhere, on the Eternal Spring website and via videos posted to our YouTube channel. But I wanted to get this in front of Thurrott Premium members, at least, in case any of you are interested.

Thanks,

Paul