What do you need to write a book?

Writing a book is not as easy as it sounds, but also isn’t that hard once you get to know what things you need to gather or prepare. Since the book I’m writing here “Think in Recursion” is a technical book, I guess the materials is relatively more important than the idea comparing to a novel. But this is only my guess.

Material

Believe it or not, the editor or publisher these days are more interested at whether you have gathered enough content to write, especially after they are convinced that you can be a writer of that particular subject. So you need to ask yourself some basic questions:

• Book title (and subtitle)
• What’s so catchy about it? What’s your audience? Why should people choose to read your book other than what’s available in the market?

These questions might not be hard to answer, but you need to have a clearer picture on them than just an idea. The reason is probably simple. There are probably too many people over the internet who say they want to write a book for such and such. I’m not trying to discourage anyone, I’m just trying to say you need a bit more than that. If not, just keep thinking or gathering.

If you think the above information is too much, you’d be surprised when asked to provide the book outline!