Concurrently Asynchronous | Multithreaded Income Episode 28 with Stephen Cleary

welcome everyone back to the Multithread Income Podcast. I'm joined today by my guest, Steve Cleary. How are you, Steve? I'm doing well. And we are at Codemash in Ohio, another episode here. Steve, you've been to Codemash a couple times before, haven't you? I have,

although it has been many years since I've been here. Many years? Pre pandemic, yeah.

What, uh, what were you speaking on at

Codemash? So, I had two talks lined up. There was Async and Await from the ground up, which is an intro, little intermediate, uh,

times. Well, that sounds fascinating. I might have to step in for that. That sounds good. Uh, but that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about We're here to actually talk more about you, not the talks you've been doing. Uh, so Steve, just kind of tell us, what are you doing now?

Okay, so I, uh, I live in northern Michigan, and I work for a company, uh, in the Pacific time zone in Washington state. Uh, the company is called Logos, and they actually write some of the best Bible software in the world. Okay. So, a lot of pastors use it, uh, we're trying to get more laymen to use it.

that's not the Bible app that I see a lot of people using, or is it something different, like

deeper? Yes. Ours is much more about a deep study in the Bible. Although we're trying to make it more user friendly so that it can be used for more casual Bible usage.

Oh, that's fun. So you get a breadth of technology and platforms. Yes. Awesome. Well, that's cool to hear. I'll have to check that out. Uh, you also, we were talking a little bit earlier, you have a book you've published with O'Reilly. Yes. Tell us a little

bit about that. So it's got a really annoyingly long name. Um, it's concurrency and C sharp cookbook. Asynchronous, parallel, and multi threaded development or something like that. Second edition? Yeah, second edition, actually. There is a second edition, yes.

Um, so, uh, O'Reilly, is that, they're the ones with the animals on the front? Yes. Alright, what animal do you have on the front of your book?

I forget what it's called. Okay. Um, but it's, uh, it's kind of infamous because people make coffee from its poop. Oh, okay. Like, they, they feed it coffee beans. Yeah. And it poops out the coffee beans and then they make coffee from that. And I'm like, I would never do that.

coffee. I feel like it's this sort of thing, you drink the coffee first and then someone tells you afterwards, hey, by the way, great story about where these beans came from.

I don't know who, who had that idea first, right? Man, I'm really hungry. Oh, this looks good.

It's like the invented coffee. Someone had to get to that point where they found the beans and they roasted the beans and then they, they drank the beans, right? It's just a natural progression of you. Um, so you have a book with a very long title through O'Reilly. Yes. Now we've talked to a couple of other book publishers, but I would like hearing everyone's individual story. How did you, were you approached to do the topic or did you approach

O'Reilly to do the top? Oh yeah, absolutely not. So, um, so I. Shopped the idea around. I wanted to write a book on async and await. Essentially, uh, which was still a very new technology at the time, and at the time, no other books really covered it. Um, you know, if you were to pick up a copy of, uh, C Sharp and a Nutshell or whatever, you know, uh, at that time, did not actually cover Async and Await.

Did you have any sort of pre existing relationship with someone at O'Reilly? Or was that a cold email? I have an

idea. No, I, if, if I recall correctly, they had like, uh, some kind of a web form or something that I filled out. Okay. Something like that. It's probably a completely different process these days.

So you managed to ship an idea to them. Um, talk a little bit about the process. What was the next step for setting up the outline? Yeah, so. Do you know what

you want to talk about? Yeah, so I think, if I recall correctly. Most of the publishers that I submitted to actually required an outline before they would even look at it. Okay. So you had to have the idea, you know, title, uh, convincing them that you could do it. You were the one to write the book. Um, and also, uh, a pretty fleshed out, uh, you know, not, not just, uh, uh, chapter titles, but also like, here's what I'm planning to do in each chapter.

I think that's good advice for anyone that might be looking at going through a publisher for a book. Is that, you just said, they're really good at knowing what sells. Yes. So, while you might have a good initial idea, they can take your initial idea, run with it, and create a much better idea. And it sounds like you're pretty convinced it's a much better book because of the changes they wanted to make. Yes.

Yeah, I think so. I think that the book has been, uh, has shown that, that that approach has been. Was a good idea. Yeah. I do get asked a lot. Hey, I want, you know, I want a deeper book on async and await. There are some people who want that, but I think that, uh, that, that looking at developers as a very broad base, I think that that was the right decision for that book. Yeah.

How long was the timeline from the moment you got it sold to, I guess, when it hit bookshelves?

Yeah. Good question. I want to say. a year or so, maybe a little more.

Um, how often, I understand you have checkpoints kind of along the way. Yes. Certain chapters. How long did you usually have between say a chapter being due or a set of chapters being due?

Yeah, it was usually a month. So, you know, you'd have this month, you want this chapter, these couple of chapters, um, completed by then. And It was, it wasn't super strict, but they do being a publisher, you know, they do have all their marketing and everything like that is like, is all lined up behind that. So those deadlines, you can't slip on them a whole lot. Um,

yeah, were you working on multiple chapters at one time or was it pretty synchronous through, uh, one chapter to the next chapter? I didn't mean to do that, but I'm going to go with

that. Yeah. Um, yes, it was, uh, yeah. It was, uh, it was mostly one then the next. Um, every once in a while I'd say, well, I want to do this chapter, you know, next or whatever. And they, you know, that's fine. Gotcha. Um, I'm trying to remember. I don't think I ever wrote like two chapters at once. It was mostly one at a time. Although I would go back and edit as necessary. Awesome.

I was thinking, like, with, uh, you have editing and tech editing. Were those happening in parallel with writing the new chapters?

Um, yes, they would. So, uh, so the, the way that my book was published through them, uh, they provided their own copy editors. So anything like grammar, punctuation, that kind of stuff, they took care of. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. And I, well, I mean, they wouldn't do it for me, but they'd say, Oh, they would tell you, Oh, you should do this. You shouldn't. You should use the Oxford comma. Oh wait, you shouldn't use the Oxford comma. I am pro Oxford comma. I don't know about your listeners.

this table might be pro

Oxford. Okay, okay, cool. We're in good company then. Alright, um, you know, so they had their own copy editors who would provide that kind of feedback. And then, or like tone. Yeah. Like mine was a cookbook. So, O'Reilly has a line of cookbooks that they want a specific tone in. Okay. And they want, uh, a specific structure to all of the chapters. Okay. So, so each, each chapter has, you know, certain recipes in it.

now we don't need to talk about numbers or anything. Did you do a, any sort of upfront, and then royalties, or was it all royalties on the?

So it was all royalties. This was my first book. So I was an unknown author. And, um, do you not want to get into numbers? If you're comfortable talking numbers, then I'm happy. I'm totally comfortable talking numbers. Let's talk numbers then. Okay, so, if I recall correctly, yeah. Yeah, it's ten percent is their royalty rate. Okay. And it's important to note that that's ten percent of the publisher's income, which is not what the book sells for.

But you hope you sell a couple thousand copies and maybe close to, you know, Millions of copies, maybe, depending on the book. Right,

so the thing is, with technical books, you know, you're not Harry Potter, you know, you're not Stephen King. These are the books that actually make money. Most books lose money in the publishing world, um, including a lot of technical books. And so they have to be, uh, Yeah, so you as an author usually do not make money with a technical book because your target market is not everyone in the world. Yeah. The developers, which is a small segment of that.

And it also seems your, your book is not for the 100 level dot net developer. It's more the two, three, maybe 400 level.

I tried to make it as. You're trying to

make it as accessible as possible. I mean, just the title alone kind of seems like, oh, this is for a

higher level. Yes, that's true.

So you did also, you have a second edition. Yes. Can you talk about the process of, did they come to you to do the second edition or was that your idea as well? So

actually, uh, they did reach out to me. I think that they had had enough people reach out to them. And I had actually come to the same conclusion. I was going to reach out to them, I just hadn't done it yet. Um, but I had had enough people, you know, ask me about a second edition. And there had been enough changes in the asynchronous wait support. With things like system threading channels being added. And things like that. And, uh, asynchronous streams, um, was something else that was new.

it's not a complete rewrite, right? Is it, it's a, let's start with what we have and let's add this chapter. Let's change to these chapters. Yep.

Yeah. I simplified some of the code, uh, you know, just, just making it more modern C sharp. Um, so I went through all the code samples I, I ripped out in the first edition. There's like these charts of here's all the different. net, uh, language, not languages, but like all the different, uh,

Now they say you don't write the book for the money. Can you talk about where there any other positive positive effects of having the book? Oh yeah,

absolutely. So one of the things that I guess, I guess you could say it's in my blood. I, uh, I have a lot of relatives who are teachers. Okay. Um, including my mother, uh, who was a, uh, a public school teacher for many, many years. Um, and, uh, you know, I've got aunts and, a cousin who's a, actually a, a professor of epistemology. I can't. I can't say it. Okay. It's a study of how diseases spread. So like, that's what he does.

What's next? Do you want to do another book? You want to do courses? Anything like that?

I have been thinking of another book. Um, I keep starting it and then, and then stopping it because it's, it's too much. But I want to go like all the way super deep into Async and Await. You know, more like the book I was originally going to write. Yeah. That's even a tighter target market. So I was thinking about, uh, self publishing that one. One thing that I loved about O'Reilly was their publishing process. So they have it all set up. They've got a GI repository, right? Mm-Hmm.

I would, I'm a Udemy author. I would highly say, yeah, go do something on Udemy. Um, there's definitely a market there for some higher level stuff. And I, especially async await, like so many developers just have so much confusion going into that stuff. Yes, I would recommend you do it. Yeah. Um, yeah, I would recommend Udemy and we. And we don't have to do it on camera, but I can tell you about my experiences with Udemy and potentially what you could be looking forward to.

Yes. So I have a wife and three kids. Uh, our youngest was pretty young when I wrote the book. Um, I think, was she born? Uh oh. Anyway, I had two or three kids when I wrote the book.

You had more than one kid, more than zero

kids. Um, so, uh, it was a huge time commitment, like massive. Like it took literally. I don't remember how many years of royalties, like five or six years later, I was like, I think I might have made minimum wage at this point. Like, it was literally that much time. So it was like evenings and weekends, uh, just all the time that I, all of my spare time try to write a little bit every day, you know, um, but, but it was a lot of time.

a break. Don't jump into a new one. And courses aren't that much different. You'll spend the same amount of time, if not more time, because you'll do a take and then have to do another take and then another take. It takes a little bit of practice to get into the flow where you can just record one, one video right after the other without, you know, minor editing. I appreciate you chatting with me about it. Yeah, my pleasure.

Or

disincentive. Yeah. But Steve, thank you so much for hanging out with me and everyone else. We'll see you on the next episode of the multi threaded income podcast.