Textbooks 101 A Primer On Writing Your First Book

This paper presents a guide on the “A, B, Cs” of writing a textbook. Eighteen months ago the authors were novice writers who wanted to publish their first textbook. Their first textbook entitled “The 68HC12 Microcontroller: Theory and Applications,” was released by Prentice Hall in December 2001. During the book writing process the authors learned a variety of valuable lessons that they hope are useful to others. This paper presents their thoughts on issues associated with a book writing process: topic and publisher selection, book contracts, time commitments, the actual mechanics of writing, preparing solutions manuals, including software packages, and creating websites. Although their textbook is intended for an electrical and computer engineering audience, the lessons they learned while writing the book should be applicable to any engineering discipline.