“From SME To Published Author: Writing A Book As A Woman In Tech”: Danielle Barnes (Women Talk Design), Leemay Nassery (Spotify), and Margaret Eldridge (The Pragmatic Programmer) (Video + Transcript)

In this ELEVATE session, Margaret Eldridge (Managing Editor, The Pragmatic Programmers), Danielle Barnes (CEO, Women Talk Design), and Leemay Nassery (Engineering Leader, Spotify) discuss their experiences writing and publishing books and offer insights and advice for aspiring authors. The panel discusses the process of finding a publisher, managing time to write a book, and the doors that writing a book can open in terms of career opportunities. They emphasize the importance of knowing your audience, being patient with yourself, and sharing your ideas early on through platforms like blogs and workshops. 

Danielle’s book: Present Yourself: Proven Strategies for Authentic and Impactful Public Speaking

Leemay’s book: Practical A/B Testing: Creating Experimentation-Driven Products

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Transcript of ELEVATE Session:

Angie Chang:

I’m Angie Chang, founder of Girl Geek X, And with us today we have some subject matter experts who are now authors. Margaret Eldridge is an accomplished writer and editor in the technology space. She’s worked with hundreds of authors at publishers like Wiley, Manning, and The Pragmatic Programmers, and she’s joined by engineering leader and author, Leemay Nassery, and Women Talk Design CEO Danielle Barnes. Welcome, everyone.

Margaret Eldridge:

Thanks so much for joining us. Our talk tonight is about writing a book, and it’s called From Subject Matter Expert to Published Author. Let’s start with Danielle. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your book?

Danielle Barnes:

Sure, yeah. Thank you so much for having me here. I’m Danielle Barnes. My pronouns are she and her, and as shared, I’m the CEO of an organization called Women Talk Design that’s focused on amplifying the voices of women and non-binary folks. We have a book coming out on Monday, actually, called Present Yourself: Proven Strategies for Authentic and Impactful Public Speaking.

Margaret Eldridge:

Awesome, thanks so much. That is definitely a book that I need to read because I speak every now and then, not that often. I feel like I’m a bit rusty, and I think even people who speak a lot, we need to polish our presentation skills, so I’m definitely going to be a buyer.

Danielle Barnes:

I’m glad to hear that.

Margaret Eldridge:

Leemay, what about you? Can you tell us a little about yourself and the book that you wrote?

Leemay Nassery:

Yeah, definitely. <y name is Leemay. I’m an engineering leader at Spotify. I wrote a book called Practical A/B Testing with Pragmatic, which gives you a practical approach into how you would incorporate A/B testing at your company, because A/B testing is not just about the platform, but it’s also about the cultural changes that go into incorporating A/B testing into your product development life cycle. There’s a lot of data and there’s a lot of analysis, so it’s like a practical introduction to get started.

Margaret Eldridge:

Wonderful. And you’re also working on a new book for us?

Leemay Nassery:

Yes. The second one that’s… Sorry, what?

Margaret Eldridge:

Is that a follow-up to the first one?

Leemay Nassery:

Yeah, it’s a little bit more advanced topic. We’re assuming that you’ve already built an A/B testing platform, and now you’re navigating some of the more challenges related to not having enough users or not having testing space or wanting to improve the data that you get from your experiments.

Margaret Eldridge:

It’s one thing to actually work in a particular domain and coach other people in that area, but it’s a whole other thing to write a book. Leemay, how did you actually get started? What was your spark and how did you go about finding a publisher?

Leemay Nassery:

That’s a really good question. I think I’ll put that question to two. For first, what sparked me to write the book? I’ve been working in tech for about 15 years and I’d say probably the most exciting aspects of my career have been related to A/B testing. It’s a pretty thrilling experience evaluating your change in production with millions of users and then getting data points that suggest it’s performant or it’s not performant, it’s increasing metrics or it’s not increasing metrics.

I shortly realized that my favorite aspect of working in tech is the A/B testing phase. It started with the passion. I was obsessed with the concept of A/B testing regardless of the context, if you’re A/B testing content on a video platform or a website or Spotify, any aspect of A/B testing was interesting to me. Then once I realized that I’m obsessed and I could spend a lot of time and energy writing about it, because we know it takes a lot of time writing a book. Then I experimented with the publishers.

I reached out to a few publishers and I’d say Pragmatic was the best fit from a ways of working and the history, the books that preceded me, I think I read personally. It was pretty cool to be part of company where I was contributing to their catalog, if that makes sense. The process, and we can talk about this later, I think was most compelling. How we worked with the editors, tools to push changes with your book, et cetera, is what attracted me the most to Pragmatic.

Margaret Eldridge:

I know Pragmatic has a workflow that’s a little more friendly for developers, it feels more like, yeah.

Leemay Nassery:

That’s what I love about it. It’s not a Google Doc. I have worked with other publishers where it was a Google Doc, and that was so stressful because I kept replicating the Google Doc. Because I was scared that it would become a single point of failure. Whereas I trusted a repository, which I committed to every day once I was done.

Margaret Eldridge:

Right, right. And Danielle, your book is not with a publisher. You published it sort of self-published through your company, correct?

Danielle Barnes:

Correct, yeah.

Margaret Eldridge:

How did that book get started?

Danielle Barnes:

Yeah, so Present Yourself actually started as a workshop. In 2017, we ran the first two-day Present Yourself program to help women and non-binary folks take an idea that they might have and turn it into a talk and practice it. We got such great response from that that we started running it in different cities, and then in 2020 we moved it online. Then in 2021, we launched it as an eight-week hybrid that was part asynchronous, part live.

We found when we had to make asynchronous sessions. We ended up writing out big chunks of the curriculum. There was someone who took that first program that said this should be a book, and the founder of Women Talk Design, Christina Wodtke, actually helped develop a lot of Present Yourself. She’s self-published several of her own books. When we first ran Present Yourself, she was like, “Let’s make it a book.” And I was like, “Absolutely not. That sounds like a terrible idea. I don’t want to write a book.”

After all this time and all this feedback we’ve gotten from alumni, I thought, I really want more people to be able to access this material. I never considered myself a writer. I never particularly wanted to write a book, but one of the pieces that I wrote, actually, I didn’t make it into the book, was that my why ultimately outweighed my fear.

I was like, I cared so much about this and I really wanted it to exist, but I decided it was worth it to pursue it. And we did talk to a couple of publishers early on. Even though Christina was a big fan of self-publishing, I wanted to do our research and make sure that was the right path. I spoke mostly to indie and hybrid publishers, none of the really big publishing houses., and I think ultimately we decided to self-publish for a lot of different reasons.

One was that we wanted to show the Women Talk Design community what was possible because so many people have book ideas in them, but it can be hard to find a publisher and get connected with one. We wanted to show the route of self-publishing, so we’ve done a lot to share our journey along the way.

We also really wanted to put together our own team, our editors and designers, and be able to make sure that that reflected the community that we had, and have a little bit more creative control in that way. I has been quite the journey. I have been troubleshooting some things that we’re getting ready to publish on Monday. There’s still things going wrong, so there’s definitely a lot of benefits to working with a publisher. But going this route allowed us to, like I said, share a lot of that journey, have some more controller pieces, and ultimately have more of the profits go back to the folks who are creating the content.

Margaret Eldridge:

That is the best reason for self-publishing is the creative control aspect, I would say. Because when you work with a publisher, we do want input. We want input on the content, on the cover, and there’s the whole rights thing.

When you’re self-published, you can sell it as many different places as you want and on your own, however you’d like for whatever price you’d like. The control thing is the number one, I think, self-publishing reason. I looked at your outline and I was like, “They definitely had an editor. This is a very sharp outline.”

Danielle Barnes:

Oh yeah. I guess maybe one of the misconceptions, and some people I guess sometimes do self-publish without an editor, but we still very much had all of people working on a book that might, we just paid them each individually. We had developmental editors and line editors and copy editors and proofreaders and designers, and so it was definitely not a solo project.

Margaret Eldridge:

I guess for some people who don’t have the money upfront to pay those sorts of people, traditional publishing can be a more attractive option just because the publisher takes on those upfront costs. Although you do pay because you don’t get to keep all of the royalties from it when you’re publishing. Although actually with Pragmatic, you get 42% on your first book and 50% on every book thereafter. So we’re a little better than other publishers who start around 10%. But still, it’s not a hundred percent, which is what you get to keep when you’re selling it yourself on your own website. So that’s definitely a consideration.

Danielle Barnes:

One thing I’ll add is we did, we had a community and we kick-started a lot of the initial funds. We ran a Kickstarter project and were able to bring our community in that way, and that also helped us pay for our editor. We had several contributors we wanted to pay for upfront. So yes, there are a lot of different factors that go into this.

Margaret Eldridge:

Now you have another book idea, which is self-publishing your book, right?

Danielle Barnes:

It’s true, that’s true. And anything you do, you have a book idea in you to inform the next one. Yeah.

Margaret Eldridge:

You didn’t actually have to write a proposal and present it to a publisher, but Leemay did. What was that like? Was it tough to write the proposal? Did we give you feedback that we asked you to change a lot of stuff?

Leemay Nassery:

That’s a good question. Was it tough to write the proposal? No, I would say it wasn’t. The part that I had to let go of a little bit was it evolved. My book evolved from the original idea to what it is today, which I think is a way better idea. Keep in mind, I truly did experiment with publishers, and one publisher was taking it a total different direction. Pragmatic was taking it another direction, and I picked the direction that I like.

The proposal itself is, for folks that are interested in writing a book, don’t be too intimidated. You talk a little bit about yourself, why you should write the book. You reference other competing books that are related in the topic, and then you drop an outline. Outline probably sounds a lot more intimidating than it is. It’s the chapters that you think that you’ll incorporate and that can evolve. Just because that’s what you propose, it doesn’t mean it’s what you’re going to end up with.

I think that’s something to keep in mind is it’s not set in stone forever. Just put pen to paper and see what you churn out. But the part that I think is most interesting is how it evolved based on the feedback and how letting go of what I originally had in mind actually helped the book be better.

Margaret Eldridge:

That’s a very interesting point because we get some people who come to us after they’ve already written their book and we’re like, “Oh, darn, that’s great. We’re happy that you wrote a book, but now we don’t have any chance to give you our feedback because it’s done.”

Leemay Nassery:

Yeah, I think I wrote one chapter. For my first proposal I think I wrote one chapter that accompanied the outline.

Margaret Eldridge:

I’d say my advice to people who are thinking about writing a book, especially a technical book or just a nonfiction book, is to go ahead and just write the proposal and maybe a few pages from the book to give publishers an idea of your writing style, but don’t go any further than that because publishers really do like to, on nonfiction books and technical books, they like to work with you on a chapter-by-chapter basis from the very start to shape the idea.

It’s really not that much work up front to propose your idea. And the worst that can happen is they say no. In the case of Pragmatic, I always try to say, “No, but. No, but how about this idea? Or would you be open to changing it around a little bit?” So yeah. [crosstalk]

Danielle Barnes:

I can add briefly. Even as a self-published author, I actually did fill out the proposal, a proposal template. I had talked to one of the publishers and they sent me theirs, and I found it to be really helpful in just helping me shape my own ideas. Like all of those things, if you’re going to be selling your own book, you want to have that competitive analysis and you want to be thinking through who is your audience. And so I particularly found that helpful, and we gave it to our developmental editor with our first draft of the manuscript so that she could say, “Oh, okay, well if this is who your target audience is and this is what you’re trying to achieve, that actually doesn’t match this of what you’re saying, or here would be my recommendation for some of this stuff.”

Margaret Eldridge:

That’s very important, your audience, you have to know who you’re talking to. And you have to realize that even though your topic might appeal to other audiences, like Leemay’s book, maybe it would appeal to some middle management people who aren’t actually doing A/B testing. But that’s not the primary audience, and you really need to laser focus your voice and who you’re talking to on the primary audience. If other people pick it up and get benefit out of it, great. I’m glad that you brought up the point of audience. Definitely. As far as when you’re writing the book, just basically how do you manage your time to do it? Because I know both of you have full-time jobs. How does that work?

Leemay Nassery:

I can go first real quick. Does that sound good? It’s a great question. Yeah. I love my day job. Definitely focus during the day on working at Spotify. To be honest, from what I’ve gathered, I think there’s two types of writers, and I’m curious where Danielle falls in this. I’m more of a marathoner, so I’ll spend weekends working, writing, editing. I’ll spend Saturday, Sunday, I’ll just allocate towards working on my book. I just don’t have the energy in me at 8:00 P.M. after a long work day to write. It’s just writing takes so much brain power.

Editing I think takes even more brain power because you’re meeting the needs of, or you’re trying to understand your development editor wants this, but it’s hard to hold in that change. Then you need to be in the right mindset, and so I focus on the weekends. At least for a year, almost every weekend, not every one, but almost every weekend was dedicated to working on my book, with breaks. I would go for a run, then work on my book, go for a walk, then work on my book. That was my style. Danielle, what was your style?

Danielle Barnes:

Yeah, I agree that I cannot work at the end of the day. I’m definitely a morning person. And it took me a while to figure out what was going to work for me. I am lucky that I was able to do this as part of Women Talk Design, which is my full-time job. I decided at one point I wasn’t making enough progress. I was going to take off a week of doing anything else, and I was just going to write.

I went to a coffee shop, I’m going to do this, and I write for an hour and a half. And then I was like, all right. I just couldn’t focus for that long. It was too hard. There was a lot of experimenting of trying to figure out what worked for me. I also had a baby in the middle of the process, so I also had to figure out who I was and what I was capable of before I had the baby changed once my family was very different.

The biggest thing that I learned in that process is to be patient with myself and to realize that there wasn’t one right way. I had someone recommend to me, “Oh, you don’t have to write an order, just write different ideas and then you can piece it together afterwards.” But that didn’t work for me, and I just kept getting stuck and I was like, “No, I need to write linearly, start again and write all the way through.” And so yes, very much appreciate that there’s different ways to do it.

Margaret Eldridge:

That’s interesting that you both didn’t find it possible to work on the book after work.

Leemay Nassery:

Yeah, I’m a manager, so it just, my day, emotionally, takes so much out of me that I just didn’t have anything. I’m an introvert too, so I just needed to sit in silence or something. And so writing, it’s just a lot of inner dialogue that’s going in, a lot of thinking and energy. I would love to be the type of person I would wake up every morning and just spend an hour working on it like they do in the movies. But weekends-

Danielle Barnes:

[crosstalk].

Margaret Eldridge:

I write a lot of blog posts and things like that, and I find that I really do my best writing early in the morning. I would wake up at 5:00 AM if I was going to do an article for just my own blog, like writing about baking and random things, I would do it super early at five o’clock in the morning and then start my day job.

Everybody’s completely different. Some people like to write in sprints where they spend 20 minutes writing and then go back and do something else. Pomodoro, whatever you want to call it. That’s interesting. It’s amazing that you both found the time to write a book while doing so many other things. I am completely amazed that you could have a full-time job, a baby, and write a book, Danielle, so that’s insane.

Now that you’ve written a book or are almost done writing the book, in your case, do you find that things have changed as far as, has it opened any doors for you? Has it changed your outlook on your career, your profession, what you’re able to do, things that, Leemay?

Leemay Nassery:

Yeah, I think, yes, definitely in two ways for me personally. One way, I’m giving workshops at universities. For example, I gave a workshop last year at UPenn, at Wharton about A/B testing.

The thing that’s really neat about A/B testing is it’s so applicable to anybody. Engineers build the platform, product owners leverage it to evaluate their ideas. Managers, same thing, CTOs, if their companies aren’t doing it, they want to do it. That’s the luxury with A/B testing is that it opened doors for workshops at universities, which is super cool. That’s always an avenue I want to venture into.

The other door that it opened up, which I think is such, I’m so grateful for this because I’m so obsessed with A/B testing, my manager sees that and then gives me the space to focus that more at Spotify. I do think that the book was a conduit for that change.

I think it more [inaudible] credibility, but it also, at certain point, if you’re writing every week about A/B testing, you’re thinking about A/B testing a lot. It’s just ingrained in me. I’ve said the word experimenting in different contexts at least four times today in this session. It gave me the credibility at work to then focus more on things that I’m more interested in. Again, I have a manager that’s amazing and lets me do that, but I think the book helped that case, if that makes sense.

Margaret Eldridge:

Danielle, what about you?

Danielle Barnes:

Yeah, and I just want to share that I had the chance to work with a lot of authors through Women Talk Design, and that’s something that I’ve heard as well. It’s like talk about and write about the work that you want to be doing, not just what you’re doing already, because-

Leemay Nassery:

I love that.

Danielle Barnes:

Yeah, folks start to see you for that and reach out to you and you can get more opportunities. The book, it comes out next week, so we’ll see, I guess what comes from it. But just already. one of the things that I’ve noticed, we’ve been talking about the book a lot, and when people know that you’re working on this thing, they want to support you. We’ve gotten connected to podcast hosts and I’ve spoken more podcasts than I’ve ever had getting to share this idea and have gotten to meet just so many wonderful people.

I’ve had a lot of folks from throughout my career also reach back out when they’ve seen that I’m working on the book and use it as an opportunity to reconnect. I’m excited to see what comes from this. I think we’re still very much at the early stages. But something that we did that I would recommend to others is to talk about the book even before, I know there was a question, I think about marketing too before you release it, which I think both helps with marketing, but then also can help build some of those opportunities before the book even comes out.

Margaret Eldridge:

Awesome. Well, we did get a question. “How do you prioritize writing a book and working it into your schedule?” From Michelle. And I think we answered that. I’m not sure if maybe Michelle wasn’t around. But yeah, all of us say that we can’t put any energy into writing after work. We all seem to need a dedicated time set aside for that.

I don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but in this room it is. Any other questions? I don’t see any. I think that was the only one. We only have about five minutes left, so if you guys want to share anything about your book, maybe where to get it or maybe something, just an insight that you gained through writing the book. Why don’t we use the last few minutes for that? Danielle, do you want to go first on that?

Danielle Barnes:

Yes. Sorry, can you repeat the question one more time because-

Margaret Eldridge:

Oh, I’m saying just wrapping it up, tell people where they can get your book and maybe share just an insight that you gained from writing it that you didn’t have before.

Danielle Barnes:

Yeah, sure. Let’s see. Right here. This is what our book looks like. Oh, it’s a blurry background, but Present Yourself, if you go… And there’s my dog because we’re getting book deliveries. I’m going to pass it to Leemay because my dog’s going to take a second and then we’ll come back.

Leemay Nassery:

Sounds good. I can go real quick. My book, Practical A/B Testing, you can get on the pracprog.com and on Amazon. Check it out, please. I have a few jokes in there, so if you read through the chapters and see, will spots some jokes. You’ll get an insight into my humor. And then insight that I would share, I’d say writing a book has made me a better writer for everything, for emails, for documents at work. I’m constantly writing documents to pitch ideas, proposals, push ideas forward. I would say all of the insights that I gained from working with my editor, Vanya, at Pragmatic has made me a better writer. And the better writer you are, the better you’ll be able to do in so many facets of life, just convincing and persuading people [inaudible].

Margaret Eldridge:

Awesome. So apparently a bunch of more questions popped up that, I guess they were in the chat, but I was on the Q&A. Any platforms or mediums you all recommend to start writing on before you test the idea of a book? So I guess blogs and that thing. Are you guys doing any blogging, and have you found a preferred platform if you are?

Leemay Nassery:

Substack, like I have a newsletter, it’s called Experimenting. Do you have something similar, Danielle?

Danielle Barnes:

Yeah. For us, it’s really great to be able to run the workshop first for years. I think that was a big way that we found that there was interest in this topic and we refined the topics a lot and it informed the outline of the book. That was big. Even now I’m writing on LinkedIn. I’m trying to share more about what I’ve learned in the process.

For anyone who’s curious about self-publishing, if you want to find me on LinkedIn, I’ve been writing lessons that I learned about the process. I think it’s a great and really important idea to start sharing your ideas early and by writing, by giving talks that can help develop the book. And that was, I think one of the big lessons that I’ve had through writing the book is just how important it is to bring in people to support you – and by sharing your ideas early, you can do that.

Margaret Eldridge:

Right. Very good. Leemay, there’s one directed at you that says, “As a technical female, how have you found the marketing side of writing a book to be?”

Leemay Nassery:

That’s a really good question. It is, and a vulnerable answer is, I was shy at the beginning, because it is a very technical concept. I had a little bit of imposter syndrome, but I hate those words. But that left. I think once it was out in the wild, and once I got pretty good feedback from colleagues and from friends, I then started pushing marketing a lot more. But I was timid at the beginning. I was, truthfully, I was more timid than I probably should have been. And I hope not to be like that in the second book. But it is hard. There’s [inaudible]

Margaret Eldridge:

And I think the thing that some authors don’t realize is that people like to celebrate with you your accomplishments.

Leemay Nassery:

Yeah, I had a lot of support.

Margaret Eldridge:

Don’t be shy about it. And also while you’re at it, boost other people. If you see somebody who’s written something, they’re not your competition. Support everybody and good things will happen. So it looks like we’re out of time. Angie is back. Hi, Angie.

Angie Chang:

Thank you all for all your insights and encouragement for us to become such experts that are recognized and published. We’ll be looking forward to reading your books, the ones that are coming out soon, and the ones you’ve already published.