how you started the authorship journey. We're
seeing a lot of authors pop up nowadays, but
for you being in the programming world and then
traveling all over and being an author, that's
very, very interesting. It's very interesting.
So tell me more about that. So now I've been
writing for a good long while. Bruce Tate, I've
had a number of technical bestsellers. Normally,
I'm a big fish in a small pond. I did break through
with a book called Bitter Java, which your readers
will find is a terrible book with a good title.
And so this book was written right after I left
IBM. And to tell just a brief story, this was
one of the lowest parts of my life. My wife's
mother was sick and she was overseas when she
got sick and they couldn't take care of her there
because of insurance concerns. So we had a two
level house, but the first level was an open
concept. So you can imagine there was this dying
woman in the middle of our breakfast nook with
two kids and even a wound sucking machine that
just went. Just basically suffocating the whole
room and taking all the joy out of life and everything
that was happening there. I was a technical person
and the Internet bubble was exploding because
it was right at the end of 1999. And I was unemployed.
And when I lost my job, my goal was to start
writing because I said anybody can write. I'm
pretty good at it. And so what happened was I
wrote a book that had an excellent title at exactly
the right time. And so that bitter Java title
was important because there was a there's a moment
in time when when people were were afraid that
there was this kind of there's going to be this
overarching language that would control everything.
And so I wrote this book and this was way back
when Amazon. wasn't really that popular yet and
they would they would offer a book for sale before
you could actually before you could actually
get it and people saw that name pop up and there
was a technical community called slash dot right
so they found this book and the title and um
so we're in the middle of the breakfast nook
and the whole family including the mother are
huddled around the monitor We're hitting refresh,
refresh. And we said, hey, we sold one. We sold
one, right? We're number two million on Amazon.
And it started creeping up and we will keep hitting
reload, reload, reload until it went to 10 ,000.
So we were the 10 ,000 best book in all of Amazon,
not just technical ones. And it kept rising and
rising until we were amongst the best sellers
and then higher and higher until I was between
John Grisham and Stephen Hawking. So number seven
books of all technical books before it actually
became wildly available. And then once it became
available, I didn't sell. I barely sold another
copy, right? The reviews came out. It wasn't
a great book. But what it did do is it allowed
me to start a journey, and I was invited to participate
in conferences and with other authors. So that's
how I got started. That's awesome. And since
then, how many books have you written? Oh, gosh,
somewhere around 15. Wow. So a lot of them. There
were a number of books that were well written,
but sold poorly. And a few books that actually
did pretty well and actually won some awards.
There's an award called the Jolt Award. That's
a productivity. award so i've won that twice
and then there was a a pretty special book called
seven languages in seven weeks and the idea of
that book was that um the the programming world
was changing from single core computers to multi
-core computers and when this happened all the
programming languages really needed to change
and this book kind of brought people along in
the journey as i was learning how to navigate
these waters. And the interesting thing about
this book was there was a man named Joe Armstrong
that had written a language called Erlang. And
the Erlang language was a little bit popular
in Sweden, but not very popular everywhere else.
But it was technically beautiful, just an absolutely
gorgeous language. And then there was a language
that I was working on that a lot of people knew
called Ruby. And, in fact, it was a beautiful
language and a beautiful community. But it was
written in a way and structured in a way that
it really wasn't good for the new generation
of computers that was coming out. And so I wrote
this book, Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. And
after I'd written the first three chapters, one
of them was about Erlang. So I did some kind
of crazy things that started to get my editor's
attention. Like I would compare each programming
language to a movie and a movie star in it. And
they kind of liked that because it allowed you
to switch headspace from one to the next. But
anyway, after I had three languages written in
the book, my publisher said, hey, I've got a
couple of reviewers to send it to. And I said,
that's great. And I get this note back. from
joe armstrong which was the creator of one of
the languages and um he actually said the author
understands my language very well which was patently
not true right i just based my examples off of
his examples so he was liking his own work and
he said but the author doesn't understand this
other language very well which was called prologue
it was one of the early artificial intelligence
languages and um So I basically approached Joe
to have him teach me prologue. And he adopted
this whole idea of this book and took me under
his wing. That really gave me the technical start.
That's amazing. A lot of technical language,
lingo in there. I hope people understood that.
But I want to add on to what you just mentioned.
Yeah. You definitely went through some ups and
downs when it comes to distribution of the book.
But what different things did you do when you
sold the seven languages in seven weeks? A lot
of times when people come on our show and they
want to talk about their book and I go in there
and I'm like, hey, look at the ratings. They
have one rating, two ratings. I'm like, when
was you couldn't get your mom or your sister
or your brothers to write you a review? You have
successfully launched a book to 180 reviews.
I would say that's pretty fairly good. So tell
us the journey about that. What was the difference
in the earlier books than this one? And what
lessons did you learn through that? Yeah, so
I think that reviewers are important. And it's
really, it's also important to bring people along.
I mean, people don't write in a vacuum. And as
you're aware, the writing business, it isn't
so lucrative anymore in terms of the book itself.
But in terms of building a career and building
connections, it's extremely important. So the
idea of getting reviews, part of that is building
community. And once a community has followed
you around, you can ask them to take a look at
a book. Or, for example, it might allow you to
do something different. We have a new book out.
Well, new as in a couple of years old now. It's
called Currently Away. And that's the book that
we talked about last time. So Currently Away
was a travel memoir. And that was a new genre
to me. It was a story within a story. But the
cool thing about that book is that I had an audience
that I could say, hey, you don't know me in terms
of a person. You know me as a technical author.
You don't know the broader Bruce Tate. Come get
introduced. And we were able to kind of kick
that book off as well. Yeah, that's awesome.
Thank you for sharing that. I think a lot of
times people undervalue. the power of distribution
and and the community that you need to build
and the people that you're trying to target yes
it's not does not mean that the content of your
book is undervalued anyhow but if it doesn't
reach the right audience you not might not get
the right impact that you need like for specifically
one of your books your specific target audience
were i'm guessing engineers and software developers
who are literally focused on learning that language
and yes it switches out through what genre you're
trying to target and what team and things you
use so so what lessons did you learn in that
bruce like i would love to hear some of those
lessons that the good bad and the ugly i love
all three in terms of promotion i've learned
that um when you get when you finish the um let's
say the beta version of the book you put the
last word down in your first rewrite that's probably
about a quarter of all the work that you're going
to do with the book the promotion is absolutely
huge and promotion means going out and talking
to people about your book it means and you know
some of this work might be paid some of it might
not be paid um but it's it's finding If you can't
find the speaking gigs, it's going to conferences.
It's finding like -minded people. It's doing
podcasts like this one. But all of that work
is tremendously important, but it has to be focused
work, right? You have to be able to find the
people that are interested in the books that
you want to write. Like, for example, the Seven
Languages in Seven Weeks, that launched a new
genre. Most books at the time were written about
one specific technology. And what people were
missing were the holistic view of how do you
be a good software engineer? What do you have
to know to be a holistic software engineer? And
there were a whole lot of problems I had to solve
for that book. Like one of the problems was...
Your headspace changes when you go from chapter
one to chapter two. You can't just have a cliffhanger
and says, hey, Johnny has got his fingers dug
into the side of a cliff. He's going to fall.
What are you going to do? What are you going
to do? Turn the page. No, I'm going from language
Ruby to the language IO, and they're completely
different. And maybe they don't have anything
to do with each other, but I have to bring the
reader along. So I had to solve that problem,
right? To solve that problem, I built these movie
characters. But that tied into the promotion
because then I could promote within conferences.
I could say, hey, Mary Poppins meets the Matrix,
right? And people say, what does that mean? Well,
then I could tell this story about the connecting
of those two ideas in the book and how I got
your headspace from one book to the next. It
all ties together. I want to double down on what
you just said. Yeah. There is a reason that Apple
is very successful. There's a reason that McDonald's
mascot is a clown. There's a reason Starbucks
is very successful in the world. There's a reason
Google is very successful in the world. Because
they focus on the user experience and experience
of any person going through their product, service,
or customer review, anything. The whole life
cycle. Yeah, it's a whole life cycle is that
experience is not on the product itself. I mean,
that comes along. Obviously, you have to have
good products to sell, but their focus is on
improving that from that first click to checkout
to buying an iPhone, to unboxing an iPhone, to
holding that iPhone, to having the community
of iPhone -ers, right? Right. That's why. To
the conference, right? Exactly. Exactly. Wow.
Awesome. That was awesome. Thank you for sharing
that with us, Bruce. Sure. What would you say?
And this is my last question for you for today's
segment, Bruce. What would you say is your goal
for being on the show today? I think I would
like to introduce people to the book Currently
Away. The Currently Away book, I think it's an
important book about a journey. but the types
of journeys that we take that help us change
our mindsets. It's about going from a place where
we were letting life happen to us to imagining
what must be true if we were to accomplish our
goals. And this goes right into what you're talking
about with Vision Bros, right? So we had to have
a vision and then we had to think about ourselves
in the future and what must have been true for
that vision to come true. And when we were done,
we we had completely remade ourselves and we'd
we implemented this vision and we surrounded
ourselves with curious people. You know, we would
go from place to place, from dock to dock. And
at the end of that day, we would surround ourselves
with the boaters of that day. And you would talk
about how much how you almost wrecked your boat
that day. Right. And today we do the same thing,
not on docks, but around dinner tables. And it
has been a tremendous impact on our lives. So
Currently Away, that's the story I'd like to
talk about. That's awesome. So let's share more
on that. I'd love to hear more about that book.
Tell me more. So Currently Away is about a time
of COVID where I... have pretty high risk symptoms
on a lot of different dimensions. I really thought
the disease was going to kill me. And my wife
and I were both depressed in 2022 as we were
thinking about what was about to happen. And
we knew we had to quarantine because of my risk
factors. And one day, my wife looked out the
window at a river and said, wait a minute, what
if I quarantine? Instead of being in a 2 ,000
square foot house, what if it was in a 2 ,900
square, what if it was a 290 square foot boat
with a big back porch? How different would our
life be? And so this was about the story of buying
the boat, getting ready for that journey, deciding
to make this journey during this kind of politically.
charged time and having to be with people on
both sides of the aisle and how we were able
to bridge those gaps and navigate some pretty
real difficulties. And at the same time as we
were kind of rewiring our boat, we were rewiring
our life stories. in our futures. Thank you for
being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned
in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to
seeing your reactions as these episodes continue
to move forward. This is going to get more and
more fun. We'll have more and more engagement
as well. We'll invite people to participate in
the show. And thank you for giving us your time
and attention. Have an excellent time building
out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.