Value Driven Data Science

[00:00:00] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Hello, and welcome back to Value-Driven Data Science, where data professionals become strategic experts. I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and I'm here again with Cynthia Dunlop, co-author of Writing for Developers and senior director of content strategy at ScyllaDB. Last week, Cynthia and I discussed how data professionals can use blog posts to build genuine authority.
[00:00:27] Today, in this Value Boost episode, we're exploring how blog writing can open doors to conference speaking, book deals, and other opportunities that progressively compound your authority. Welcome back, Cynthia.
[00:00:42] Cynthia Dunlop: Hi, thanks for having me again
[00:00:44] Dr Genevieve Hayes: If you want to become a recognized authority as a data professional, writing blog posts is a great first step.
[00:00:51] The majority of data professionals don't write anything at all, so writing the right things will set you apart from the crowd, as we discussed in our previous episode. However, your authority building doesn't have to stop there, and if you want to stand out even further and set yourself apart from the other data professionals who write, there are additional steps you can take.
[00:01:13] For example, writing a book. To illustrate the power of this, Cynthia, you've written hundreds of tech articles in your career, but it was only because of one of the four books you've co-written that your work came to my attention leading to our conversation today. In your book, Writing for Developers you discuss how blog posts can act as stepping stones to additional opportunities, including articles, podcasts, conference talks, and book deals.
[00:01:42] Can you walk us through what it takes to convert blog writing into bigger opportunities?
[00:01:48] Cynthia Dunlop: There's probably two different ways of that. One, there's the being recruited part, and then there's the looking for your own opportunities part. First let me talk about the being recruited part, and I've seen that from a couple different angle. I've seen my colleagues be recruited from, based on their blogs to speak at conferences, write books have some very nice career opportunities, et cetera.
[00:02:13] And then I've also been on the side of doing the recruiting. In my actual job, I help organize some conferences, the P99 Conf., which is about performance, and Monster Scale Summit, which is more about scaling data intensive applications. And we have our people, we have our open call for speakers that people that are on the speaker circuit are looking for.
[00:02:35] We also go to, our past community of speakers and people we know, because we always wanna have them back. But we always wanna find those new gems, those new people that are really going to excite our audience. And how do we find them? The first part is we go through searching through blogs because, who's written on something.
[00:02:50] We know they've already thought deeply about this topic. There's almost zero risk that it's going to end up being too light, too spammy, too product pitchy, et cetera, because they already have that topic. We know what angle they're going to take. They're known, and we can also, if it's been on Reddit, it's been on Hacker News and gotten a good reaction, we know that people respect this person's authority.
[00:03:12] So it's a very low-risk way of finding good people
[00:03:15] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So that's speaking opportunities and did you also mention books as one of those opportunities? How does that happen?
[00:03:23] Cynthia Dunlop: Yeah I have seen a couple people been scouted to do books from their blogs and speaking opportunities. There's a whole world of people in the publishing world called acquisitions editors, and they're basically talent scouts for books. So they'll go hunting around the various conferences.
[00:03:39] They'll attend the bigger conferences. They'll attend the online conferences. They'll keep an eye on Hacker News and some of the more topical subreddits in the fields that they work on. Keep an eye on their talent list, and if somebody looks interesting, they'll reach out. I think a lot of the book deals are actually publishers reaching out with an idea.
[00:03:58] They have an idea for a book that they think will sell, and they're actually looking for an author to write that book
[00:04:03] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Okay, so it's not just someone like me, for example, deciding I wanted to write a book on a particular topic and pitching the publisher with my topic. It might be the publisher wants to write a book on said topic and they'll see someone like me writing on that topic and match the author to that topic
[00:04:26] Cynthia Dunlop: Absolutely. We took the weird route. Of coming up with your own proposal and pitching it to the publisher is not the standard way, and I think that's probably the harder way. You need to convince them that, one, it's a good book to publish, and then two, that you're the person to publish it.
[00:04:41] Whereas otherwise, if they already have the idea that this is a book that's going to sell, you don't have to convince them of that first part
[00:04:48] Dr Genevieve Hayes: One thing I've heard about with the publishing industry is that publishers are only interested in authors who already have, hundreds of thousands of followers. But from what you're saying, it sounds like that isn't necessarily the case
[00:05:04] Cynthia Dunlop: I think it depends on the publisher. They all have different approaches, and I think different people within each of the publishers have different approaches. But one nice thing I've learned about the publishers is they have pretty sophisticated distribution systems. They know where the technical readers are.
[00:05:21] They have massive mailing lists. They have massive social media followings, so they know who buys books and who's interested in books. So if you don't have the following, they have a following, and if they think that you're going to speak well to their following, then that's a win for them
[00:05:37] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Okay. That's very interesting
[00:05:39] Cynthia Dunlop: I think if you were going to self-publish a book and you don't have a good following, then you're in a bad spot. But if you can jump onto the coattails of their following, then they're more focused on your ability to deliver a good book and actually get it done. I don't know that all the books get published that start from the book deals, so I think they wanna make sure that you're going to get it done before they invest time in you.
[00:06:03] Because it, costs a pretty good amount of money for them to publish a book between all the different editors. There's the acquisitions editor. At least with Manning, there's a development editor who once your book starts he or she's the person that ushers it through the process. There's also a technical editor or two who reads every word of every chapter, offers suggestions, makes, iterations on that.
[00:06:24] There's all the production crew, the people on the cover, the people that do the index. Lots of marketing teams.
[00:06:30] So there's all these little details, and it's cost just as much to put a very popular book on all those places as it does to put an unpopular book. So they'd rather get a good amount of popular books
[00:06:41] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Oh, wow. Now, there's a big difference between writing a 1,000-word blog post and a, 50,000-word-plus te- book. How do you know when you're ready to make that jump from blog post to book?
[00:06:57] Cynthia Dunlop: I think if you have the idea of the book, and you can't really get rid of that idea, then that's a sign. You thought of it, and it's your book. But if you're not sure, there's ways to get started without as much risk. You could say, commit to writing the first part of the book as blog posts, and, maybe you wanna do 30, 40, 50 pages in blog post form.
[00:07:20] That's not going to prevent any publisher from signing you. In fact, it might help you, attract a publisher, convince a publisher that there's a need for it. And at the same time, it lets you really test out what it feels like to have to write these things. Are you energized? Are you excited?
[00:07:34] "Oh, yeah, I need to get up, and I'm going to get up early, and I'm gonna work on this thing, and it's gonna be fun." Or is it just "Oh, gosh, this thing is hanging over my head already. I'm only 20 pages in. I can't do it." So I think it's a good trial run
[00:07:46] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah, that whole waking up extra early to write, that would be a non, nonstarter for me.
[00:07:51] Cynthia Dunlop: We're late. We had different times. Early in the morning was good for me, and then that coincided with some of the later times with my co-author,
[00:07:58] Dr Genevieve Hayes: You've mentioned different steps that you can take to go beyond writing blogs to bigger opportunities. So writing books, speaking at conferences. How does each of these steps compound your authority?
[00:08:10] Cynthia Dunlop: I think the rarer the opportunity is, the more putting it on your resume establishes your authority, so not too many people have written a book, so that's certainly a highlight. Conferences, it depends on the selectivity of the conference. But even if it's not selective, I think speaking at any conference opens the door to a lot of opportunities.
[00:08:29] Even if people don't see your talk, if the conference promotes you as a speaker, then people go oh, Genevieve, I saw her advertised for such and such. She's an expert on such and such." They might never hear your talk, but they've already see that some third party recognizes you as an expert, and that's a win.
[00:08:44] You might meet other speakers that are there, and even if you don't meet them at the time, it's a great excuse to connect with them later, reach out. The talk itself is a good opportunity to meet people who are interested in your topic. You can see exactly where people are surprised and interested, and people take out their phones and start taking photos of your slides, you know that's a really interesting part.
[00:09:06] If they start looking at their phones and dozing, then you know maybe you wanna cut that part next time. The feedback, the questions they have, that's probably inspiration for another series of posts or another talk, maybe even a book. If it's recorded, you might get a really nice professional video of yourself presenting that you can use for job applications other conference calls for speakers, et cetera
[00:09:30] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So you've got the benefit in how people perceive you. So for example, if you've written a book that looks really good if you've sp-spoken at a top conference, that is again gonna look really good. But there's also the benefits in the feedback that you're getting and just having that opportunity to interact with your audience live
[00:09:53] Cynthia Dunlop: I think it's invaluable feedback
[00:09:55] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So if a data professional came to you and said, "I wanna write a book within the next two years," what would you tell them to start doing today?
[00:10:03] Cynthia Dunlop: Find a co-author. That would be the first thing. It's a much better process if you have a co-author, someone to brainstorm with, commiserate with when you're frustrated with something someone to move it ahead when you're on vacation or you're sick or you just don't feel like doing anything.
[00:10:18] I've done books pretty much by myself, and it's a completely different experience if you have a co-author that you really like to collaborate with. That would be the first thing. The second thing, if we're allowed a second thing, would be to just think really hard about the topic. You want a topic that's going to stay fresh for...
[00:10:40] They're writing the book in the next two years, so it's probably not going to publish for three or four years. I think most people spend over a year writing the book. We did ours in six months, but most people spend over a year, and then there's probably another three to four months of production time before it actually goes to the printer.
[00:10:59] So it's quite a lead time. So you wanna make sure that the topic is still interesting at that time, and then you wanna also make sure that the topic's still interesting maybe two to three years past that time. Because you spend all this effort in writing a book, you don't want it to be outdated three months after it's published.
[00:11:19] You don't want it to be a how-to guide to how to use a certain version of certain software when there's no way that's still gonna be relevant, say, four years down the line
[00:11:27] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So that's it for today's conversation with Cynthia. If you haven't already, listen to our previous episode where we discussed how data scientists can use blog posts to position themselves as authorities in a world increasingly flooded with AI slop. Thanks for joining me again, Cynthia.
[00:11:47] Cynthia Dunlop: Thank you. Have a good day
[00:11:48] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And for those in the audience, thanks for listening.
[00:11:51] I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and this has been Value-Driven Data Science