In 2011, my client SAS hired me to turn the best posts from its Data Roundtable blog into a proper book. At that point, I ran Motion Publishing. The book dropped in September of that year. 101 Lightbulb Moments in Data Management: Tales from the Data Roundtable was never going to be a best-seller, but its results pleased SAS. (My primary client contact sang my praises.) In today’s post, I’ll talk about how that experience informed Racket’s unique, data-centric approach to researching, writing, and publishing non-fiction books.

Basically, everything.

Hello, Data

As the book’s title implies, it contains 101 blog posts on the umbrella topic of data management. Within that broad category, however, I felt compelled to track a number of dimensions. They included:

• The number of posts by author.
• The number of posts by date.
• The number of posts by subcategory.

When I agreed to take on the SAS project, I wanted to easily answer questions and avoid potential editorial problems down the road. For example, I didn’t want SAS to complain after I had compiled the manuscript that it contained too many posts from yours truly or not enough about data governance. Ditto for too many older posts and not enough recent ones. You get my drift. Transparency, baby.

As you might suspect, I found the idea of scrolling through a 50,000-word manuscript to answer those simple questions absolutely abhorrent.

The AI Razor

Excel to the Rescue

To meticulously track the book’s content, I downloaded all of the SAS Data Roundtable blog posts into an XML file and created a simple spreadsheet. I then used a pivot table and pivot chart to carefully select—and track—the posts for inclusion. In the end, I was able to work efficiently and avoid messy rework.¹

As much as you can, quantify your research efforts before you begin writing your manuscript.

Upgrading the Tech

At the time, Notion didn’t exist, much less RacketHub. No-code tools hadn’t matured that much. If they did, then I’m sure that I would have used them. Now that they have, Excel no longer makes sense. To this end, here’s a partially blurred screenshot of resources by chapter for the fifth Racket title:

RH34: RacketHub Research Tracker

I have removed the book’s chapter titles. 

Tracking resources by chapter allows for more efficient work and the rapid identification of potential issues. As you can see from the simple Notion chart above, for the last chapter, we lack sufficient resources to start writing. All non-fiction writers need to support their arguments with facts, statistics, and expert opinions. To this end, eight is not nearly enough for a proper book chapter. For the chapters containing 50 or 60 resources, though, we’ve got plenty to work with—maybe even a bit too much.

Does this level of rigor sound like too much effort? It isn’t, especially considering the upside: the odds that we’ll need a time-consuming and expensive developmental edit are precisely zero.

What You Need to Know

Whether you use Notion or not to manage your book project, it behooves you to embrace data and contemporary tools as you research and write it.

1. A few months later, I wrote a blog post about it for SAS but, for the life of me, I can’t find it.