From the course: Side Hustle Strategies for Data Science and Analytics Experts

Why you might want to be the editor of a book

From the course: Side Hustle Strategies for Data Science and Analytics Experts

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Why you might want to be the editor of a book

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- An editor? Yes! You'd be surprised at how you can use this role, which probably sounds like a senior role, to establish yourself. My very first book project started out as a two person project, but eventually involved five authors. In our desire to make the book comprehensive, we sought out world-class experts in various topics to help out. The higher the caliber of the existing team, the easier it was to recruit even more help. But, now that meant that someone had to deal with the phone calls, and emails, and meetings, that comes with a more complicated book project. I was the one to raise my hand, so the next thing you know, I was lead author. In essence I had become an editor. With more than a hundred years of combined experience represented in the author team, we were widely considered the definitive resource in our software user community. That was a real boost to our reputation. Since I was lead author, I got a bit more visibility, since I was the first person anyone would contact about the book. Of course it was more work to be lead author but it didn't require that I be the most experienced nor the most well known of the group. I just had to be willing to put in the effort. Some books are explicitly edited works. I've seen a variety of books like this and editors can produce a great book by assembling the expertise and writing of others. I contributed a chapter to a somewhat academic style book when I was the VP of a small analytics team. We had a particular strategy of integrating data mining and BI reporting. So we contributed to a book that had dozens of chapters on the subject. Rather than just writing a white paper and putting it on the corporate website, we wrote this peer review chapter, and then summarized it on the website in a blog post. I think it had much more credibility this way. The editor contributed just one chapter in this very large book. Her contribution was recruitment and organizing. Perhaps something like that seems a bit too ambitious, but there's an approach that you can take that is scaled down but similar. I've seen books that are essentially a collection of interviews of thought leaders. Again, the effort is in the recruitment and the organizing of the material. You don't need to be the famous expert as long as you're willing to work hard, recruit the experts, and win them over to your project.

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