Beyond the Code
My first book project: From idea to KDP listing
Background
You might wonder why you should try it too. It’s fun and might even turn into a small passive income stream. Enjoy the journey. Especially for a Sci-Fi book, it’s interesting to extrapolate potential future scenarios. I looked at it almost from an engineering point of view. Story elements are product features. The first iteration is the pseudo-code or the outline. The implementation is each chapter. Moving towards MVP v1 by covering all key story elements. Refactoring before launch to keep everything as consistent as possible. User testing with first readers and iterating. Overall striving for the best possible user experience given the constraints of the project setting. Now Beyond the Code is the (non-perfect) result of my first book project.
The idea of writing a book has been in the back of my mind for a long time. During the first Covid lockdowns, I thought about it more concretely. Then an outline and character ideas became clearer. What pushed me to really do it was actually the inspiring drive of my neighbor. He is over 80 years old and started painting and writing a book about art history.
As time is constrained I decided to view it more like a time-boxed creative project where I would be able to take over the role of an architect, but I would not be the builder. Going from idea to launch of the book via KDP was an interesting and fun journey and we’re still learning and improving.
Links (not affiliate links) to the resources I relied on to bring the idea to life:
- Illustrations and book cover: https://pro.fiverr.com/freelancers/germancreative
- Website: https://www.strikingly.com
- Ghostwriters: https://theurbanwriters.com
- Self-publishing: https://kdp.amazon.com
- Register literary works: https://www.copyright.gov/registration/literary-works
Learning here is to spend enough time with sample projects to find the right freelancers who understand what you aim to do and can deliver high enough quality within budget constraints, especially with the ghostwriter. The Urban Writers provide a great pool of ghostwriters and packages can even include the editing process before the book goes into self-publishing via KDP.
Story inspirations
We wanted to blend futuristic ideas with a love story. We took inspiration mostly from Lex Fridman, Elon Musk, Yann LeCun, “I, Robot” and “Matrix”. How will we interface with AIs, move, live, fight, communicate, and love?
One thought from Yann LeCun resonates when he says: “We will design AI to be like the supersmart-but-non-dominating staff member.” So the systems we imagine in the book are superintelligent (= smarter than humans) but do not necessarily want to dominate humans. Maybe instead they actually want to understand and learn more from humans? Would we be able to contain such systems in sandboxes or will they eventually break into every digital device?
Elon Musk’s genius chipped in ideas for transportation (Hyperloop), human-machine interface (Neuralink), and space colonization (SpaceX). In a less story-centric setting and with more time we would have liked to explore how products/businesses, societies, and politics might evolve too. What happens when humanoid robots take over eventually all manual human labor and when the next generations of LLMs solve all office tasks? How will we deal with climate change, energy supply, and population growth?
Our main character Lex Richardson is a podcaster like Lex Fridman and a movement starts to form.
We’ll take you on a journey with Lex and Elyza, an ordinary human and a genetically enhanced superhuman, traveling with Hyperloops, Moon mining, war & secrets, and friendships & love.
Amazon
Timeline
- 1st Nov 2023: E-Book
- 1st Dec 2023: 1st Paperback
- 1st Jan 2024: Blog
- 1st Feb 2024: 2nd Paperback edition
