Start to Write the New Version of My Flask Book

← Back 2021/11/5

In March 2017, I start to write my first book, “Python Web Development with Flask“. Starting with this book, I dive into the Flask community and became a self-proclaimed Flask developer advocate in China. In the past four years, I published the Flask book and a Flask online tutorial, created a Flask community (HelloFlask), give a few talks about Flask at different conferences, contributed to a lot of Flask related projects on GitHub. Meanwhile, I also become a maintainer of Flask.

For now, the book has sold 15k copies (not including the pirated version :P), and I’ll start to write the second version of it. The key change in the new version will be the pages number. The first version has 704 pages, here is the picture compare to Miguel’s book “Flask Web Development”:

Flask Books

By the way, Miguel’s book is the first and best Flask book I have ever read, I learned Flask from it and learned how to write a good book. Thanks, Miguel!

Back to the topic. Too much content makes people fear to read and hard to carry, but it’s a perfect monitor riser, though. The first version comes with five example applications, I will keep only two of them. So, the new version will have about 450 pages.

Besides the normal improvements and updates, I will also improve some open-source projects that are involved in the book when writing the new version, here is the initial plan:

  • APIFlask: Finish all the chapters in the documentation (progress).
  • Bootstrap-Flask: Support Bootstrap 5 (progress)
  • Flask-CKEditor: Support CKEditor 5
  • Flask-WTF: Add support for multiple files validation

I enjoy writing a lot, but it’s very hard to make a living out of it since the book price in China is very low. For a book that has 704 pages, the price is ￥129 (approximately $20, although the actual sale price will be below $15). As the author, I will get 9% of the price, which means each sold book will bring me $1.5. However, I still want to try to become a full-time writer, as long as I can write one book per year. And I also have another book in progress (the one that has been delayed for two years…), “The Design and Development of Python Web API“, it will finish in 2022 as well.

I hope I can finish the new version of the Flask book at the end of this year, as it’s one of my three (unachieved) goals this year.