Two Steps I Missed When Writing Street-Smart Coding

25 Nov 2025 #book

Ever had that moment after turning in an exam when all the answers suddenly hit you? Too late!

OK, something similar has happened after launching Street-Smart Coding, my latest book.

I’ve realized I missed two key actions before writing and launching it:

#1. Write a one-liner.

Writing a book is hard. But summarizing it into one line is harder.

That one-liner makes marketing easier.

This week I discovered Jose Saramago’s The Stone Raft. Its one-liner? “One day, quite inexplicably, the Iberian Peninsula simply breaks free from the European continent and begins to drift as if it were a sort of stone raft.” Boom! Who doesn’t want to read the book after that?

That’s a fiction book. But the principle applies to non-fiction too.

#2. Follow the “same but different” framework.

Salwa Emerson, an author and ghostwriter, shared the “same but different” framework in a LinkedIn post.

The goal is to answer, “My book is the same as <insert book>, but different because <reason>.”

Again, this comes from traditional publishing, where books are placed next to hits. Hits show there’s market demand for the topic. But we can follow it for non-fiction too.

And applied to my book: Street-Smart Coding is like The Pragmatic Programmer but different because it covers soft, unexpected skills in a choose-your-own-adventure style.