Book of the week

Each week we invite a book author to DataTalks.Club to answer questions about their book and the topic it covers.

We don’t regularly host this event at the moment. If you know a book author and want to ask them questions, reach out to Alexey Grigorev - we can invite them.

Archive of past book discussions: datatalks.club/books.html

How it works

Join the #book-of-the-week channel in Slack
Ask as many questions as you’d like
The book authors answer questions from Monday till Thursday
On Friday, the authors decide who wins free copies of their book

Information for authors

Book of the week is an AMA-like event where the community asks authors questions about their books and the topics the books cover.

It’s not a live event. The interaction happens asynchronously in Slack, so you can answer questions at a time that is convenient for you.

If you’d like to take part, email Alexey at alexey@datatalks.club or find Alexey Grigorev in the DataTalks.Club Slack.

What we do

Promote the event in the DataTalks.Club newsletter
Announce the event internally in Slack
Give the community a place to ask questions during the week
Help select giveaway winners randomly if you prefer not to choose them yourself
Send a calendar invite to remind you to answer questions

DataTalks.Club has a mailing list with 120k subscribers and an average open rate of 30%, so more than 36,000 people can see the book announcement. The Slack community has 90,000 registered members, and more than 3,000 people are in the #book-of-the-week channel.

On average, authors get 10-20 questions per week.

What authors do

Join Slack at least once per day from Monday to Thursday and answer questions from the community
Reply in Slack threads so the discussion stays organized
On Friday, choose who wins free copies of the book
Provide 5 free ebooks for the community
Optionally, announce the event on social media

If you don’t want to answer some questions, that’s fine.

Winners can be selected randomly or based on the most interesting questions. If you want random selection, we can take care of it.

Ebooks are preferred because printed books can be difficult to ship. We already have agreements with Manning, O’Reilly, and Packt, so if your book is with one of these publishers, you don’t need to arrange anything separately. If your book is with another publisher, we’ll be happy to talk to their marketing team.

What we need from you

Your bio and a picture, or a link to a website where we can take them
Optionally, social media accounts such as Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, and your personal website
The book cover image and description, or a link to a website where we can take them
Optionally, links to the publisher’s page, book landing page, GitHub repository, or other supplemental materials

Publishing answers

Your Slack answers will be published on the DataTalks.Club website, so people can read them without logging in to Slack.

If you don’t want to publish your answers, or you’d like to remove or edit some of them, let us know.

You can look at previous discussions in the book archive.

Typical schedule

After the announcement, people start asking questions in Slack
From Monday to Thursday, come to Slack every day and answer questions
On Thursday, we’ll ask whether you want to select the winners yourself or use random selection
On Friday, we’ll announce the winners

Feedback from authors

Hi Alexey. We’re only part of the way through the week but I wanted to thank you for inviting me to be part of the DataTalks.Club book of the week. The questions in Slack have been super high quality and I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback via LinkedIn as well. I would highly recommend this format to any author. Thanks!

Mark Ryan, author of “Deep Learning with Structured Data”