Possibility of writing English C++ textbooks

I am Ryou Ezoe. I made my living by explaining the very latest C++ features in Japanese. I wrote two C++ books.

"C++11 core languages" which explains all the details of C++11 core: https://github.com/EzoeRyou/cpp-book

"Ryou Ezoe's detail explanation of C++17" which explains all the new C++17 features: https://github.com/EzoeRyou/cpp17book

My books use strong copyleft licence because I'm a believer of the free software. A concept defined by RMS. My last C++17 book was GPLv3 because I convinced the publisher and editor to release the source code of the book under the GPLv3 license. The github repository contains the markdown source file I wrote and the very same tex source code the publisher used to layout and print my book.

I'm writing in Japanese because it's the native language for me. I've never thought writing in English because: 1) English is not my native languages so my English is not great. 2) there are so many talanted native English speakers so I have no hope of competing with them.

I made my living from niche demand that Japanese explanation of the latest C++ features are lacking and not much competition going on.

Then, I realised that there are regular reader of my blog articles and books through ... machine translation!

This fact surprise me. grammatically, Japanese and English are way too much different so the machine translation between Japanese and English doesn't work well.

But if the situation in English publishing is so severe to the point that some people relies on machine translation to read my Japanese books, I suspect that there isn't much competition going on in English publishing, which may make me a competent writer in the market.

So I wrote an short English article for the overview of C++20 Range view.

The overview of C++20 Range view

It turns out writing English isn't that hard. There are minor grammatical errors here and there. But these errrors can be fixed by proofreading of natives. As for the writing speed, I spend more time on studying the new knowledge than actually writing the explanation, so English doesn't slow down the writing speed. For that, I think I can manage to write both Japanese and English in parallel for my next C++20 book.

So what do you think? Feel free to send your opinions. I'm available at email boostcpp@gmail.com or Twitter @EzoeRyou.