I have written two exam guides for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification, published under a pen name on Kindle Direct Publishing. People ask how long a book takes. The honest answer is: much longer than the writing.

The research is the book

Roughly seventy per cent of the time went to reading service documentation, building the examples, and confirming that a claim still held in the current version of the platform. Cloud documentation moves. A guide that is accurate in March is subtly wrong by September.

Structure beats prose in a study guide

Nobody reads a certification guide for pleasure. They read it under time pressure, the night before an exam, looking for one specific thing. So:

• Every chapter opens with what the exam actually asks
• Concepts appear before the services that implement them
• Cheat sheets live at the end of a chapter, never the start

Writing under a pen name

It changes the voice more than you would expect. The book is not mine to be clever in. Every stylistic instinct that would make my own writing recognisable is the wrong instinct here, and learning to suppress that is most of the craft.

The work is finished when it sounds like the person on the cover.