9 ms·

I canceled my book deal

• kmoser 10mo ago
  I'm surprised the contract didn't obligate you to return most or all of the advance after canceling.
  • onraglanroad 10mo ago
    The first half of the advance was to be paid after the first third was approved. They never got to that point.
  • metaphor 10mo ago
    I don't think he ever got the first half of the advance...cherry-picking from the TFA: > They offered a $5000 advance with the first half paid out when they approve of the first third of the book and the second half when they accept the final manuscript for publication. > I continued to get further behind on delivering my revised draft of the first 1/3. > Around this time, there was a possibility of me changing jobs. Oh, and my wedding was coming up. That was the final nail in the coffin. > There were too many things going on and I didn't enjoy working on the book anymore, so what is the point? I made up my mind to ask to freeze the project. > They agreed.
• websiteapi 10mo ago
  "All of our future books will involve AI."
  • SoftTalker 10mo ago
    In the era of AI, who is going to buy books?
• banbangtuth 10mo ago
  Wow this is the first time I encountered this blog! Subscribed!
• threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  I don’t see the publisher doing anything wrong. You “froze” the contract instead of telling them you intended to stop all together and it also seems like you didn’t return their advance.
  • smlavine 10mo ago
    It says the first half of the advance would be paid on approval of the first third of the book. It also says that the first third of the book was never submitted. So I don't think the advance was ever paid out.
  • azhenley 10mo ago
    You are reading a lot of things that I didn't say. The publisher didn't do anything "wrong". It was their suggestion to freeze it instead of cancel immediately. I didn't intend on giving up on the book even then. I didn't return the advance because I never received the advance.
    • threethirtytwo 10mo ago
      ah my mistake then. Looks like either party didn't do anything wrong.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
• milancurcic 10mo ago
  Thanks for sharing. I always enjoy reading author-publisher process articles as they get to the true behind the scenes story. I can relate to most things mentioned, and the terms seem identical to what I had when writing Modern Fortran with Manning. I also started with the intent to write for experts, but the publisher pushed for targeting beginners. The author can concede or (usually) give up the project. One important aspect to this is that a typical first-book technical author knows well the subject matter, and sometimes knows how to write too (but usually not, as was my case), but does not know how to edit, typeset, publish, market, and sell well. That's what the publisher knows best. And of course, they want sales, and they understand that overall beginner books sell better than advanced/expert level books. I encourage the author to continue writing and self-publish, and at a later time a publisher come to package and market a mostly finished product.
• syntaxing 10mo ago
  This was quite a fun read and I appreciate the insight. A couple of my peers have suggested me to write a “stuff you should know” book. Some technical in nature (like linear algebra. It blows my mind how many engineers hardware or software do not understand linear algebra) and some not technical (why stuff cost the way they do. “Why does this cost $200 when I can make it for $20!”). But reading your post was encouraging to see that self publishing for fun might be the way to go. Though I guess people would argue you can just ask a LLM now instead of reading my book.
  • soperj 10mo ago
    that'll only be the case if you actually write the book so that the LLMs have that info. Until then they can't regurgitate your know-how.
  • jimnotgym 10mo ago
    I think I could ask an LLM to explain linear algebra. I think it would be less good at the 'here are some things you should know' aspect. One reason for this is that people might not ask, but the LLM might not agree with your list anyway. I think there is still a place for a book here. I think I might buy a book (or may have done 10 years ago when I was still coding) of things you should know (especially from a respected publisher), that being a longer form book I could work through over time.
  • dbalatero 10mo ago
    Why should I know linear algebra, ooc?
  • nickpsecurity 10mo ago
    Udemy and Coursera both have Math for Machine Learning courses that start with Linear Algebra. Then, Calculus and Probability and Statistics. They're often $25-50. You might want to look at their outlines to see what they're teaching. Then, decide if you can do something similar and/or cheaper.
  • bigstrat2003 10mo ago
    > Though I guess people would argue you can just ask a LLM now instead of reading my book. I would certainly not argue that. LLMs do not understand anything, and are thus prone to non-deterministic inaccuracies in their output. Due to that, I think it is extremely foolish to use one for learning unfamiliar topics. Give me a book every time, because (if it's a good book) I am guaranteed to actually learn something. Not so with LLMs.
• rasengan0 10mo ago
  >"All of our future books will involve AI." >It is antithetical to the premise of the book (classic programming projects!) that they agreed to publish. I hope this trend is not industry wide. A publisher chasing fads and trends over enduring quality, so sad. I wish I knew who the publisher was to avoid but I can foresee their pivot to AI authors with titles like "From Zero to Hero, ChatGPT 5.2 Top Prompting Secrets for Dummies"
  • hluska 10mo ago
    I’ve never worked in technical publishing but I have a few acquaintances who do. Adding chapters on AI is pretty close to industry wide for new writers. Experienced writers with sales figures have a lot more freedom. The thing is, it’s not about getting chapters published on AI. The publishers are keenly aware that AI is using their content to steal their market and so anything they publish on AI will be obsolete before the final manuscript is published. It’s about getting potentially difficult first time authors to quit before their first third gets approved - that’s when the author is owed their first advance. It’s a lot easier to slaughter sheep if the most docile select themselves.
  • p_ing 10mo ago
    Technical books don't sell well to begin with. I've written a couple w/ a major publisher, it never paid back the RAM I needed to purchase to run the lab environment. Publishers are going to demand chasing the hot-new-thing which will most likely be irrelevant by the time the book is on the shelf. "How to write x86 ASM... with the Copilot Desktop app! - Build your bootloader in 15 seconds!"
  • DrewADesign 10mo ago
    Industry-wide? Looks damn near pan-industry to me
    • asveikau 10mo ago
      And most normal people are fed up with it. Nobody understands why most of their apps suddenly have chatbots in them now.
• miyoji 10mo ago
  This is why most publishers won't even talk to you unless you have a finished manuscript already, but I appreciated this look into a different situation. I hope you finish the book. I would buy it.
  • squirrel 10mo ago
    This is not true for business books like mine. It's vital to write a proposal first in that world; publishers want to influence the content (as in the OP article). I think the same is true for tech books but I don't know as I haven't written one. A novel or other fiction is the opposite; there you do have to write the whole thing first.
  • WoodenChair 10mo ago
    > This is why most publishers won't even talk to you unless you have a finished manuscript already This is absolutely not true in the world of technical publishing. I mean books published with publishers like O'Reilly, Manning, No Starch, etc. Usually you come to them with just a proposal and a couple chapters or even just a proposal. Or their acquisition editors actually reach out to you. It's the exception (not quite rare, but definitely less than 20% of books) that comes to them with a finished manuscript. I did that with my last book. I've published 5 technical books across three different technical publishers, so I know a bit about this business... I'm just replying to this comment to not discourage people who just have an idea and not a finished book yet but have the motivation to finish and want to get a deal.
• daedrdev 10mo ago
  Something like 80 percent of published books with an advance never even make back their advance, in case you were wondering why royalties are so low.
• aaronblohowiak 10mo ago
  The idea of doing a thing (or having done the thing) and the actual DOING of the thing are very different. See this a lot where people think they want to be a woodworker or a baseball player or an author, but the actual _work_ of sweeping dust, doing 200 hits a day off a tee or grinding out words by deadlines are not as appealing as the halo or mystique of the final product once made the activity seem. this doubles on the effect that humans are terrible at predicting what will make us happy. so, i am glad this author was self aware enough to follow their bliss, but the last paragraph made me wonder if their introspection was fully resolved.
  • JoeAltmaier 10mo ago
    Every writing group has that person the keeps restarting their project, or abandoning a project when it gets hard, to start another one with another 'great' idea. The upshot is, they don't want to do the hard part - continuity editing, developmental editing, hell, just finishing the dang thing. Even the boring chapters you didn't really have any idea what was going to go on there. Writing, as an occupation, is a whole lotta schmoozing, attending conferences, volunteering, promoting. Maybe 1 month of writing a year, for 11 months of the hard stuff. I have a buddy who says he always wanted to start a bar. I said, You like budgeting? Taxes? Hiring? Firing? Stocking? Remodeling? Promoting? Nah; turns out, he just likes to hang out in bars. The only reason you start a business is, because you like to run a business. The only reason you become a writer is, because you like the business of writing.
  • fantasizr 10mo ago
    there was a funny joke that chatgpt removes the critical part of being a writer which is hours staring at a blank screen, then deleting everything you've done on a weekly basis.
• zkmon 10mo ago
  This story is a prototype of thousands of other stories going on right now. Of course we can't blame the book businesses. They are in survival struggle. They have no clue what to do. Every business is barely holding onto whatever that might keep them in business. AI is bad, but it is the new mafia in the town. Just erase all your beliefs instincts and make friends with it. Maybe write a book about "Classic projects using AI", whether it makes sense or not. And use AI to write that.
• spooneybarger 10mo ago
  This sounds like my experience with a "major" technical publisher except we managed to get to the end. I'd say that almost no one should work with the major technical publishers more than once. There's some good basic skills you learn but otherwise, they contribute very little that you couldn't get done on your own.
• k__ 10mo ago
  Somehow, I miss the time when I was writing a book. It's nice to do the work and research and also nice to refine. Getting money later without doing much anymore was also cool. But my consecutive attempts of writing a book failed because of my ADHD and missing guidance. I can't do employment, but I really need someone to "nag" me 2-3 times a month to keep focus.
• legitster 10mo ago
  Traditional publishing is a weird world. They have the shortsightedness to want to force AI into everything. But also it sounds like they still assigned human technical editors who took the job seriously.
• nospice 10mo ago
  I am honestly a bit puzzled by this description and I wish they had named the publisher. I'm fairly familiar with this space and the usual experience with tech publishers is that they don't get all that invested in what they publish because 99% of technical books sell somewhere between 500-5,000 copies. That's barely enough to pay the copyeditor to do the bare minimum (often paying attention only for the first couple of chapters), then pay the layout guy, then the proofreader. The usual accounts I've heard from my friends who published with Wiley, Addison-Wesley, or O'Reilly is that they sign up, get some in-depth feedback on the first couple of chapters, and then are on their own. I've never heard of a tech publisher exercising this level of creative control. I don't doubt that this happened, but it just sounds out of the ordinary.
  • OGEnthusiast 10mo ago
    > I am honestly a bit puzzled by this description and I wish they had named the publisher. Does it matter which exact one if all the publisher oligarchs behave exactly the same?
    • nospice 10mo ago
      Yes, because as far as I know, they don't behave like that.
    • qarl 10mo ago
      He wants more information because the story doesn't ring true, in his experience.
  • antirez 10mo ago
    The 500 - 5000 figure, which is correct, is why most folks should instead self publish via KDP. 70% royalties mean you can get 10-50k easily with an average book. If the book is a success, you can switch career to a full time author if you wish. All this with full creative freedom. Many years ago, I canceled my Redis book for a large publisher for similar reasons to the OP: too many "do it this way" requests.
    • 10mo ago
• atlasunshrugged 10mo ago
  I appreciate you sharing this! I just published my first book (nothing about programming, its about how the nation of Estonia modernized post re-independence and became a tech/e-gov hub in a single generation) and I can sympathize with a lot of this. My experience was a bit different -- I also knew the advance was going to be nothing and had a day job so I said I didn't need one (which was a relief for them as I was with a smaller publisher) and instead asked for more books to give away and some other contract terms. It took many months of negotiating to finalize the agreement and then they wanted the manuscript in ~7 months from contract signing. I guess they also assumed that I'd miss at least one deadline but instead I took a bunch of time off to get it done. I think the most important lesson for me is that book publishing, unless you're focused on trying to be the top 1% (maybe even .1%) in a popular category, is not going to be very lucrative, especially with a publisher that takes a major cut. It's easier than ever to go direct, in my case because I had a niche book and I wasn't doing it for money, I valued the prestige (or perceived prestige anyways) of having a book with a name brand publisher as I thought it'd be more helpful for my career in other ways, and candidly was mostly a passion project that I didn't feel strongly about monetizing! If any folks want to talk about nonfiction publishing, I'm always happy to chat as many people were incredibly generous with their time for me and I'd like to try to pay it forward.
  • ipython 10mo ago
    What’s the name of your book? That sounds super interesting
    • RealityVoid 10mo ago
      Was wondering the same and went stalking in the profile. They named it a couple of days ago[1], apparently it's called Rebooting a nation 1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398265
    • raybb 10mo ago
      Looks like this is the book: https://www.rebootinganation.com/ https://www.rebootinganation.com/ Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution Paperback by Joel Burke
• barishnamazov 10mo ago
  Thanks for sharing! I have been dreaming of writing (or better yet, finding!) a similar book for a couple years now. A hands-on guide that peels back the layers of abstraction to teach how things actually work under the hood by building them yourself. I hope one of us gets to it one day :-)
• apt-apt-apt-apt 10mo ago
  "12% of total sales ..." Me: That doesn't sound too bad! They keep 12% of the profit, leaving him 88%! ".. and then 15% [after that]" This reminds me of the scene in Queen of the South. FL (female lead) is new to power, negotiating some deal. Guy: How much? FL: Unsure how much to take 10%. Guy: Thinking her cut is only 10%, seeing her as weak Oh.. heh. FL: Detects her mistake For you. Guy: Face gets red, angry But.. but..
• w10-1 10mo ago
  Writing for publication is a ridiculous amount of work, smoothing and digesting to the point of pablum, because it's just hard to please everybody. Now that LLM's can tailor to chapter-level discussions, why write? Still, that's what it takes to reach N > friends+students. It's beyond ironic that AI empowerment is leading actual creators to stop creating. Books don't make sense any more, and your pet open source project will be delivered mainly via LLM's that conceal your authorship and voice and bastardize the code. Ideas form through packaging insight for others. Where's the incentive otherwise?
  • carlosjobim 10mo ago
    When you have original information that hasn't been released anywhere else in the world, why would a book be a bad choice?
• _lex 10mo ago
  You're witnessing a collapse of demand. Do not ignore it - though it may not be permanent.
• 578_Observer 10mo ago
  Reading the full context, this is a textbook case of a "Failed Pivot" driven by investors (the publisher). As a banker, I see the "Advance" not as a loan, but as an Option Fee paid for the author's future output. The publisher tried to exercise that option to force a pivot: "Inject AI into this classic book." They tried to turn a "Shinise" (classic craftsmanship) product into a "Trend" product. The author refused to dilute the quality, so the deal fell through. Keeping the advance is financially justified. The "R&D" failed not because of the engineer's laziness, but because the stakeholders demanded a feature (AI) that broke the product's architecture. In finance, if the VC forces a bad pivot and the startup fails, the founder doesn't pay back the seed money.
  • Gooblebrai 10mo ago
    Do they have to return the Advance in this case? Is there any case where it makes sense fo reject the Advance?
    • 578_Observer 10mo ago
      It depends on the contract, but generally, if the author worked in "Good Faith" (did the work legitimately) and the project was cancelled due to the client's strategic shift, the advance is usually non-refundable. The advance pays for the time already spent. If I hire a carpenter to build a table, and halfway through I say "Stop, I want a chair instead," I still have to pay for the half-table he built.
      • brianwawok 10mo ago
        If the carpenter took 1/3 of the project quote, built half a table, and decided to quit and join the circus, would he keep the fee? For a carpenter it would be a small claims court, for this it’s a gift. Which is weird.
        • 578_Observer 10mo ago
          I love the circus analogy! That made me chuckle. You are right—if the carpenter just ran away, he would usually be sued. But in this specific case, the client (publisher) agreed to let him go. It’s more like: The carpenter said "I'm quitting to join the circus," and the client said, "Fine, keep the deposit, just leave." In finance, we call this a "Write-off" to maintain relationships or avoid legal costs. It seems the publisher decided it wasn't worth fighting over.
• testing22321 10mo ago
  I’ve self published a few books now on Amazon. I put $0 down, they take care of everything and I get a deposit into my account every month. I’m doing it again soon for my next book. It’s fantastic, though having a following online is helpful to get the word out
  • firesteelrain 10mo ago
    Care to share links to your books?
  • yndoendo 10mo ago
    You have to many me to engage with Amazon. I will not spend a penny of my personal income to enrich the deplorable Jeff Bezos. Amazon and companies like them must be broken up because they harm the producers and consumers with dictating buying and selling pricinf.
• redsymbol 10mo ago
  I had written and self-published three books, and in 2024 decided to publish the most successful one with O'Reilly. It went up for sale in December 2024. The whole experience was wonderful. I had basically none of the problems that this fellow experienced with his publisher, and I am delighted about how it went. I did some things differently. For one, I had already been selling the book on my own for a few years, and was essentially on the 3rd self-published edition. Because of this, they were able to see what the almost-finished product was. I told them I would not make massive changes to the book, nor would I contort it to the AI trend (the book barely mentions AI at all), and they never pressured me once. Their biggest contribution was their team of editors. This book has code on just about every page. I had 3 technical editors go through it, finding many bugs. How many? Let's just say "plenty". And the feedback from the non-technical editors was, to my surprise, even more valuable. Holy crap, I cannot express to you how much they improved the book. There were several of these folks (I had no idea there were so many different specialties for editors), and all of them were great. (They also accepted my viewpoint when I disagreed with them, immediately, every time. The final published version of the book was 100% my own words.) From all of that, I made improvements on what must have been almost every page, and rewrote two chapters from scratch. I also added a new chapter (I volunteered for it, no one at any point pressured me to do that). The result was making a book that IMO is at least twice as good as what I was able to accomplish on my own. I do not resonate with the article author's comments about compensation. He negotiated a pretty good deal, I think; it's not realistic to get much better than what he did, since the publisher is a business with their own expenses to pay, etc. I was pretty disciplined about meeting deadlines that we agreed to for certain milestones. That helped my relationship with the publisher, obviously. All in all, it was a great experience, and I am glad I did it this way. Reading the article, it sounds like my publisher (oreilly) was better to work with than his, but I think he could have done some things differently also. In the end, though, I agree with him that it was best to walk away in his situation.
  • impendia 10mo ago
    Did they let you choose the animal to appear on the cover?
    • 10mo ago
• analogpixel 10mo ago
  I would have 100% bought the book the author initially pitched. I could do without the junk the publisher wanted him to add, and really it would have probably caused me to not buy the book. I've come to hate every cookbook that starts with 100 pages of here is a tour of my pantry, which sounds a lot like, here is how to use pip!
  • bachmeier 10mo ago
    Honestly, I wouldn't consider publishing a book if it didn't have that information. There's no reason to give up half or more of the potential market for a book because it's arbitrarily pitched at advanced users. Assuming the customer knows how to use pip would be crazy.
    • analogpixel 10mo ago
      Honestly I don't want to buy books that pander to the lowest common denominator so the author can make more money.
  • JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > I've come to hate every cookbook that starts with 100 pages of here is a tour of my pantry To each their own. As someone who learned to cook as an adult, I’ve appreciated seeing both what someone has and what nonsense I own that they manage just fine without.
  • skibidithink 10mo ago
    Just skip the chapter?
    • analogpixel 10mo ago
      It uses up the preview in amazon, so you can't actually see the recipes in the book or if the recipes actually have pictures. All you can see is the default, here is my pantry. Another bonus feature, would be to remove: breakfast, appetizers, and salads from all cook books, or put them in the back where no one needs to look at them. Although I have found that cookbooks that don't include the useless fluff to pad the book out are usually much better, like the cookbooks from Milkstreet or Love and Lemons, So I guess it's actually a decent way to just filter out all the crap books.
• WoodenChair 10mo ago
  Ironically, I was working on a book with a similar concept in the same time frame that came out as "Computer Science from Scratch: Interpreters, Computer Art, Emulators, and ML in Python" with No Starch Press a couple months ago. Like Austin's book it contains a CHIP8 chapter and a couple chapters on making a programming language. The difference with regards to his experience and my experience in writing it with a traditional publisher, is that I was an experienced author so I felt comfortable finishing the entire book first before shopping it around to publishers. I didn't want too much scrutiny around the core concept and I was getting similar signals of "every chapter must have AI." I wrote a similar blog post a month ago describing the process of creating the book and getting it published called "Writing Computer Science from Scratch": https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/writing-computer-science-from-scratch.html https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/writing-computer... Some in this thread have wondered what publisher Austin was working with. Based on my experience working with three different technical publishers and the setup and terms Austin was offered, my educated guess would be Manning. I will critique the blog post a little bit. It's presented as a critique of the experience of working with the publisher, but ultimately I'm reading between the lines that the book failed because he was missing deadlines. He wrote that "life got in the way" and I think he lost his motivation only partially because the publisher wanted AI in more of the book. Many of the trials he had along the way: dealing with a development editor who wants to tailor your style to a particular audience, a technical editor who needs a couple chapters to warmup, back and forth on the proposal, etc. these are all really par for the course when writing a technical book. Ultimately you have to be self-motivated to finish because of course the development editor, technical editor, etc are going to disagree with you from time to time and try to push you in different directions. If that alone is so demotivating to you, it's just not for you to work with a publisher. PS I think his blog is really good and he should think about self publishing under a time frame and terms he is more comfortable with.
  • firesteelrain 10mo ago
    I came away with the same impression. I was less blaming the publisher and more about life getting in the way with the author
  • ghaff 10mo ago
• egorfine 10mo ago
  > "All of our future books will involve AI." What an incredible take. It is both so wrong on so many levels and also technically correct, akin to saying "All of our future books will involve spellchecker." I hate it.
• didip 10mo ago
  You didn’t share the complete deal details but just from what you shared, it seems like the payout is not worth it for this big of an effort. What if you self publish yourself using Amazon toolings? Will the numbers be worse? At least you will be in charge of your own quality and deadlines.
  • bruce511 10mo ago
    For most books, but technical non-fiction in particular, the payout isn't nearly worth enough for the effort. And by "most" there I mean "all". Yes, there are exceptions, but those exceptions prove the rule. I've written 2 technical books, for incredibly niche audiences, where the total number of potential buyers is numbered in the low thousands. I self published as a PDF. and charge $200 a copy, of which I keep $200. It's -marginally- worth it. But the hourly rate is much lower than my day job. The marketing benefit (as it affects my actual business in the same field) is likely real, but hard to measure. Still, having "written the book" opens doors, and brings credibility.
    • levocardia 10mo ago
      Disagree, a blog that gets tens of thousands of unique visitors could clear huge numbers on KDP. Maybe your niche is too narrow (probably, given your TAM is in the thousands) but this post is about "timeless programming projects" and is going to be extremely broad. The number of hits to the blog is itself an indicator of a very big and very eager potential market.
    • jimnotgym 10mo ago
      A mentor once told me, 'half of the effect of marketing is hard to measure, the other half you have no idea'
    • uxcolumbo 10mo ago
      Do you have any links to your books? Can't see them in your profile.
• kevmo 10mo ago
  I killed a book deal I had for this book I mostly finished: https://kevmo.io/zero-to-code/ https://kevmo.io/zero-to-code/ I inked the deal in 2023, but shortly after felt like the market was too dead for newbies. When I initially removed the website for the book, I got a small wave of complaints, so I guess some folks still found it helpful.
• jdlshore 10mo ago
  Published author here (through O’Reilly, twice). A lot of people seem to be taking this as an indictment of the publisher. What I’m reading, though, is that the author didn’t make time to write the book and then lost interest. All the rest is normal stuff that happens when writing a book for a publisher. The author did a good job of standing up for themself and their vision, but a poor job of, you know, writing an actual book. The publisher expended time and money on the author and got nothing in return. This isn’t surprising, and it’s why first-time author royalties are so low.
  • crystal_revenge 10mo ago
    I've also authored multiple technical books and had the exact same reaction. While writing I have had similar feeling as the author to publisher/editor comments, especially related to: > The unhelpful feedback was a consistent push to dumb down the book (which I don't think is particularly complex but I do like to leave things for the reader to try) to appease a broader audience and to mellow out my personal voice. I also remember being very frustrated at times with the editor needing things "dumbed down". I used to get very annoyed and think "didn't you pay attention! We covered that!" But then I realized: If I can make this easy to understand by a fairly non-technical editor at a first pass, it absolutely will make this book better for the reader. Publishers have a lot of experience publishing books, so I've learned that their advice is often not bad. There was also plenty of advice from the editors I vehemently didn't agree with, so I pushed back and quickly realized: publishers need you more than you need them, so very often you do get final say. But you still have to actually write the book. Book writing is hard, and a much more complex process than writing blog posts. Personally I feel all the editorial feedback I've gotten over the years has made not only my books better, but also has really pushed my writing to be higher quality.
  • dpark 10mo ago
    > the author didn’t make time to write the book and then lost interest That was my read as well. The book deal fell apart because the author never wrote most of the book.
  • johnyzee 10mo ago
    That's how I read this too. The publisher invested a non-trivial amount of work and was left with nothing, for no better reason than the author changed their mind. From the tone of the post, the author seems to not realize or care.
• henry_flower 10mo ago
  That was super interesting! I think you should self-publish. With your existing audience, you'd sell plenty of copies, and nobody would push "AI" into your work.
  • azhenley 10mo ago
    I'm on it!
• koalacola 10mo ago
  AI slop
• sedatk 10mo ago
  I'm glad that I released my book in 2022 before AI-hype took off. I'm familiar with the type of publisher mentioned in the article too. Those are very strict in their format and content guidelines, and I had also felt that such constraints were limiting at times. I can relate. But, I also learned a lot from the process, and in the end, my book got fantastic feedback. It became one of the print bestsellers in 2022, and got translated to many languages. I've found the whole experience positive. But, I totally understand author's reasoning, and it's one of the reasons I want to explore different publishers as I want to deviate from writing strictly technical books.
• crote 10mo ago
  > Why buy this book when ChatGPT can generate the same style of tutorial for ANY project that is customized to you? Isn't it obvious? Because the ChatGPT output wouldn't be reviewed! You buy books like these exactly because they are written by a professional, who has taken the time to divide it up into easily digestible chunks which form a coherent narrative, with runnable intermediate stages in-between. For example, I expect a raytracing project to start with simple ray casting of single-color objects. After that it can add things like lights and Blinn-Phong shading, progress with Whitted-style recursive raytracing for the shiny reflections and transparent objects, then progress to modern path tracing with things like BRDFs, and end up with BVHs to make it not horribly slow. You can stop at any point and still end up with a functional raytracer, and the added value of each step is immediately obvious to the reader. There's just no way in hell ChatGPT at its current level is going to guide you flawlessly through all of that if you start with a simple "I want to build a raytracer" prompt!
  • YouAreWRONGtoo 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • WoodenChair 10mo ago
    Absolutely. And further because when you prompt ChatGPT as you write your ray tracer you don't know what the important things to ask are. Sure, you can get their with enough prompts of "what should I be asking you" or "explain to me the basics" of so and so. But the point of the book is all of that work has already been done for you in a vetted way.
    • p1esk 10mo ago
      If something is not clear in the book, can I ask it to explain it to me?
      • WoodenChair 10mo ago
        No but an LLM is a great assistant to reading a book. In fact some eReader interfaces have started to include them. Best of both worlds.
• neilv 10mo ago
  > Cons of a publisher: [...] they actually do little to no marketing of your book. Unless the publisher has already written off a book, don't they have incentive to market it? There are some low-cost things you can do to market a book, and they reportedly make the difference between no sales, and some or many sales. And a publisher can learn the currently effective marketing methods, and then apply that skill across books of many authors.
  • levocardia 10mo ago
    No, their incentive is to wait and see what books are taking off, then pile on the money when they know it's already a winner. Today, unproven authors are expected to do their own marketing.
    • neilv 10mo ago
      For the marketing that has significant costs (e.g., paying for ads, paying for show appearances, paying other influencers to plug, making quality videos for social media, travel for events). But it costs almost nothing to do ARC readers for reviews and ratings, and it's free to time things for the Kindle store algorithm. You just have to know to do it, when. And there's some other "free" marketing that publishers should have automated by now, because they can amortize that across many book releases.
• rahulrav 10mo ago
  I would have purchased your book ! I just wanted to say thank you for writing (your blog). It is a joy to read.
• conartist6 10mo ago
  That sounds like 2025. Everything is "required" to be about AI. Gooodbyee you silly year!
• reactordev 10mo ago
  Sounds like your publisher was trying to just take your work and sell it. Giving you the least amount you’ll agree to. Self publishing is the way. The internet is your Barnes & Noble. Finish the book and publish it yourself. Sell it for $20. Market it. Have peace.
  • dpark 10mo ago
    > Sounds like your publisher was trying to just take your work and sell it. Giving you the least amount you’ll agree to. That’s literally what a publisher does.
    • reactordev 10mo ago
      I work in games, I know how publishing works. My point was about the pay. For us, that equation is flipped.
• mdavid626 10mo ago
  I'd definitely buy this book!
• manicennui 10mo ago
  Are the people who are really into "AI" even buying books anymore?
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• rodolphoarruda 10mo ago
  I'm writing my first book now. It's a novel aimed at teenagers and young adults, in a technical format similar to "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim et al., if you're familiar with it. It explores FOSS, non-proprietary file formats, digital preservation, cryptography, and the concept of freedom as a whole. I resonate with the author of the article who discusses motivation to write and the "existential crisis" that comes and goes almost every day. I've been fighting those negative feelings by adopting the mindset that I'm writing the book for myself. It's a book I've always wanted to read, which I can then lend to my teenage children so they can read it as well. Everything else (commercially speaking) will be a nice consequence of this endeavor.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• LoganDark 10mo ago
  Nice of them to transfer back the rights when they terminated the contract! I haven't heard of anyone not doing that, but it feels suspiciously not always a given if they have to specify explicitly.
• vasco 10mo ago
  > There was also a daunting voice in the back of my head that LLMs have eliminated the need for books like this. Why buy this book when ChatGPT can generate the same style of tutorial for ANY project that is customized to you? Why have sex with your wife when you can buy her a dildo?
• apwheele 10mo ago
  The such low royalties make folks seriously consider self-publishing if you think you can get any sales. (And if you do not need a copy-editor.) So I have only around 150 sales of my book (see notes at https://andrewpwheeler.com/2024/07/02/some-notes-on-self-publishing-a-tech-book/ https://andrewpwheeler.com/2024/07/02/some-notes-on-self-pub...). I make around ~$30 though net (average between on-demand print and epub). So my measly sales are about the same as the advance here (not clear if this was ever paid out, presume they would get it back if it was paid out). If you really think you can sell thousands of copies the economics of it really should hit you. I get going through a publisher will increase sales, but if you have a popular platform already to advertise it (like a blog or other popular social media), I just don't get it.
  • redsymbol 10mo ago
    This is absolutely true, speaking as someone who has both self-published and also published with a big publisher. Each choice has pros and cons. In my case, I self-published and sold a book for several years, and then published an updated version with O'Reilly. I decided to do that because I came to realize people judge self-publish books as less vetted and lower quality. That may be often true. But in many cases, a self-published book can be much better than those released by a former publisher. I certainly believe it was true in my case. But in the end, I decided my highest best opportunity was to go with a well-regarded publisher, for the authority that would bring. And it changed things. People treat me differently now, like they consider me more of an authority. Even though it's essentially the same book; it just has an O'Reilly logo on the cover now. Whether that should be the case is up for debate... But it absolutely made people listen more seriously to my message. and I believe it has massively increased the positive impact of that book on the world. Financially, I think it's been about even. For me it was worth the tradeoff for other reasons, but I don't think that is always the case for every author and every book.
• mrlonglong 10mo ago
  Good for you.
• ajkjk 10mo ago
  i wish you'd kickstart the same project and do it your way somehow the publisher's interests were making it all worse
• d4rkp4ttern 10mo ago
  Amusingly, for a library [1] I’ve been building, 100% of the code is AI-written (with a huge number of iterations of course) and the ONLY part I wanted to write myself is the portion of the README that explains the thought process behind one of the features. It took a lot of thinking and iterations to come up with the right style and tone, and methodically explain the ideas in the right order. Leaving that to an LLM would have been a frustrating exercise. [1] https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools
• kburman 10mo ago
  I'm curious about the economics of canceling a deal like this. Since the editor spent significant time reviewing the drafts, did the contract require you to reimburse the publisher for those costs or return the advance?
  • zerocrates 10mo ago
    They never got the advance because they didn't get to the first milestone.
• adriatp 10mo ago
  paid stuff shouldnt be here, I thought this site as about sharing knowledge not selling it
• QuantumNoodle 10mo ago
  > He also wanted me to add a chapter that acts as an intro to programming with Python... This explains why some books I picked up earlier in my career had great depth but there was always a way-too-basic-programming-intro chapter duct taped in the beginning. So now I have an idea of how they are squeezed in.
• azhenley 10mo ago
  Thanks to the positive encourage here and in my email, I've decided to go the self-publishing route. I setup a pre-order page and will release each chapter as I go. :) Happy New Years, HN.
  • N_Lens 10mo ago
    Thanks for sharing, good luck and Godspeed!
  • beej71 10mo ago
    All those reasons you listed were why I never went with a publisher. I'm a big fan of print-on-demand. Good luck!
  • tempestn 10mo ago
    Wouldn't normally nitpick, but just in case it's helpful as an author - compound verbs that end in particles, like "set up", "break down", "log in", "check out", etc., are all two words when used as verbs. They each also have single, compound word versions, but those are the noun forms. So, you set up the page, and now the setup is done.
    • Guestmodinfo 10mo ago
      Thanx so much. Can you point where we can learn all this. These days it's hard to grab all that even when you read books a bit everyday
      • tempestn 10mo ago
        That I don't know. I don't have an English or linguistics background myself, it's just a common mistake I've noticed. Ironically though, your reply has another similar one. You read books every day; reading books is an everyday activity for you.
      • jraph 10mo ago
        See also: - set up [1] (notice that it's a verb) - setup [2] (notice that it's a noun) - Phrasal verbs [3] Unfortunately, I'm afraid it's mostly stuff one needs to know by heart, but I think it's often that the noun is the one that is all in one word and the verb is the phrasal one (composed of "base" and the particle, in several words). Note: I'm not a native English speaker. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/set_up#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/set_up#English [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/setup https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/setup [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb
• __mharrison__ 10mo ago
  I've published books with two publishers and many self-published books (Anthropic owes me around $60K for book theft by my calculations). Publishers can be great, but if you want control of your book, just self-publish it. The most valuable (IMO) service publishers provide is feedback. If you have a small online presence, it isn't hard to get feedback from others.
• sb8244 10mo ago
  Writing with Pragmatic was such a great experience. Definitely a blessing that I was able to do that. My experience with writing and royalties is just so different than this author's experiences.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• algoghostf 10mo ago
  I think self publishing and publishing via an editor serve 2 different purposes. In my case, I always self published. My objective was simply to get my writing out there and have it as a "business card" with all the freedom. Publishing with editors is a different can of worms : more constraints, more process.. and to me removes part of the pleasure and the "amateur" aspect of it and a LOT of freedom. But is surely more professional though.
• dependency_2x 10mo ago
  New meme: [Earth] [Astronaut 1] [Astronaut 2 + Gun] Astronaut 1 says nothing Astronaut 2 says "More AI"
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• rajatrs5054 10mo ago
  https://stck.me/books https://stck.me/books You can self publish your print edition on stck.
• Dwedit 10mo ago
  The illustration is an extremely AI-generated book image with all the usual AI image generation mistakes (especially read the book spine). If people stop reading the article because they expect the text to be AI slop as well, I can understand why.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• sheepscreek 10mo ago
  Err, the publisher cancelled the author’s book deal. More specifically, cancelled the contract they had. The author procrastinated indefinitely (after losing interest) eventually leading to this. Is it just me who took offence to the title?
  • freetime2 10mo ago
    Yeah this article didn't really sit well with me. Not the part where they procrastinated and never wrote the book... life happens. But as you say - the title is a bit misleading. But the bigger issue to me is that after failing to write a book, they have now started accepting pre-orders and promising to deliver chapters as they are written. Because first, if they were capable of writing the book, they probably should have honored their original contract. And second, if they are not capable of finishing the book, they probably shouldn't be taking peoples' money in pre-orders for a book that they may not ever be able to deliver. To be fair, it does sound like they were mistreated and/or mismanaged a bit by the publisher, which may well have hindered the writing process and helped prevent the book from getting written. So I'm not going to lose any sleep worrying about the poor publisher - who I am sure deals with this pretty frequently. It's mostly just the concern about not being able to follow through with their obligations to pre-order customers that concerns me.
    • sheepscreek 10mo ago
      Yeah, I fully empathize with them. It’s just the title that threw me off.
• BiteCode_dev 10mo ago
  > There needs to be an initial chapter for teaching Python in case the reader doesn't have the background. I can't stand books that start with a half-baked Python tutorial. It's not only wasting the time of people who know, but worse, it's wasting the time of people who don't. Because a one-chapter explanation on the topic is always going to be so superficial that the people who actually need it will never have the details they actually require to get up to speed. You will give them the illusion of understanding, only to let them hit a wall the first time they try any. Before uv, install python package was a topic that required a lot more than a quick intro, explaining virtualenv, branching depending on OSes, even backtracking how to source the Python installer. Better to just say "mastering this is a requirement prior reading the book" and be done with it. There are full books on the topic that can actually help. Replace this useless chapter with more content to which the book is actually dedicated.
• fuzztester 10mo ago
  I read a good part of the OP. I don't get why he went with a publisher despite the serious cons he listed up front.
  • fuzztester 10mo ago
    In fact, I've been reading about the big cons (1) of going with traditional publishers for many years now, here on HN, as well as elsewhere. IMO, it's analogous to the VC-backed startup lottery, where the few bosses (VCs) take on less risk and win big (think "ten-bagger", etc.), and the slaves, aka noobs (startup employees, except, rarely, for founders) take on more risk and lose bigger. And still the gullible ones keep on coming, like lemmings, due to the brainwashing that goes inexorably on. Been in both scenarios. Another good analogy is the gold rushes like California and Klondike, you know, "picks and shovels". (1) Pun intended.
• Roark66 10mo ago
  Good to hear you decided to self publish. Don't let people online put too much pressure on you (is it done yet?) On the subject of AI. I'm a great believer in that AI is a huge force for good (gives a single individual a huge power). I've been using every popular commercial and open weights models there are. I know their strengths and weaknesses. But I think there will always be a need for human book writers. Just like there will be a need for human programmers. Although for different reasons. With software, humans are needed, because AI is still very, very far from being able to grasp actual, overall architecture of even modest sized hobby class projects (there is a special "trick" that is used to convince us otherwise, notice all very impressive examples are almost always "one shot" small prompts, with not a lot of refinement later. That almost never happens in real projects. In fact the opposite.) With books, the AI is good explaining small chunks of knowledge. But an entire book, that is fun to read, consistent, and has a plan of "reader advancing in capability" through chapters and has some of the author's personality? No way. Will I buy the book? I don't know. I have built a small library of physical books over the years (maybe about 200 books). But I also have about 50 of them on my kindle. I tend to buy an ebook first. If I really like it I buy a physical copy. But I'm definitely reading a lot less than i used to. I've been working from hone exclusively since 2016. Before that I did a lot of commuting and that provided an opportunity of time to read loads of books. I certainly do not miss the airports, the budget airlines, the crowded trains and underground, but the reading took a big hit. I imagine I'm not the only one. So the market for books probably shrunk substantially in the last decade.
• stevage 10mo ago
  >Fast forward, I just got notification from the publisher that the contract has been officially terminated and all rights of the work were transferred back to me. Does this mean they get to keep the advance, and all the feedback from the editors, as well, for free? That seems like a pretty good deal - the publisher put resources into this project and got exactly zero in return.
  • einsteinx2 10mo ago
    It doesn’t sound like they ever received the advance, and most of the feedback was totally off the mark and unhelpful. Not sure it was a pretty good deal for anyone.
• mark_l_watson 10mo ago
  I think the author is better off self publishing, based on my personal experience: I wrote ten tech books for big publishers (McGraw-Hill, J. Wiley, Springer Verlag, etc.) and I was so happy being a published author. However, about twenty hears ago I moved to self-publishing, finally ending up using Leanpub. I am much happier only writing self-published eBooks now because I can update my old books as needed. I still write new books from scratch (just started a book that is basically a rant against over-spend of SOTA LLMs called ‘Winning Big with Small AI’) but hardly a week goes by without an update to an older book. Writing is great, and even better when not attatched to a conventional publisher. Austin: if you are here, good luck, and enjoy writing!
  • hermitcrab 10mo ago
    Is a piracy a major problem for eBooks? Doesn't somebody just upload a PDF of your book somewhere?
    • mark_l_watson 10mo ago
      I use a Creative Commons share alike license and my eBooks can be read free online. Occasionally some readers purchase my eBooks, and I use sales as a signal for what readers enjoy and that is a guide for deciding where to put my energy. I only allocate three hours a day to writing and sales also guide what books I update. I used to keep statistics: about 1 in 60 people who read online buy a book, except for my Common Lisp book that had a 1 in 20 purchase ratio. As you might imagine, I put more effort into the Common Lisp book. For 30 years writing tech books was an economic driver for my career as a computer scientist. Now that I am retired I still write because I enjoy writing and interacting with my readers.
• Ghos3t 10mo ago
  The book cover makes me think that AI got involved in the book eventually lol
  • hellel 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • ramon156 10mo ago
      Why exactly? I think it's fine to question this, given there's money on the table.
      • hellel 10mo ago
        [dead]
• thewhitetulip 10mo ago
  I have written a foss python book on github. In the apst 5yrs, the same Acquisition editor from Apreas reached out to me about publishing my book. When he reached out to me for the first time, I was excited. He gave me a format and I expanded my book in their format. Then 6 months later dude emails me that it was rejected and if I could write something else, he recahed out to me and now he made a u turn asking me to write something different blah blah I said no thanks and moved on. A few years later, dude sends me the exact same email. I replied saying that get me in writing that you'll publish the book this time because the last time you wasted my 2 3 months. Publishing is hard. Yess publishing is even harder. Royaltie are dwindling not to mention these days the documentation has improved so much that people learn from that. My foss books have netted me more $ than if I had signed up with Apress, so not a loss!
• satisfice 10mo ago
  I got into a book contract in the 90's and nearly killed myself with stress, trying to write it. At one point I was told I might have thymus cancer. My first reaction was not distress, but RELIEF. Why? Because it meant I could feel okay about taking a couple of weeks off work to get the exploratory surgery. That's how burned out I was. (Turned out, no cancer. So that was nice, too...) Eventually, a lawyer friend of mine told me that I could easily get out of the contract by offering to repay the advance. Problem solved. Lesson learned: don't get into a contract until the book is almost done. Even so, I just published a new book that I delivered one year late (I wasn't as close to finished as I thought I was). Still it was less stressful because I knew I could take all the time I needed (because publishers actually understand that it's hard to write a good book).
• MagicMoonlight 10mo ago
  If you don’t need money and they aren’t going to advertise it and they’ll only give you a tiny amount, why would you ever want this deal?
• gregdoesit 10mo ago
  > The unhelpful feedback was a consistent push to dumb down the book (which I don't think is particularly complex but I do like to leave things for the reader to try) to appease a broader audience and to mellow out my personal voice Interestingly, this was my exact experience when working with a publisher (Manning, in my case), and it was the main reason I decided to part ways when writing my book (The Software Engineer’s Guidebook). While I did appreciate publisher’s desire to please a broader crowd by pushing a style they thought would broaden the appeal: but doing so makes technical books less attractive, in my view. And even less motivation to write! In my case, self publishing worked out well enough with ~40,000 copies sold in two years [1], proving the publisher’s feedback wrong, and that you don’t need to dumb down technical books, like this specific publisher would have preferred to do so. Even if it wouldn’t have worked out: what’s the point writing a book where there’s little of the author (you!) left in it. Congrats to OP for deciding to stick to your gut and write the book you want to write! [1] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-software-engineers-guidebook?utm_source=publication-search https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-software-engi...
• cratermoon 10mo ago
  AI! AI! AI! It's been a bad couple of years to work on anything in programming that isn't somehow tainted by Altman and Amodei's fever dreams.
• HarHarVeryFunny 10mo ago
  I wonder how many people choosing to write books, are expecting it to be a profitable use of their time, and make more than pocket money? The article mentions the publisher saying that their median book sells in the single digit thousands, so half of the books are selling less - perhaps hundreds rather than thousands. If you are making a 15% royalty on a $50 book selling a few hundred, or few thousand copies, for something that probably took a year or more to write, then this is obviously more about the satisfaction of doing it than being a worthwhile financial endeavor. Are most people choosing to write books fully expecting that it may only make a few thousand dollars?
  • nativeit 10mo ago
    In my experience (which is limited, personally, but I have several writers/editors/publishers in the family), writing a book is something one feels compelled to do, irregardless of financial incentives, or even tangential incentives like notoriety/influence. I would compare it to my own endeavors writing/recording music. I would do it even if I know for certain nobody else will ever appreciate it. Because the drive is internal. It’s what I do to make myself fulfilled. The fact that others may find some meaningful value within that work is a nice knock-on effect, but wasn’t involved in my choice to create it.
• hermitcrab 10mo ago
  Interesting. For a while I have wanted to write about a book about starting and running a small software company. Markets, marketing, sales, support, versions, promotions, websites, pricing, documentation etc. Possibly as a retirement project. Probably self-published. I have plenty of experience and material to draw on: -have been running my own small software business for >20 years -have written ~400 on blog posts on this and related subjects at https://www.successfulsoftware.net https://www.successfulsoftware.net -have consulted to other small software businesses -know plenty of other people running small software companies -have given a face-to-face course on starting a software product business But... -my experience is in desktop software, not SaaS or mobile software, which feel increasingly niche -everything seems to be changing so fast with the emergence of LLMs, I am beginning to feel like a dinosaur I could cooperate with others or work with a co-author to include more on SaaS. And human nature doesn't change that much, despite AI. But it is unclear to me whether enough people would be interested - for me to invest months of work into it.
• skeeter2020 10mo ago
  related to not using AI, the project list shared is actually right in the sweet-spot for current LLMs ability to generate decent code.
• arendtio 10mo ago
  Why not simply add a chapter about writing your own neural network or using OpenAI APIs? I have done some of the projects you were writing about and understand that learning to program is very different from doing vibe coding, but knowing how to use the OpenAI API should be valuable to the same audience, as integrating AI into everyday programs is a useful skill in itself.
• prawn 10mo ago
  From my very brief experience writing a technical book (a few chapters, many years ago), I think one danger that the author might have run into is having a mental progress bar that covers writing the draft. And then when the edits start to come in and they go far beyond rephrasing or typos, prospective authors realise that their progress bar is far from realistic, and things risk being derailed.