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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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!"
It's exactly the sort of financial pressure that will make them chase fads and trends, and it gets worse in difficult economic times.
I hope you finish the book. I would buy it.
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.
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.
Maybe write a book about "Classic projects using AI", whether it makes sense or not. And use AI to write that.
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.
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.
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.
Does it matter which exact one if all the publisher oligarchs behave exactly the same?
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.
Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution Paperback by Joel Burke
Some of them already replied saying the proposal seems interesting but they want to read a few chapters. I don't know if I am in the right path or not, but I'd love to read more about your experience and what can be shared!
Goodreads seems to think so. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14291276.Joel_Burke
Edit: Added some context and I'd also mention that one thing that was quite helpful is that at the start of the writing process I created a massive spreadsheet where I'd add in quotes, writing, and anything interesting I thought I might pull from (some of it manually written, like when watching documentaries). This was hugely helpful when I was going back but also during the writing process so I had a single source of truth I could keyword search. I've just checked it and its got 4787 rows, with most entries being about a paragraph long
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..
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?
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.
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
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.
I will say I was very happy with the animal they came up with! If I was not, I would have asked them to change it, and I bet they would have. They showed me a preview version early on, so there would have been plenty of time to do so.
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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was my read as well. The book deal fell apart because the author never wrote most of the book.
I think you should self-publish. With your existing audience, you'd sell plenty of copies, and nobody would push "AI" into your work.
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.
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!
Shame OP stopped their book, it would definitely have found an audience easily. I know many programmers that love these styles of books.
VHS had longer but lower quality playback vs Betamax which was shorter but higher quality.
It wasn't clear when VCRs came out which version consumers would prefer. Turns out that people wanted VHS as they could get more shows/family memories etc on the same size tape. In other words, VHS "won".
Most people have heard the above version but Betamax was widely adopter in TV news. The reason being that news preferred shorter, higher quality video for news segments as they rarely lasted more than 5-10 minutes.
My point being, the market is BIG and is really made up of many "mini-markets". I can see folks who are doing work on projects with big downside risk (e.g. finance, rockets etc) wanting to have code that is tested, reviewed etc. People needing one off code probably don't care if the failure rate is high especially if failure cases are obvious and the downside risk is low.
Have you tried? Lately? I'd be amazed if the higher-end models didn't do just that. Ray-tracing projects and books on 3D graphics in general are both very well-represented in any large training set.
Of course, nowadays you can ask an LLM separately. But that isn’t the same as if it were an integrated functionality, focused on (and limited to) the specific book.
On the one hand, I can see the point- you'll never get chatgpt to come up with something on par with the venerable Crafting Interpreters.
On the other hand, that means that all the hard-won lessons from writing poorly and improving with practice will be eliminated for most. When a computer can do something better than you right now, why bother trying to get better on your own? You never know if you'll end up surpassing it or not. Much easier to just put out mediocre crap and move on.
Which, I think, means that we will see fewer and fewer masters of crafts as more people are content with drudgery.
After all, it is cheaper and generally healthier and tastier to cook at home, yet for many people fast food or ordering out is a daily thing.
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.
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.
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.
kmoser•1h ago
onraglanroad•1h ago
They never got to that point.
metaphor•1h ago
> 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.