[HN Gopher] I canceled my book deal
___________________________________________________________________
I canceled my book deal
Author : azhenley
Score : 262 points
Date : 2025-12-31 18:26 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (austinhenley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (austinhenley.com)
| kmoser wrote:
| I'm surprised the contract didn't obligate you to return most or
| all of the advance after canceling.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| The first half of the advance was to be paid after the first
| third was approved.
|
| They never got to that point.
| metaphor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "All of our future books will involve AI."
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In the era of AI, who is going to buy books?
| banbangtuth wrote:
| Wow this is the first time I encountered this blog! Subscribed!
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ah my mistake then. Looks like either party didn't do
| anything wrong.
| milancurcic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why should I know linear algebra, ooc?
| rasengan0 wrote:
| >"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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Industry-wide? Looks damn near pan-industry to me
| asveikau wrote:
| And most normal people are fed up with it. Nobody understands
| why most of their apps suddenly have chatbots in them now.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| When a company whose services I use announces that they're
| adding AI to them, my first response is always to wonder
| how I can turn it off.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I don't even bother looking anymore because it's rarely
| possible.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| The article hints at this, but publishers live on the outsize
| success of very few of their books, and the rest of them are
| losses.
|
| It's exactly the sort of financial pressure that will make them
| chase fads and trends, and it gets worse in difficult economic
| times.
| raincole wrote:
| You won't believe how bad things are where I live. We have a
| _government-subsidized_ AI image generation course here.
| miyoji wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zkmon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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__ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yes, because as far as I know, they don't behave like that.
| qarl wrote:
| He wants more information because the story doesn't ring
| true, in his experience.
| antirez wrote:
| 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.
| nospice wrote:
| In general, yeah. The hard-to-replicate benefit is
| professional editing, but this is something that most tech
| publishers skimp on. There are some "premium" outlets where
| you get some real attention, but the default Wiley experience
| is definitely not worth 70%.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What's the name of your book? That sounds super interesting
| RealityVoid wrote:
| 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
| raybb wrote:
| Looks like this is the book:
| https://www.rebootinganation.com/
|
| Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia,
| E-Government and the Startup Revolution Paperback by Joel
| Burke
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Yep, thats it, sorry for the slow replies, I'm out with
| family for the holidays!
| raybb wrote:
| Is there any way to buy your ebook book DRM free? I know
| that's not always easy for authors to make available but
| I thought I'd ask.
| 101008 wrote:
| I feel 100% identified with you. I am working on a non ficton
| book about a niche topic and I wouldn't do it for the money at
| all. It's about the "prestige (or perceived prestige)". I am
| about to finish the first 1/3 of the book (the first draft,
| anyway), and I am already attempting to reach out to publishers
| to see if they would be interested in the book (at least the
| ones that don't require a literary agent!).
|
| 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!
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| That's awesome, can I ask what the topic is? What I did for
| "selling" the book was to create a proposal -- about 45 pages
| that has a skeleton outline of each chapter (it changed
| significantly during the end writing process but gave the
| publisher a feel for the topic), a sample chapter, and some
| more sales/marketing details like what are comparable books
| (and how well they sold if you have that data), who your
| audience is and how you plan to reach them (OP was in a great
| place having a following), why you're the right person to
| write the book, etc.
| 101008 wrote:
| 45 pages as a skeleton? Wow. I wasn't expecting that much!
| I guess your book is +120k words? Do you think having a
| clear vision/structure helped when sending it to
| publishers?
|
| I think I lack all the last parts (that some publishers are
| requiring for) such as a social media platform to reach
| your potential readers. I find that a bit unfair because it
| means you first have to play the Instagram game and once
| you are popular there, you can write a book.
|
| If you give me an email address I'd love to tell you more
| about my book!
| raybb wrote:
| Did you also write "Inspire!: Inspiration for Life and Life at
| Work" ?
|
| Goodreads seems to think so.
| https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14291276.Joel_Burke
| asveikau wrote:
| That one goodreads review for the Estonia book is amusing.
| One reader criticized him for providing references. I feel
| like that's a positive, not a negative, and if you find it
| uninteresting those tend to be easy to skip.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Yeah, I have to admit because this was my first work I
| maybe overdid it in providing references because I wanted
| to default to having real historical data and not just
| writing a lot of personal opinions with no backing (it was
| a nightmare writing up that reference section but I'm glad
| I did it in the end) and if I'm being honest, because I'm
| not in academia and didn't have credentials as an "Estonia
| expert" I wanted to play it safe.
|
| 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
| asveikau wrote:
| It sounds like you did the right thing and that guy is
| grumpy.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Ha, I didn't, I wish Goodreads would get a major update!
| RagnarD wrote:
| Interesting handle (atlasunshrugged) - a reference to Atlas
| getting back to work rather than shrugging? (I know it's a book
| title.)
| barishnamazov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| When you have original information that hasn't been released
| anywhere else in the world, why would a book be a bad choice?
| 578_Observer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do they have to return the Advance in this case? Is there any
| case where it makes sense fo reject the Advance?
| dpark wrote:
| Where is the part where they forced a pivot? They asked for AI.
| He said no.
| testing22321 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Care to share links to your books?
| _lex wrote:
| You're witnessing a collapse of demand. Do not ignore it - though
| it may not be permanent.
| redsymbol wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Did they let you choose the animal to appear on the cover?
| redsymbol wrote:
| Haha good question. No, but I did not ask; I wanted to give
| them as much freedom as I could bear on aspects of the
| process I was not too attached to, so I let them pick.
|
| 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.
| ssttoo wrote:
| I've published several books with them. Only once I asked and
| they managed to find the beast. They didn't promise but they
| did deliver.
| redsymbol wrote:
| That's great! I am not surprised.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There's a reason that ORA have huge credibility in technical
| publishing, and have for decades: a reliably good product.
| redsymbol wrote:
| That was definitely my experience.
| analogpixel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Honestly I don't want to buy books that pander to the lowest
| common denominator so the author can make more money.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| Just skip the chapter?
| analogpixel wrote:
| 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.
| theSuda wrote:
| Speaking of good cookbooks, Big Vegan Flavor by Nish Vora
| is actually one of my recent favorites. First of all, the
| pictures are amazing and make it a very fun read. And it is
| less of a recipe book and more of a guidebook on how to
| develop a good sense about cooking. Don't let the word
| Vegan put you off it's not the pompous kind of vegan stuff.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > 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!
|
| Yeah I agree. I hate when books do more hand holding than the
| reader clearly needs to the point of tedium. Plus many of those
| setup steps like how to use a package manager change over time
| and make the book stale instead of evergreen. And Austin was
| clearly not writing an absolute beginners book.
|
| That's why when I pitched both the Classic Computer Science
| Problems series and Computer Science from Scratch I explicitly
| told publishers in the proposals that I was not writing a
| beginners book (been there, done that). I was clear that I was
| writing an intermediate book for people that already know
| programming.
|
| It's a different, more narrow audience. But you can be
| successful if you write a good book. It's also a less tapped
| market and luckily publishers were able to see that.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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...
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Agreed. The one time I worked through a publisher I beat every
| schedule and it was all smooth enough.
|
| I'm glad I did it but I'm not sure how much the publisher added
| beyond some prestige and a few bucks. The first edition in
| particular I felt I needed to pad out a bit to meet length
| requirements.
| eduction wrote:
| I'll also note that the publisher was right to bring up AI,
| even if they did not do it in an artful way. He himself comes
| to doubt the need for his book in the era of LLMs and he says
| that is part of why he cancelled. To his publisher's credit
| they raised the issue early in the process where a pivot would
| have been more practical.
|
| In fairness to the author, he presents a reasonably balanced
| view and it did not read to me like "my publisher sucked."
| egorfine wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A mentor once told me, 'half of the effect of marketing is
| hard to measure, the other half you have no idea'
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Do you have any links to your books? Can't see them in your
| profile.
| kevmo wrote:
| I killed a book deal I had for this book I mostly finished:
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| If the author of this article just finished the book the
| publisher would have just published it without much fuss and
| probably without any significant changes.
|
| The author had all the leverage regarding content. It's not
| like the publisher could actually incorporate what they were
| asking for with AI, they still need an author to do that and it
| was a totally new subject at the time. Their demands were
| empty.
|
| I don't think the author would have finished the book if it
| _was_ self-published. They clearly didn't want to write a book
| that badly.
|
| Not to say that finishing a whole-ass book is easy, I'm
| certainly not going to pretend that's the case.
|
| I've lately been trying to finish more side project type things
| in my life because these dead ends themselves feel empty to me.
| I am trying to set scope reasonably and then just finish even
| if it's painful or there's no confetti-style payout and nobody
| else cares.
| mold_aid wrote:
| Yeah, I mean I hate to seem churlish about this, but I really
| didn't read this with sympathy for the (would-be) author.
| CameronBanga wrote:
| It does feel high pressure in the moment, but I wouldn't have
| two published technical books if not for the consistency and
| push of my editors and the publisher.
|
| Another constraint of a technical book that I didn't see
| mentioned here was that time almost has to be very limited
| during the writing process. I worked on a couple mobile
| development/design books, and an iOS 18 programming and design
| guide is worthless after Apple announced Liquid Glass last
| summer. At 2+ years into the project and seemingly only 1/3rd
| complete, the publisher really needs to be sure the content
| will still be relevant after released.
| henry_flower wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm on it!
| koalacola wrote:
| AI slop
| sedatk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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!
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| shimman wrote:
| Agreed. Still amazed that people keep trusting the service that
| has like a 60% failure rate, who would want to buy something
| that fails over half the time?
|
| Shame OP stopped their book, it would definitely have found an
| audience easily. I know many programmers that love these styles
| of books.
| alexpotato wrote:
| This reminds me of the VHS vs Betamax debate.
|
| 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.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Unfortunately (fortunately?) it does not have like 60%
| failure rate. Yes, there's some non-negligible error rate.
| But it's lower than the threshold that would make the average
| user throw it into the bin. We can pretend that's not the
| case, but it doesn't even pass the real life sniff test.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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!_
|
| 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.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| Isn't the whole point to learn and challenge yourself? If you
| just wanted to render a 3-dimensional scene there are already
| hundreds of open source raytracers on github.
|
| Asking chatgpt to "guide" you through the process is a
| strange middle-ground between making your own project and
| using somebody else's in which nothing new is created and
| nothing new is learned.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Ridiculous. If you go through this process with ChatGPT and
| don't learn anything, that's all on you.
|
| Given the lack of a CS professor looking over your
| shoulder, what's more powerful than a textbook that you can
| hold a conversation with?
| layer8 wrote:
| It would actually be nice to have a book-LLM. That is, an LLM
| that embodies a single (human-written) book, like an
| interactive book. With a regular book, you can get stuck when
| the author didn't think of some possible stumbling block, or
| thinks along slightly differently lines than the reader. An LLM
| could fill in the gaps, and elaborate on details when needed.
|
| Of course, nowadays you can ask an LLM separately. But that
| isn't the same as if it were an integrated feature, focused on
| (and limited to) the specific book.
| jchallis wrote:
| Tyler Cowen's GOAT book explores this in depth. Try it out!
| https://goatgreatesteconomistofalltime.ai/en
| johnnyfived wrote:
| Genuinely have no idea what the novelty of this is for
| versus just uploading a PDF to ChatGPT. In terms of UX it
| is incredibly limited for a book evolution work.
| vunderba wrote:
| I've not used it, but isn't this kind of what NotebookLM
| does?
|
| You drag a source into it such as a books PDF and then you
| have a discussion with it.
|
| https://notebooklm.google
| layer8 wrote:
| What I'm imagining is an LLM that is strongly tied to the
| book, in the sense of being RLHF'd for the book (or
| something along those lines), like an author able to cater
| to any reader interested in the book, but also confined to
| what the book is about. An LLM embodiment and
| generalization of the book. Not an LLM you can talk about
| anything where you just happen to talk about some random
| book now. The LLM should be clearly specific to the book.
| LLMs for different books would feel as distinct from each
| other as the books do, and you couldn't prompt-engineer the
| LLM to go out of the context the book.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I heard the other day that LLMs won't replace writers, just
| mediocre writing.
|
| 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.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Your whole point is disproven by woodworking as a craft, and
| many other crafts for that matter. There are still
| craftspeople doing good work with wood even though IKEA and
| such have captured the furniture industry.
|
| There will still be fine programmers developing software by
| hand after AI is good enough for most.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| high quality carpentry has a market of people who buy one
| off projects for lots of money.
|
| There is not really a similar market in software.
|
| I'm not saying there won't be fine programmers etc. but
| with woodworking I can see how a market exists that will
| support you developing your skills and I don't see it with
| software and thus the path seems much less clear to me.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Bro, there is a HUGE market for one off software projects
| for lots of money.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I've been involved in building a multitude of saas apps
| and very few of them had any unique functionality. I'm
| not sure many of those companies cared about the
| uniqueness of their code.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Obviously, they care about the uniqueness of the code if
| they are one-offs.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| My thought is that many of them thought their products
| were one-offs but were actually not in practice.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| yeah sorry I've seen one off carpentry projects for lots
| of money and I've worked on software projects for
| individual companies, and it's not really comparable
| (especially going back to the earlier post that started
| this, which I thought was not discussing say the newest
| spotify competitor or something similar)
|
| however I suppose at the point where I need to explain
| that and all the ways in which the two things are
| dissimilar it becomes a book in itself.
| brailsafe wrote:
| > There will still be fine programmers developing software
| by hand after AI is good enough for most.
|
| This fallacy seems to be brought up very frequently, that
| there are still blacksmiths; people who ride horses; people
| who use typewriters; even people who use fountain pens, but
| they don't really exist in any practical or economical
| sense outside of 10 years ago Portland, OR.
|
| No technological advancement that I'm aware of _completely_
| eliminates one 's ability to pursue a discipline as a
| hobbyist or as a niche for rich people. It's rarely
| _impossible_ , but I don't think that's ever anyone's
| point. Sometimes they even make a comeback, like vinyl
| records.
|
| The scope of the topic seems to be what the usual one is,
| which is the chain of incentives that enable the pursuit of
| something as a persuasive exchange of value, particularly
| that of a market that needs a certain amount of volume and
| doesn't have shady protectionism working for it like
| standard textbooks.
|
| With writing, like with other liberal arts, it's far from a
| new target of parental scrutiny, and it's my impression
| that those disciplines have long been the pursuit of people
| who can largely get away with not really needing a viable
| source of income, particularly during the apprentice and
| journeyman stages.
|
| Programming has been largely been exempt from that, but if
| I were in the midst of a traditional comp sci program,
| facing the existential dreads that are U.S and Canadian
| economies (at least), along with the effective collapse of
| a path to financial stability, I'd be stupid not to be
| considering a major pivot; to what, I don't know.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Things that won't be automated anytime soon, like
| plumbers or electricians.
|
| Or double down on applied ML?
| mhb wrote:
| Nurses.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| No job is special, even though many programmers like to
| think of themselves as so. Everyone must learn to adapt
| to a changing world, just as they did a hundred years ago
| at the turn of the century.
| ponector wrote:
| Yet usually woodworking is not a viable business. As a
| craft - sure. As a day job to provide for your family - not
| really. Guys who created a custom tables for me five years
| ago are out of business.
|
| Pretty much the same story with any craft.
| sojournerc wrote:
| Right, nobody needs cabinets or doors because... AI. /s
|
| I'm a professional woodworker. One-off tables in a garage
| might not be a great business, but millwork, built-ins,
| and cabinetry in homes is a great business. You're likely
| not exposed to cabinet or architectural woodwork shops
| that build high-end homes, or that just do renovation for
| that matter.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| What is the inherent value of being able to write well?
|
| Is it not possible that people consider their craft to exist
| at a higher level than the written word? For example, writing
| facile prose is a very different from being a good
| storyteller. How many brilliant stories has the world missed
| out on because the people who imagined them didn't have the
| confidence with prose to share them.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Your last sentence is one answer to the question you ask in
| the first sentence.
| pinewurst wrote:
| I have to disagree. My brother-in-law has started to use
| ChatGPT to punch up his personal letters and they've become
| excerpts from lesser 70s sitcoms. From actually personal and
| relevant to disturbingly soulless.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| Right? If I could get the same output by just talking to AI
| myself, what's the point of the human connection? Be
| something, be someone. Be wrong or a little rude from time
| to time, it's still more genuine.
| pinewurst wrote:
| His last letter was an update on a serious health issue.
| I care. It's not supposed to be a yuck fest, especially
| inorganic AI sludge.
| alpinisme wrote:
| I'm honestly stunned that people use AI for personal
| communication. It seems so alien to me.
| lokar wrote:
| LLLMs replace bad writing with mediocre writing
| whyenot wrote:
| > Isn't it obvious? Because the ChatGPT output wouldn't be
| reviewed!
|
| Reviewed by a human. It's trivial to take the output from one
| LLM and have another LLM review it.
|
| Also, often _mediocrity_ is enough, especially if it is cheap.
| layer8 wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if publishers today delegated some of
| the reviewing to LLMs.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| Why buy the book when big AI can add it to their training data.
| Multitudes of people can then enjoy slightly higher quality
| output without you being compensated a single cent.
| rectang wrote:
| Yes, this is the big change. There's no more financial
| incentive to create such a work because Big AI captures all
| the views it would have gotten and thus all the revenue
| potential.
| alain94040 wrote:
| In my dream world, you take _that book_ plus information about
| yourself (how good of a programmer you already are), feed that
| into AI and get a customized version that is much better for
| you. Possibly shorter. Skips boring stuff you know. And slows
| down for stuff you have never been exposed to. Everyone wins.
| cjaybo wrote:
| Does this type of ray tracing book exist? It's something never
| learned about and would love to know what courses or books
| others have found valuable
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Try _Raytracing in One Week_ and its sequels[1] perhaps.
|
| [1] https://raytracing.github.io/
| yallpendantools wrote:
| Happy New Year my friend and welcome to this wonderful world:
| https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.ht.
| ..
| lbotos wrote:
| 100% right. I buy lots of Japanese cookbooks secondhand. I
| found an Okinawa cook book for $8. When I received it, it was
| clear the author was just a content farmer pumping out various
| recipe books with copied online recipes. Once I looked up their
| name I saw hundreds of books across cooking baking etc. there
| was no way they even tried all of the recipes.
|
| So yes, review and "narrative voice" will be more valuable than
| ever.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Tangentially related, but I think the way to get to this is to
| build a "learner model" that LLMs could build and update
| through frequent integrated testing during instruction.
|
| One thing that books can't do is go back and forth with you,
| having you demonstrate understanding before moving on, or
| noticing when you forget something you've already learned.
| That's what tutors do. The best books can do is put exercises
| at the end of a chapter, and pitch the next chapter at someone
| who can complete those exercises successfully. An LLM could
| drop a single-question quiz in as soon as you ask a weird
| question that doesn't jibe with the model, and fall back into
| review if you blow it.
| wyager wrote:
| > Because the ChatGPT output wouldn't be reviewed!
|
| So what? If it's not already, frontier LLM one-shot output will
| be as good as heavily edited human output soon.
| dmos62 wrote:
| This discussion might be a bit more grounded if we were to
| discuss a concrete LLM response. Seems pretty freaking good to
| me:
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6955a171-e7a4-8012-bd78-9848087058...
| edanm wrote:
| > 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!
|
| This is the entire crux of your argument. If it's false, then
| everything else you wrote is wrong - because all that the
| consumer of the book cares about is the quality of the output.
|
| I'd be pretty surprised if you couldn't get a tutorial exactly
| as good as you want, if you're willing to make a prompt that's
| a bit better than just "I want to build a ray tracer" prompt.
| I'd be even more surprised if LLMs won't be able to do this in
| 6 months. And that's not even considering the _benefits_ of
| using an LLM (something unclear in the tutorial? Ask and it 's
| answered).
| neilv wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I would have purchased your book ! I just wanted to say thank you
| for writing (your blog). It is a joy to read.
| conartist6 wrote:
| That sounds like 2025. Everything is "required" to be about AI.
| Gooodbyee you silly year!
| reactordev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I work in games, I know how publishing works. My point was
| about the pay. For us, that equation is flipped.
| mdavid626 wrote:
| I'd definitely buy this book!
| manicennui wrote:
| Are the people who are really into "AI" even buying books
| anymore?
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| 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.
| LoganDark wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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-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.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Good for you.
| ajkjk wrote:
| i wish you'd kickstart the same project and do it your way
| somehow
|
| the publisher's interests were making it all worse
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| 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
| kburman wrote:
| 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?
| adriatp wrote:
| paid stuff shouldnt be here, I thought this site as about sharing
| knowledge not selling it
| its-kostya wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
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