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-engi...

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.

Happy New Years, HN.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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?

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!

-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

-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Leaving that to an LLM would have been a frustrating exercise.

[1] https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools

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?

I hope you finish the book. I would buy it.

Maybe write a book about "Classic projects using AI", whether it makes sense or not. And use AI to write that.

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.

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.

My experience with writing and royalties is just so different than this author's experiences.

You can self publish your print edition on stck.

I think you should self-publish. With your existing audience, you'd sell plenty of copies, and nobody would push "AI" into your work.

Is it just me who took offence to the title?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

the publisher's interests were making it all worse

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.

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).

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..

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!

[Earth] [Astronaut 1] [Astronaut 2 + Gun]

Astronaut 1 says nothing

Astronaut 2 says "More AI"

I don't get why he went with a publisher despite the serious cons he listed up front.

Why have sex with your wife when you can buy her a dildo?

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.

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.