I Canceled My Book Deal

> 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.

They never got to that point.

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.

I would certainly not argue that. LLMs do not understand anything, and are thus prone to non-deterministic inaccuracies in their output. Due to that, I think it is extremely foolish to use one for learning unfamiliar topics. Give me a book every time, because (if it's a good book) I am guaranteed to actually learn something. Not so with LLMs.

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.

You might want to look at their outlines to see what they're teaching. Then, decide if you can do something similar and/or cheaper.

It's exactly the sort of financial pressure that will make them chase fads and trends, and it gets worse in difficult economic times.

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!"

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 either come to them with just a proposal and a couple chapters. 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 and I've published 4 technical books before that 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.

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.

Does it matter which exact one if all the publisher oligarchs behave exactly the same?

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

It didn’t sound like they got the advance (or rather the first half) as they never fully completed the first 1/3 of the book before the deal fell through.

Amazon and companies like them must be broken up because they harm the producers and consumers with dictating buying and selling pricinf.

The publisher he worked with will push you but also make a better book in the end. You have to be willing to do your part.

(Not naming the publisher because I don't want to out myself.)

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.

Yeah I agree. I hate when books do more hand holding than the reader clearly needs to the point of tedium. 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.

In fairness to the author, he presents a reasonably balanced view and it did not read to me like “my publisher sucked.”

Glad the author got out relatively unscathed.

Self publish - especially with AI available to get you through the stuff where you just need superficial or process knowledge, like which firms to hire and how to market a self-published work, what boilerplate legal protections you need. You'll get 99% of the value of a big publishing firm at a small fraction of the cost, and you won't have to put up with someone else taking a cut just because they know a few things that they don't want to tell you in order to justify taking your money.

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.

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.

That was my read as well. The book deal fell apart because the author never wrote most of the book.

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.

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.

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.