alt Hacker NewsI canceled my book deal
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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.
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.
>"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"
I think the author is better off self publishing, based on my personal experience:
I wrote ten tech books for big publishers (McGraw-Hill, J. Wiley, Springer Verlag, etc.) and I was so happy being a published author. However, about twenty hears ago I moved to self-publishing, finally ending up using Leanpub. I am much happier only writing self-published eBooks now because I can update my old books as needed. I still write new books from scratch (just started a book that is basically a rant against over-spend of SOTA LLMs called ‘Winning Big with Small AI’) but hardly a week goes by without an update to an older book.
Writing is great, and even better when not attatched to a conventional publisher.
Austin: if you are here, good luck, and enjoy writing!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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!
Good to hear you decided to self publish. Don't let people online put too much pressure on you (is it done yet?)
On the subject of AI. I'm a great believer in that AI is a huge force for good (gives a single individual a huge power). I've been using every popular commercial and open weights models there are. I know their strengths and weaknesses.
But I think there will always be a need for human book writers. Just like there will be a need for human programmers. Although for different reasons. With software, humans are needed, because AI is still very, very far from being able to grasp actual, overall architecture of even modest sized hobby class projects (there is a special "trick" that is used to convince us otherwise, notice all very impressive examples are almost always "one shot" small prompts, with not a lot of refinement later. That almost never happens in real projects. In fact the opposite.)
With books, the AI is good explaining small chunks of knowledge. But an entire book, that is fun to read, consistent, and has a plan of "reader advancing in capability" through chapters and has some of the author's personality? No way.
Will I buy the book? I don't know. I have built a small library of physical books over the years (maybe about 200 books). But I also have about 50 of them on my kindle. I tend to buy an ebook first. If I really like it I buy a physical copy.
But I'm definitely reading a lot less than i used to. I've been working from hone exclusively since 2016. Before that I did a lot of commuting and that provided an opportunity of time to read loads of books. I certainly do not miss the airports, the budget airlines, the crowded trains and underground, but the reading took a big hit.
I imagine I'm not the only one. So the market for books probably shrunk substantially in the last decade.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I've published books with two publishers and many self-published books (Anthropic owes me around $60K for book theft by my calculations).
Publishers can be great, but if you want control of your book, just self-publish it.
The most valuable (IMO) service publishers provide is feedback. If you have a small online presence, it isn't hard to get feedback from others.
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.
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.
I think self publishing and publishing via an editor serve 2 different purposes. In my case, I always self published. My objective was simply to get my writing out there and have it as a "business card" with all the freedom. Publishing with editors is a different can of worms : more constraints, more process.. and to me removes part of the pleasure and the "amateur" aspect of it and a LOT of freedom. But is surely more professional though.
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
Are the people who are really into "AI" even buying books anymore?
Err, the publisher cancelled the author’s book deal. More specifically, cancelled the contract they had. The author procrastinated indefinitely (after losing interest) eventually leading to this.
Is it just me who took offence to the title?
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.
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.
> There needs to be an initial chapter for teaching Python in case the reader doesn't have the background.
I can't stand books that start with a half-baked Python tutorial. It's not only wasting the time of people who know, but worse, it's wasting the time of people who don't.
Because a one-chapter explanation on the topic is always going to be so superficial that the people who actually need it will never have the details they actually require to get up to speed. You will give them the illusion of understanding, only to let them hit a wall the first time they try any.
Before uv, install python package was a topic that required a lot more than a quick intro, explaining virtualenv, branching depending on OSes, even backtracking how to source the Python installer.
Better to just say "mastering this is a requirement prior reading the book" and be done with it.
There are full books on the topic that can actually help.
Replace this useless chapter with more content to which the book is actually dedicated.
> 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.
That sounds like 2025. Everything is "required" to be about AI. Gooodbyee you silly year!
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 :-)
I'm surprised the contract didn't obligate you to return most or all of the advance after canceling.
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.
You can self publish your print edition on stck.
Writing with Pragmatic was such a great experience. Definitely a blessing that I was able to do that.
My experience with writing and royalties is just so different than this author's experiences.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I would have purchased your book ! I just wanted to say thank you for writing (your blog). It is a joy to read.
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.
New meme:
[Earth] [Astronaut 1] [Astronaut 2 + Gun]
Astronaut 1 says nothing
Astronaut 2 says "More AI"
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.
You're witnessing a collapse of demand. Do not ignore it - though it may not be permanent.
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.
I read a good part of the OP.
I don't get why he went with a publisher despite the serious cons he listed up front.
>Fast forward, I just got notification from the publisher that the contract has been officially terminated and all rights of the work were transferred back to me.
Does this mean they get to keep the advance, and all the feedback from the editors, as well, for free? That seems like a pretty good deal - the publisher put resources into this project and got exactly zero in return.