I got into a book contract in the 90's and nearly killed myself with stress, trying to write it.

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).

From my very brief experience writing a technical book (a few chapters, many years ago), I think one danger that the author might have run into is having a mental progress bar that covers writing the draft. And then when the edits start to come in and they go far beyond rephrasing or typos, prospective authors realise that their progress bar is far from realistic, and things risk being derailed.

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’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

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

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?

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.

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.

> 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.