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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I mean I hate to seem churlish about this, but I really didn't read this with sympathy for the (would-be) author.

> 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.

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.