Avoid Apress

For me, Apress's apparent feeling that the wording of contracts just doesn't matter, and the comment that they "don't modify the standard contract" are huge huge red flags, and I've had major issues in the past with this.

Their seems to be a scarily common school of thought that contracts are, basically, magic incantations to ward off the lawyer demons. You just need to have a contract, sign it, and somehow, magically, everything will be okay.

This is, obviously, not how it works. The wording of a contract is of absolute import; you should never ever sign one without reading it closely, and (ideally) getting a lawyer familiar with the issues to read it over. But I've had more than one boss or client who had a "standard" wildly inappropriate contract they expected me to sign, and when I pointed out some issues would just say "oh, those clauses don't matter"/"don't apply to you"/"just ignore them".

In my experience, confidentiality agreements are especially likely targets for this egregious mentality. "Uh, this contract says that if I throw together a mockup of an iPhone app for you, you will own all the IP/product ideas/designs/technology I develop for the next three years." "Oh, don't worry about that, it's just a standard clause - just sign right here." "...No."

Madness. And yes, most people are playing it honest, and have no intention to try and enforce whatever crazy clause is in the "standard" contract, or invalidate it, or other legal shenanigan. But you just never know...

I'm convinced that most publishers are difficult to work with and actually care very little for their authors. It seems that O'Reilly really has some great people inside, and I really think the Pragmatic Bookshelf is a fantastic staff and author program. But for my part with the few publishers I've worked with, it's been nothing but hassle.

The issues with payment were annoying, but even worse in my case were publisher content control struggles. The book concept I was to work on was explained to me numerous times as "not a recipe book but an example driven narrative book." I think we discussed that at least 5 times leading up to the kick off. After I submitted the first 3 chapters, they suddenly shifted gears and gave me example outlines for the chapters that remained to follow.

They were freaking recipe chapters (problem/solution/discussion ad nauseum).

There was no discussion of this change, and any attempted further shift in content was met with "well we told you we hadn't worked out this series fully yet." They'd basically jacked the book out from under me and changed it to a book I didn't want to write. I think I wrote one or two more chapters and farmed the rest out to contributors. Terrible experience.

To make matters worse, I made very little money off of it because they didn't promote it at all. They never sent copies to conferences or user groups unless I asked them to. They never sought out blogs and other things like that to help promote it whatsoever. Part of the problem was they really sucked at promoting their books (other authors have had the same issues), but another part was that they had about 4 different marketing managers during the timeline for my book, which made coordinating efforts incredibly difficult.

So, yes, I think this gent's experience isn't totally out of the norm, even though I wish that wasn't the case.

It seems like starting work before a contract is in place (save maybe very high-level exploratory work, like a table of contents) is a recipe for disaster. They don't really owe you anything until there's a signed contract in place saying you do.

Now, it's possible that Apress is problematic in that they strongly encourage people to work despite there being no contract in place ("we'll figure it out", "you have our word", "legal is slow", etc), which then puts them in a better negotiating position when it is contract time because people have already done much of the work.

But I wonder what would have happened if he had said, "I'll do high-level planning, but I won't write a single paragraph of actual content until we have a firm, mutually-satisfying contract in place." Maybe it would have gotten him a firm date on when he would get his advance that they would stick to, plus deadlines in the contract that were actually in the future and other good things. Or maybe they would have still said, "no, just write it, we'll figure that out later", which would not look good

I'm seeing a few common themes in comments, so I figure I'll address them all at once. I'm writing this comment both for my blog and Hacker News, so please excuse vagueness etc.

Beginning work without a contract was certainly not a smart move. They talked a good game but I still should have known better. However, I think I was still in a pretty good position, because it is that contract that gave them the right to use my work. I already had a reasonably popular technical blog that would have made a fine home for what I wrote if they had changed their minds.

In fact, this gave me quite a bit of leverage when it came time to get the Pro Objective-C contract amended. After they refused my amendments, I pointed out that they could not use my work without a contract, and that I would not sign anything that didn't have my amendments. They changed their tune with amusing rapidity.

The amendments I requested were fairly simple. Aside from fixing the dates, I struck out portions that required ongoing work from me, such as responding to errata, since I was no longer involved with the book.

The money involved was not large, for sure. In general, writing technical books doesn't pay well. There are good reasons to do it (exposure, fun, satisfaction, etc.) but money isn't one. I went into the project knowing that I wasn't doing it for the money. Given that, it might seem strange to have such a problem over money, but I don't think it is: even though I wasn't doing it for the money, I was still promised money, and I simply couldn't tolerate any crap over it.

For everyone talking about other publishers, I appreciate the sentiment, but I have moved into self-publishing. The Complete Friday Q&A is self-published and the experience was great. I intend to continue doing so in the future. I really don't see much of a role for traditional publishers these days.

I'd like to hear what Peter Seibel's experience was with Practical Common Lisp, or some other authors. From an outsider's perspective, I've always been impressed that some Apress books continue to offer online versions for free, which suggests that Apress allows their authors to retain IP rights to their books. Can anyone comment?

The experience is not limited to Apress.

I was at a garage sale. Tons of Wrox books were in a pile for two bits each. When I went to pay I noticed that the spiky haired blond guy on the cover of one of the books was the same spiky haired blond guy I was handing quarters to.

Paying attention can earn you a very interesting story! Short version: In this case the author did have a contract, but they kept upping the schedule as they were selling the company (and didn't tell the author). He was paid, but it took a very very long time and he said that was the last book he is ever going to write.

I asked him if he was sure he wanted to sell it. (It was his last and only copy.) "I guess I should keep it. I wrote the book after all."

A lot of industries that perform badly for no good reason rely on shaming and saying "it's unprofessional to come out publicly" to keep people in line, or they use legal threats and other leverage.

Good on Mike for coming out. If 5% of people shared their experience honestly, damn near every bad industry would be reformed quickly.

I got mixed up these guys back in 2003, when the were still called Wrox press. Reading this timeline makes me think this "bait and switch" is part their standard operating practice when dealing with authors. Back in 2003 they were also desperate for cash ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/03/17/wrox_hit_the_rocks_a... ) and ended up publishing the book I worked on (with 3 others) minus the last 5 chapters which were still being written. I wont mention the title as frankly I'm ashamed of it. Happy to verify via PM to the same username on reddit

My Apress experience: http://blog.merjis.com/2006/11/08/practical-ocaml/

I think maybe a better title would be 'Lesson learned: Don't start work until a contract is signed.'

I fully understand that the potential for delaying or losing the contract completely could be part of the motivation for starting work in advance or in parallel to a contract. But, it seems that in this case, was the headache worth it?

Regardless, I do agree that it sounds like Apress should have treated the author with more respect. I'd love to hear the other side of this story as well.

I liked working with APress for my book that they published. They found a very good technical editor for my book project who added a lot of value and the editors were all nice to work with. The only negative thing was that the book did not sell very well so I didn't make money for my business partner (i.e., APress).

The only publisher I ever had a negative experience with was Manning. My project was cancelled and they told me to keep the advance. I wanted to return the advance and own the book and they declined (I think because they had similar titles in the pipeline). However, I continue to think that the owner of Manning is a great guy (I very much enjoyed all of our conversations), and I still buy lots of Manning books (probably 10 in the last year).

The author of the linked article seems kind of bitter and it was unusual that he didn't sign the contract for so long. Anyway, I wish him luck in his future projects - it is great fun writing books.

From a reader perspective, I would highly advise checking out No Starch Press (http://nostarch.com/) and Rosenfeld Media (http://rosenfeldmedia.com/) if you haven't heard of these smaller imprints yet.

I too was one of the contributing authors on iPhone Cool Projects and I also had to run around chasing people to get paid my "advance" months after the book had already been published.

I did have a contract in place before starting, but Apress just ignored it, and the only way I was able to track anyone down was to ask another more popular author to help me find someone who could get me paid. My contacts at Apress basically just ignored my emails and phone calls.

None of that even touches on the antiquated process where I got to spend hours screwing around with a bunch of confusing MS Word templates because most of an author's time is clearly best used trying to correct style errors. The entire process had me wondering if this is really how these books get created. If it is, I decided it definitely isn't for me, especially considering the minimal pay.

Needless to say, I had a pretty awful experience with Apress too, which is a shame, because I'm not a prolific blogger like Mike, and getting to have my name on the front of a technical book was a really exciting achievement for me. I'm proud of the work I did, but not really sure that I'd ever want to go through this again.

I had my suspicions of Apress already after reading their Practical Django Projects (2004) book. Book itself was quite ok, but it was referring to downloadable source code of the presented projects from Apress website. To my knowledge this sourcecode of the sample projects isn't still there. Gladly I found some bitbucket projects with those sample projects written by other readers, but my trust for Apress was lost.

i was asked to be a technical reviewer on a book with apress, i felt really good about reviewing and agreed.

When i received the first few chapters i realized the book would have to be re-written. The English was bad and the code was mediocre.

Since it wasn't a paid gig i felt insulted with the experience, the book would require days if not weeks of work to complete rather than a few hours which i had thought.

If you write books for the money, you're doing something wrong. Writing code for the same amount of time will make you much more money.

Writing tech books is for advancing your career, get consulting gigs, get invited to conferences etc.

That said, sending contracts with deadlines that are in the past or before work started looks not very professional.

This is the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to purchasing books from Apress.

If my memory serves me right, both Peter Cooper (Beginning Ruby) and Mark Pilgrim (Dive into Python) had "hiccups" as well dealing with Apress.

Average or below quality marred with treating the people like this is enough red marks to stay away from them.

Note: I know there are a few books that HN-ers love published by Apress such as the XYZ At Work series. That particular series, no pun intended and not to disrespect to author, is totally different when you compare it to technical books.

I like most of the people I've come into contact with at Apress ever since they acquired my first book from Wrox after a giant debacle.

That said, they've made some very strange strategic decisions about their book line that basically involved my co-author and I taking future editions of our books in directions that we completely disagreed with.

Tech book authoring really isn't a very good way to make money, so I wouldn't really worry about a thousand dollar advance - after all, it's an advance against royalties, so you should get paid either way.

Why aren't more technical books self published?

I've heard these same things echoed from non-technical book publishing experiences too. The publishers are quite simply middlemen, they can front some production costs to get books in to brick and mortar stores but expect very little unless you have a proven track record and you give a lot up for that. A friend wrote a book (a novel), found a publisher, and basically he was going to pay for everything, literally, pay for the first round of published books, pay to promote, effectively self-publishing the book but sharing the profits. His best avenue for making money on it is to sell the books himself on amazon. Never mind the crappy nature of so many technical books anymore.

Technical books, with technical audiences? Short of the tiny amount of money upfront, I can't see at all why you wouldn't self-publish. The audience is forward thinking, they get it.

Mike, did your refusal to sign the contract (despite your continuing work on the project) have anything to do with the delay in payment?

Did you attempt to modify the deadline to a future date, and if so did they refuse to accept that version of the contract?

Reminds me of the stand Sebastian Marshall is taking against Simon & Schuester. He also points to overdue advances and sluggish response times. http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/an-open-letter-to-simon-and...

I've written a book (a decade ago, for Prentice Hall), and I talked with Apress about writing a second one. Apress, it should be noted, forgot about our discussions, and I didn't push, so the project dropped.

The first thing to realize about writing a computer book is that you probably won't make much money off of it. Indeed, you'll probably make very little money from it. So it's not a surprise to hear that the author made so little.

It's also not surprising to hear that Apress didn't promote the book. I'm on the receiving end (as a Linux Journal columnist) of book press releases, and I easily get 1-2 such messages per week. The publishing business is in a terrible state, and while it seems paradoxical that it costs too much to market the book in a serious way, that is the case. When I wrote my book (and granted, this was before Facebook Twitter, and the like), I was responsible for ensuring that it was reviewed on Web sites and magazines; I didn't feel like the publisher did very much.

Given that my book got very positive reviews, you would have thought that they would have pushed to market it more, or to do a second printing. But they didn't. Most books are basically thrown out there, and the few that make a lot of money, by some combination of skill, contacts, and luck, get additional printings.

Apress was founded by someone who was fed up with other publishers, and so it's sad to hear that they have problems with contracts. But it's always unwise to into into a business agreement without a contract of some sort; I've learned this the hard way on a number of occasions through my 15-year consulting career. Writing the book before the contract was set was a mistake that the author made.

When I wrote my book, I also hired an agent. On the one hand, he got 10 percent of whatever I earned, which wasn't much to begin with. On the other hand, he got rid of many clauses in the contract that I never would have thought to notice or remove. It was probably a wash financially, but knowing that someone was there, helping me out, was a good feeling.

If I had to write a book nowadays -- and I'm certainly thinking of doing so -- I'd probably go the self-published, Ebook route. Ebooks can be shorter, are more flexible in terms of format, and will probably net a good author about the same amount of moeny as they would get from a publisher, minus much of the hassle. True, a good publisher will give you good technical edits, indexes, and distribution, but with rare exception, I have to wonder how useful those really are nowadays.

The bottom line is what while Apress might not have been professional about how they treated this author, it seems pretty par for the course in today's world. It's a shame, given how much work goes into writing a book, that he had to have such problems. I'm guessing that if had signed a contract in advance of the work, and perhaps even had an agent helping him, it would have worked out better. But maybe Apress has lost touch with their author-centric roots (that's the "A" in Apress, by the way), and smaller publishers such as the Pragmatic Programmers are the place to go for aspiring authors.

Since we only "hear" one side of the story, it's impossible to tell if he's brave, daring, or foolish doing work without a specific and valid contract. At least it ends with him getting paid.

Tldr.

Don't do business with mikeash because he will totally criticize you on the main page of Hacker News.

You were working without a contract.

I would suggest that is the whole reason this experienced sucked, not because of Apress.