| Hi, I'm the co-author of a book by PacktPub. Throwing some incoherent thoughts together: I was approach by PacktPub, and I did a bit of Google'ing before I started, to check it wasn't a scam but didn't find a great deal of advice. I really wish I had the good sense to ask on HN, like yourself, before I picked up the contract. I've been meaning to write it up on a blog, when I put mine together (ironically considering the subject matter of the book). So for me I knew it was never about the money, I was intending at least not to take the advance (which is actually a kind of loan that comes out from your royalties), it was about having my name on a book, but in the end it was so much work I figured I deserved it at the very least. The main thing that shocked me was how much time it would take to do, in the end 18 months and that was from the half way point that my co-author had got it to, to the point where I gave up with it. It should be noted I'm not a free-lance developer, I have a full time job so all this work had to be done in my spare time. This was not well understood by the publisher even though I explained it often, but deadlines came and went without any feedback. I was asked to make Skype calls during my working hours, never times that inconvenienced them, just when it inconvenienced myself. I believe they were based in India so calling in my evenings would be 2am or so for them, but I wouldn't be able to write their book at all if I was fired. I went though 3 (or 4) different 'project leads' who always told me the end was just around the corner. There was no outline as to how much work was involved, the contract stipulated chapters and some re-drafts, but there is WAY more effort in it than that. No one seemed to have a coherent view of what was going on. In the time I wrote the book and it being published, I got engaged, and married, and the thing that really annoyed me, and the point where I just stopped responding to them, is that I was still being contacted while on my honeymoon after being explicitly asked not to, that and I wasted my time 2 days before my wedding writing the pre-amble that turned out had already been written by my co-author after I was told it was just one last thing (again). As for the quality of the book? I just don't know. There are errata which get sent to me, but I am done writing books for a very long time. |