[jrockway]

Not OP, but I wrote a book for Packt.

1) They had very aggressive deadlines that I missed consistently without consequence.

2) Their editors were not native speakers of English, and introduced a ton of grammatical errors that people complained about to me.

3) They published the wrong version of a chapter.

4) They randomly decided one day to stop paying me royalties "because PayPal takes too much commission" or something.

It wasn't all bad, though. They did give me a pretty reasonable advance (at least compared to just writing documentation for free), and they did get good technical reviewers.

This was ~10 years ago, so things might have changed.

[plinkplonk]

> 4) They randomly decided one day to stop paying me royalties "because PayPal takes too much commission" or something.

Wow wouldn't that be illegal?

[jrockway]

It's not illegal, as I'm not their employee. It all depends on what's in your contract. Practically, it depends on what court is going to enforce the contract. They aren't in the US and I am, so... prohibitively expensive to go after the $20 they owe me.