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.
Yup I didn't particularly want to call them out directly, but that's it. There was another book I worked on with O'Reilly that was actually a really good experience, but I just didn't have time to finish it unfortunately. :(
I had a similar experience with O'Reilly. Worked on a title that was never published (part of their Java series), but they were good folks all around, and provided valuable editing and tech review.
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.