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.
As near as I can tell, publishers have one and only one purpose in the modern world: Publicity. They might as well change the name of the biz to reflect this, because it is the only differentiator they have.
They do provide other useful services, like copy-editing and tech review. However, they don't provide these very well, and the amount of money they take in exchange is huge.
They also provide a bit of financing, sort of like how movie studios are basically banks who specialize in investing in one particular area. But with the typical tech book advance coming in under five figures, this isn't very big.
I'll note here that on the Apress book that I worked on, the copy editing and tech review provided were both excellent, certainly far beyond what I would have sourced myself (note "would", not "could" - in the case of tech review I probably knew people who would have been equally good but I'm fairly sure that I would have picked the wrong people).
Only one chapter I wrote got that far, but my experience was that the tech reviewing was at best neutral, whereas the copy editing was ok but not great.
My chapter walked through designing and implementing a custom binary protocol running over UDP for realtime network communication over a LAN. One reviewer suggested that I expand on a bit that went something like, "Create a new project in Xcode" with a step-by-step along the lines of, "1. Open Xcode and pull down the File menu...." This seemed to be well below the level I was aiming for, but of course I could never get anyone at Apress to tell me who they agreed with.
The copy editor was decent but not technically minded, so I had to explain a fair amount. I imagine that technically-minded copy editors are hard to come by, but still, this is a technical press.... The copy editing process was atrocious. I had to download some crazy Adobe software to review the suggested changes, and for some reason they do the indexing before these final changes, so I had to ensure that any alterations didn't reflow pages too much.
When I self published, I ended up crowdsourcing people for these functions by recruiting on my blog and on Twitter. I got a couple of dozen fairly competent people and we were able to divide up the book so that nobody had to do more than a couple of chapters. (Some ended up doing much more, but simply because they wanted to.) That ended up working pretty well, although obviously not every prospective author will have the ability to recruit a couple of dozen helpers like that.
Fair enough, and I'd go further to say: Several of us have access to higher-quality editors and (certainly) tech folks for review than most of the publishers I've dealt with.
Friends of friends mainly. English majors are never very far from professional circles, and several have found that contract tech editing is a way to pay bills while working on items closer to their core.
HN should be a good place for this. If I saw a post asking for editorial help I'd certainly respond, schedule permitting. I'm sure others would as well.
They also have a certain amount of prestige and perceived quality compared with self-publishing. This probably matters less for technical books, but in, for example, academia, there is a huge difference between being self-published and published by Oxford University Press.
So far, my experience is that it's about the same. Self-publishing, I get about 10x more money per sale, but about 10x fewer sales. It's also about 100x less hassle, though, so definitely worthwhile.
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.