Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47151173

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

In my case, I self-published and sold a book for several years, and then published an updated version with O'Reilly.

I decided to do that because I came to realize people judge self-publish books as less vetted and lower quality.

That may be often true. But in many cases, a self-published book can be much better than those released by a former publisher. I certainly believe it was true in my case.

But in the end, I decided my highest best opportunity was to go with a well-regarded publisher, for the authority that would bring.

And it changed things. People treat me differently now, like they consider me more of an authority. Even though it's essentially the same book; it just has an O'Reilly logo on the cover now.

Whether that should be the case is up for debate...

But it absolutely made people listen more seriously to my message. and I believe it has massively increased the positive impact of that book on the world.

Financially, I think it's been about even. For me it was worth the tradeoff for other reasons, but I don't think that is always the case for every author and every book.

I will say I was very happy with the animal they came up with! If I was not, I would have asked them to change it, and I bet they would have. They showed me a preview version early on, so there would have been plenty of time to do so.

The whole experience was wonderful. I had basically none of the problems that this fellow experienced with his publisher, and I am delighted about how it went.

I did some things differently. For one, I had already been selling the book on my own for a few years, and was essentially on the 3rd self-published edition. Because of this, they were able to see what the almost-finished product was.

I told them I would not make massive changes to the book, nor would I contort it to the AI trend (the book barely mentions AI at all), and they never pressured me once.

Their biggest contribution was their team of editors. This book has code on just about every page. I had 3 technical editors go through it, finding many bugs. How many? Let's just say "plenty".

And the feedback from the non-technical editors was, to my surprise, even more valuable. Holy crap, I cannot express to you how much they improved the book. There were several of these folks (I had no idea there were so many different specialties for editors), and all of them were great.

(They also accepted my viewpoint when I disagreed with them, immediately, every time. The final published version of the book was 100% my own words.)

From all of that, I made improvements on what must have been almost every page, and rewrote two chapters from scratch. I also added a new chapter (I volunteered for it, no one at any point pressured me to do that). The result was making a book that IMO is at least twice as good as what I was able to accomplish on my own.

I do not resonate with the article author's comments about compensation. He negotiated a pretty good deal, I think; it's not realistic to get much better than what he did, since the publisher is a business with their own expenses to pay, etc.

I was pretty disciplined about meeting deadlines that we agreed to for certain milestones. That helped my relationship with the publisher, obviously.

All in all, it was a great experience, and I am glad I did it this way.

Reading the article, it sounds like my publisher (oreilly) was better to work with than his, but I think he could have done some things differently also. In the end, though, I agree with him that it was best to walk away in his situation.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46444669

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

If are worried about the significant expense and high risk of paid ads, which is very reasonable, I recommend you do not do paid ads at all.

I think a better alternative for you is to learn to create organic content, e.g. videos for IG and tiktok, or text posts for platforms like X. And learn to stimulate sales of your app that way.

This also has a long learning curve, but dodges the financial risk of paid ads. Once your organic content is dialed in enough to make consistent profit, you'll be much better positioned to start with ads and be successful.

Good luck!

There is also the investment in learning, which would require 5-10 hours per week that whole time.

I say this because anything short of that is likely to lose money and accomplish little.

Not trying to gatekeep, so feel free to try it however you like. Maybe it is worth you trying to set up one ad just to see if you like the process enough to continue.

It depends. What kind of offer are you selling?

Generally the learning curve is massive, long, stressful and expensive. I lost tens of thousands of dollars before I could consistently make ads which were profitable.

It's not like learning coding. Imagine if every time you saw a stack trace, $250 was deducted from your bank account. Learning media buying is kind of like that.

Another path is to get hired by an ad agency. They will train you and give you a budget to manage; if you lose that budget, the worst that can happen is they'll fire you (rather than losing all your stuff).

But that would be a switch in career path, which I do not think you are asking about.

As someone who buys ads on IG: this is almost certainly because the advertiser has misconfigured their settings for that ad campaign.

My experience:

For most ad campaign types, YES, Meta works far better than any alternative.

In my view, this is because its underlying machine-learning algorithms are better. Not the generative AI mentioned in the article, but the core ML-based learning strategy that every modern ad platform has been based on for over a decade now, allowing it to learn to find buyers for whatever you are selling. Meta is just better at that than anyone else - far better. And has been for years.

Linkedin is quite interesting and can reach audiences no other ad platform can. The problem with LI is that it is tremendously expensive. Think $50-200 per qualified lead, so it only makes sense for very high ticket offers. I've never been able to make LI ads work for lowticket offers (i.e. under $500 gross margin per sale).

I have attempted to run ads on X/twitter several times in the past 5 years, and each time gave up because of how terribly it performed. Literally zero sales from the ad spend, using the exact same ads which worked great on Meta. X is kind of infamous among media buyers for how bad it is. But I haven't tried it in over 8 months, so maybe it has gotten better now. Grok/xAI is quite good, so I am not sure why they haven't made the X ad platform a priority. If they did, I bet they could eat Meta's lunch.

Google is really 3 ad platforms: Youtube, Google Display Network (GDN), and keyword search. These are all radically different in many dimensions; the only thing they have in common is that Google lets you set them all up through the same web interface.

Mostly I run ads selling mid to high-ticket stuff to sophisticated buyers, and I think most of those people have Youtube Premium, which makes YT ad-free. So I haven't tried running ads on Youtube much. My media buyer colleagues who are into it are mostly selling mass-market offers that most people on HN would consider kind of scummy. They tell me it can work well, but requires a lot of ad spend over weeks to start working. In contrast, I can often get a Meta ad campaign profitable within 48 hours.

Keyword search works great, but only for "bottom of funnel" buyers (i.e. people who are actively looking for a solution they can pay for right now). There are only so many of those, so generally you cannot scale up ad spend (and thus absolute profit) very high. In contrast, Meta can create new "top of funnel" buyers, which is a larger audience by many orders of magnitude, which allows you to ramp up some Meta campaigns to a very high level of profitable ad spend.

GDN has been tricky for me. I think it has a lot of potential, but it has a very different model, and so far I have not been able to make it profitable for my offers. It certainly seems easier to set up a successful campaign with Meta.

Short answer to your question: Yes, even with the things the article is justifiably griping about, Meta is just way, way better than any alternative right now.

The only defense is to have checklists and continually go over running campaigns to make sure everything is configured properly, which as you note is really hard to turn off. Very easy to miss a detail in ad manager's complex UI.

But in its current form, I think that may happen mostly for very direct-response ads, while creating branding problems that would be expensive for many companies in the long run.

Also, some of the AI-generated creatives and copy that Meta has suggested to me actually misleads or flat-out lies about what is being advertised. Which makes me wonder if the American FTC will go after some companies for running misleading ads at some point, if they are not careful about what suggestions they accept (the ad manager UI currently makes it extremely easy to accidentally approve something you shouldn't).

All in all, these ad platforms are tremendously complex software systems, and as someone who has been a fulltime software engineer I have a lot of sympathy. But with so much money is on the line, the standards are high.

I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can do to avoid that now.

Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time, but right now three specific examples come to mind:

1. Promo codes 2. Site links 3. Related media

I won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to disable them.

The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are silently re-enabled.

This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had activated ads with these accidentally active.

The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive.

It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their ad campaigns.

These three specific examples have been happening for many months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which has been wasted by many companies around the world.

That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not to happen.

Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am seeing.

Not trying to challenge you, and I'd sincerely love to read your response. People said similar things about previous gen-AI tool announcements that proved over time to be overstated. Is there some reason to put more weight in "what people on HN said" in this case, compared to previous situations?