So I got contacted by Packt Publishing today...

As stated, this morning I received an email from Packt Publishing asking about contributing to a book called "Unity 3 multiplayer games: Beginner's Guide".
The first thing that strikes me as odd here is that I don't have a very big internet footprint. In fact, it's downright miniscule. Nothing like a blog or anything, just the occasional G+ post and forum crawling.
The second thing that strikes me as odd is that I was contacted via Youtube.
From what I've heard, this is part of Packt's general strategy: find authors by essentially running a random search on the subject and picking whoever the hell. I don't think I would accept in any case, because I don't consider myself exactly an expert on the subject (there've been times I looked at my netcode and wondered what state of mind created such a monstrosity)
Thoughts on this?

 

If you get paid, why not ? Who cares how they pick their candidates, if you get paid for your contribution in the end.
Would make your internet footprint a bit bigger
No time for doubting one's programming style

 

It sounds like a useful book regardless of who writes it.. question is whether you want to write it. It does take a lot of time and effort to while an entire book especially when it has to contain a lot of tutorials and explanations, screenshots, working examples, etc. But it may be worth it if you get a nice payment from it because I think a lot of people would very much like a book about how to easily create a multiplayer networked game.

 

i received multiple emails from packt publishing on multiple topics (weird i know), and most of the time, they just want you to positively review and make fuzz around some random guy book and say on amazon that its awesome and that you endorse it, but be aware that theres no payment involved

basically what they want is to make potential buyers believe that the books are certified by other industry professionals, but as you said, just picking on random people, i myself havent made much buzz on the internet either, but have been contacted by packt pub regarding various topics, and they seem to forget they already contacted you, so i started making random google searches about myself and old posts in forums come up about ogre3d,xna and unity and some older about delphi and things like that

so i guess its that, picking random people, making believe potential buyers they gathered highly experienced individuals to craft their books, and in my opinion packt pub books seem to always lack because they choose their writers in the same way

i guess a lot of others have been contacted in the same way, im not sure

 

So they got back to me and indeed this did come from them. I'm inquiring more information about what this book entails. If all goes well I may end up writing a book about networking in Unity.

 

if they pay you, I'd go for it

the only thing I'd worry is if packt gets such a bad reputation, that having your name associated with it becomes detrimental

I know that has happened with certain other companies that kind of pull shady tactics like this. Like some companies hold conferences and invite people to speak, really as just a big marketing ploy to make money, and they invite anyone they can to speak. Then it becomes a little embarrassing to have done such a thing.

 

I tech reviewed a couple of Packt Unity books.

I don't think their reputation will be harmed anytime soon, they seem to be a major provider of a range of tech books.

 

I guess their reputation is not their strongest point:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/170318-Absolutely-the-worst-quot-How-to-quot-book-I-ve-ever-read

 

Heh heh, I have to say that was not one I worked on, but I did tech review Wills book which the OP there liked a lot, and also parts of Ryan Henson Creightons "Beginners guide".

~A

 

FWIW, their tactics may be a bit shady, but the actual quality is up to the writer. I was thrilled by the quality of the Will Goldstone book, but others I read (not all on Unity) were sometimes not as good (some even quite bad, sadly).

I finished "Unity for Architectural Visualization" which has been released in September 2013. I did get paid an advance fee and then there is a royalty percentage based on actual sales. So at least you get a financial compensation. Don't expect to be rich.

They do have a system of reviewing which also depends on the quality of the reviewers.

I'm accustomed to Academic publishing, where blind peer-review is the norm. But you can have good and supportive reviewers and have laze, arrogant ones too. Totally depends on the person.

I'd say, ensure that you see yourself up to it, to get to the required level that you would expect yourself. Writing is a large task but can be very rewarding, intellectually and (with some look) financially.

Check out my book here: http://bit.ly/17u87df

 

I personally think that Pack Publishing's books are low in quality in general. Of course, there still some excellent books but in general they don't have enough expertise to judge the content so they are only the middle man who print and sell book from *anyone*. Good or bad is completely up to the author.

I once reviewed a book on ActionScript and while I think it's terrible, I put a lot of feedbacks hopefully the author will change it someway, the book got release a short time after that, still in very bad quality ...

So be careful before you buy a book from Pack, at least you need to find out who write the book, what's being told inside instead just look at the cover and the title.

Just my two cents.

 

I purchased one of PAKT publishing books on Unity 3D ,"Unity 4.x Game Development by Example" labeled as a beginner book and it was very solid.

My main problem with it is that as I worked my way through I realized I was already beyond beginner level and I really needed more intermediate material. I did the first 5 chapters and found them very decent but couldn't see going through the rest of the book. It had one other minor drawback and that is it was written with Unityscript (javascript) examples and gave C# at the end of each chapter so you had to go back and forth if you wanted to check your work in C# .. I think as C# becomes the dominant language the book could have benefited from putting C# inline with the reading.

The writer had a great sense of humor and did a really good job on helping you understand how to limit the scope of your project in the beginning in a funny and engaging way. If you've done a few games (or tried to do some games even) you probably understand how important limiting your scope is and I really appreciated he started the book off like that.

 

Pakt Publishin' be buggin for real son, spamming developers and shiz. Need to step their publishing game up, for real.