Ask HN: Hurts your career if you write a tech book that gets negative reviews?

However, after reviewing other related books on Amazon, I've noticed that reviewers/customers can be merciless. This seems to be all the more true for programming books, perhaps because these books are generally expensive and disappointed customers tend to be more upset than others because of the financial loss. But also, perhaps, because programmers tend to be more critical in general - I'm not sure.

Regardless of the reasons for the negative reviews, do they impact the career of the author? Or is it a significant enough achievement to have published something - anything - related to programming, that it matter too much if you get negative reviews?

Obviously it's best if you write a good book that everyone likes and is reviewed positively - no need to state the obvious - but how significant are negative reviews to the author's career?

Also be involved in good things. You get some leeway for making mistakes if you are a developer on an Open Source project that a lot of people like. My first (and, so far, only) book had many flaws, but the reviews were almost universally favorable (the biggest negative sentiment was that it was too short, which is about as good negative as I can think to have) because peoples opinion of me were mostly favorable, and they knew I was trying to do good things.

My book was also available for free, which tends to make people like you better, thought it's no guarantee.

As long as reviews aren't really bad, which I can only imagine would happen if you were obviously writing crap to cash in rather than transfer knowledge, having a published book will not hurt your career. It can only help. My book got me my best contract ever, almost single-handedly (I was one of a handful of people they interviewed for the gig, and the moment after my book was discussed, I could tell they'd decided the search was over and I was their guy).

Take a look at how both the Django (Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss) ~ http://www.djangobook.com/ and HTML5 (Mark Pilgrim) ~ http://diveintohtml5.org/ are evolving. Both started online and have moved/moving to publication. The interesting bit is how the content is influenced by their readers reducing the chance of poor reviews.