Working with O'Reilly was a bad experience for actor/author Wil Wheaton ...

When I wrote Dancing Barefoot, I had a lot of the concerns I think you're referring to in your question: I just wanted to create something, and give it to an audience. I didn't want to experience the same process of begging and rejection, ultimately culminating in some form of (what often feels like) selling big parts of my soul that I have experienced my whole life as an actor. I knew that there was an audience for my work, and because of The Internets, I had a way to reach them. So I learned all I could about self-publishing, asked lots of people lots of stupid and not-so-stupid questions, and came up with a way to publish, market and distribute my work on my own terms. This had a couple of huge benefits, that should appeal to any creative person: I could let the audience decide if the material was worthwhile or not, and I had complete control over the way my work (and by extension, I) was presented to the audience. When I went the "traditional" way, I didn't have that control, and it was endlessly frustrating. O'Reilly insisted, against my advice, on marketing my story as a Star Trek book, which it clearly is not. I warned that they would alienate an enormous potential audience of non-Trekkies with that plan, but my pleadings fell on deaf ears. Unfortunately I was right, (Barnes and Noble won't even stock Just A Geek I've never seen it in a single store. According to a store manager, "Star Trek books just don't sell after the first week.") Just A Geek was abandoned shortly after its release just before Christmas, no less before it ever got a chance to take off. I worked on that book for two years, and poured ten times more energy into it than I put into Dancing Barefoot, and I was rewarded with a frustrating, depressing experience that I will never repeat.