Open Call for Book Authors: Vapor, Kotlin, Unity VR, and More

3) Earn Some Money!

Many authors ask what they can expect financially from the first year of book sales — and if it’s worth the effort to release updated editions of the book. The majority of traditional publishing agreements only give authors 10-15% of royalties, expecting authors to write for exposure and to increase credibility in their field, with royalties as a secondary concern.

At raywenderlich.com, we think you can enjoy a nice financial return on your books and build your credibility at the same time. We have an unusual approach in the industry, where we give 50% of net revenue back to the book authors. We take the proceeds from each book, subtract any internal production and affiliate costs, and then give you exactly half of what’s left.

The authors’ share of royalties is divided proportionally between all authors on the book, depending on how many chapters each author contributes. If you are the sole author, you get the whole 50%. If you have a co-author and you write 4 chapters out of 10 in a book, and your co-author writes the other 6, you get 20% and your co-author gets 30%.

The chart below shows the average total book royalties paid out to authors during the first year of the book’s life. We’ve included the low and high values of the first year of author earnings as reference:

Plus – to make it easier to work on the book, we’ll send up to $8K in royalty advances before the book launches (you get all of it if you are a solo author, less otherwise). This can help you cover unpaid leave from your day job, give you time to ignore other client work, cover if you need to pay for childcare in the evenings, get grocery delivery or cleaning services, or so on.

What’s Involved

So you’re ready to become an author — great! Let’s talk about what you can expect.

If you haven’t written a book before, there are two important things you should know:

There’s a reason that the dedication page of almost every book thanks family members, spouses and other significant people — because driving the book to completion almost always means you’ll be neglecting a lot of your life outside your job and your book.

In the beginning part of your book process (see below), you will even need to work full-time on the book project, so you will need to take some time off your regular work schedule for this.

The #1 mistake we see is authors not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get a book project complete. So please be aware of what you’re getting into before applying.

1. Writing a book is a lot of work. Do not plan to write a book if you’ve just had a baby, are working 80+ hours a week on your startup, or like to spend your days off relaxing with a margarita.
2. You must meet your deadlines. Your teammates on the book team can’t get their work done on time if you, the author, don’t get your work to them on time. We almost always have a fixed launch date that must be met, so you must be able to avoid procrastination and reliably meet deadlines.

Book Writing Phases

There are four phases to write a book for our site:

And best of all, this is a paid contracting job of $3K+ (in addition to the book advances and royalties you’ll get later!) – so you basically get paid to do the research for the book! You can then repurpose the sample projects and scripts that you develop for the video course in the book, saving a ton time. Also, students can give you feedback on the course, and what they’d like to see in the final book, giving you valuable feedback and establishing yourself as a subject matter expert.

Note that you are only required to make the written materials – someone from our team can record the actual videos and demos. But if you’d like to record the videos and demos too, you’re welcome to fly into our video studio and do so! :]

This phase requires you to work full-time on this project, and will take 3-4 weeks.

This phase is light – it will take some work to put together the book plan, but then you’ll mostly be waiting for comments/revisions and for us to recruit the rest of the team. It will take 3-4 weeks.

As you submit chapters, they will go through at least three rounds of editing to polish them to the high quality style we are known for.

• If you have a day job: If you’re writing your book on your nights, weekends or days off, we’ve found authors can usually write 1 chapter every 2 weeks.
• If you are writing your book full-time: If you’ve taken a sabbatical from your day job or put contracting on hold so you can write full-time, we’ve found authors can write around 2 chapters every week.

1. Phase 1: Make Video Course Materials. As the lead author on a book, your first step is to make some materials for a video course on the subject, which form the basis for the first several chapters of the book. This is a smaller project than writing the entire book with a quicker timeframe, so it’s a great first step and a “quick win” for positive momentum.
2. Phase 2: Write Book Plan. Once you’re done with the video course materials, it’s time to turn to the book itself, and the first step is creating a book plan. We’ll give you a template to fill in, and you’ll answer questions like “What chapters will the book have?”, “What will the book schedule look like?” and “How many co-authors do you want (if any)?” Then, we will review and revise your book plan, recruit the rest of your book team, and get the project ready for kickoff.
3. Phase 3: Writing Phase. Once the book plan is finalized, we’ll have an official kickoff for the book, and you can begin writing! The timing for this varies based on the number of chapters in the book, and the amount of time you can commit to the writing and revision process:
4. Phase 4: Marketing Plan, Book Launch, and Beyond!. Once all chapters are in, we will work with you to develop a marketing plan for your book, and then later on we will have the official book launch. At this point it’s time to pop some champagne and celebrate! :]