Web Forefront

I won't dwell on the obvious which would be telling you how many nights you will spend trying to write just one chapter, so I will assume you have cleared your head of the idea that writing a book is a 'piece of cake', its a tremendous amount of hard work, but there are certain aspects that can break you along the way, no matter how willing you may be to get the work done.

Money expectations : If the tech industry is cut-throat the book business closely follows, here is a break down with numbers to show you what I mean. As an author, your cut is a percentage of the price an end user ends up paying which ranges from $20-$25 -- amazon style prices -- or the equivalent to half the cover price of $40-$50 (which in this day in age anyone rarely pays).

By industry standards an authors percentage is around 10%, with some very well known authors known to negotiate even a 25% or 30% cut. So that means as a first time author you stand to gain around $2.50 per copy sold, so you need a lot of copies to make that next car payment hu ?

Well, now for some good news. The good news is that all publishers pay advances on these would be gains at certain milestones in the book, the dollar amount varies highly by publisher, but anything lower than $2,000 dlls throughout the whole life-cycle of the book should set of warning bells -- this is based on other talks I have had with other would be authors.

The even better news is that your earnings are never capped, if its a best-seller book you keep getting a cut every sales cycle, in this sense the publisher is also making a calculated risk that your book will at least sell the break-even point of "Total Advance/Your %take", and every publisher will of course err on selling close to double this amount before even considering you for a contract, but this is their homework not yours.

Now for the worst news, all this fortune to be made is still very much 'in paper', you won't get a single dime for your hard work unless you hit your milestones, and as everything in business, its not as simple "My manuscript hit the 1/3 milestone, where is my check?", the key to your success are your editors.

Your editors, for better or worse : For starters forget the tech-savviness of an acquisitions editor and enter the mind of an English professor. From what I have gathered, editors in the technical book business are about as familiar with technical subjects as a car mechanic with a jet engine, my apologies to the exceptions of this generalization.

You might have spent hours debugging a code listing for the book or changing an explanation to make it crystal clear, but be prepared for the following observations: "use a crutch", "it needs more color","many run-off sentences", "it needs a segue", this is the equivalent of a techies own jargon medicine.

And don't believe for a minute an editors job is to change your writing to support all these requirements, their job is to just point them out. You will be lucky if they give you a single paragraph to illustrate what they mean, and with most book writing communication taking place remotely -- either via email or on occasions telephone -- you need to develop a deep understanding for what an editor means and wants, and unless you develop such an understanding, you are in for a very rough time

Don't underestimate this process, an editor can make you or break you. You may be the expert, but if the editor does not approve your writing style you will get nowhere in terms of advance money or the book in general, not a single person or the acquisitions editor can help, you are in it for the long haul.

I myself went through 3 editors on the same book project, which is a statement to either A) how I did not 'get' how they wanted the writing polished B) how much my writing sucked or C) how an editing job is done by anyone with an English major. For me, my editors made a living hell writing on a subject I very much enjoyed.

Your life-lines : Co-authors and reviewers : Once you hit your first milestone, a few more people will get involved in the writing loop : Reviewers for sure, and co-authors depending on what understanding you developed with your editors.

Reviewers are your potential book buyers, they are techies 100% and probably use and have a very good understanding of the technology or platform your are writing about. They are chosen by the publisher, and are basically used to detect major technical flaws, in the process easing the worries a publisher may have about the viability of a book. Unless you are writing complete technical non-sense or plagiarising some well known material on the subject, you shouldn't have any issues with reviewers, reviewers are in place to keep you straight on the subject.

A co-author is more like an editor's or publisher life-line, if for any reason you did not correct your writing to the editor's satisfaction or fell behind schedule on your delivery dates, you will get a co-author, no questions asked. While this might by an indicator that you are being ousted from the project, if you look closely at many technical books out there, you will realize that having more than one author on a book is extremely common.

Arrangements between co-authors are relatively simple, since you won't have any face time and most likely communicate via email, it generally comes down to a matter of splitting work in the form of : "Can I take Chapter X and Chapter X?", the exception to this would be the table of contents, but this rarely requires much back and forth discussion, besides being very high-level talk.

In terms of a monetary split, the acquisitions editor will step in as a mediator. But it generally means that if you stood to make $2.50 of each copy, you will now make a whopping $1.25 for each copy, that is, if you agree on the 50%/50% work/royalty split. At this point things can go south very fast, if 1) you believe your current work merits more than a 50% share, 2) a third or fourth co-author comes on board -- which is not strange, just check titles at a bookstore, or 3) you need to get paid an advance for the work you have performed.

As far as point 1 is concerned, you might "believe" you have written more than half of the book's value leaving just the 'easy chapters', and you can scream this to the top of your lungs, but its highly unlikely someone else will come on board for less than half, being that only two names will appear on the book, just put yourself in a co-authors shoes. And what's more, the publisher wants a co-author, so the question is not if you want a co-author, but at what percentage share both of you will be comfortable.

Option number 2 can really complicate things, because the work/royalty split is not as simple as 50%/50%, then 33%/33%/33%, then 25%,25%,25%,25%, it may be more like 20%/40%/40% or 5%/20%/30%/45%, you get the picture. You may have slaved working on 150+ pages for 1 month straight, but for every co-author that comes on board your work is diluted, and the publisher generally sticks on the 'we won't be using the material you wrote' or 'your material needs to be re-written'.

This is were you may feel the sting, starting of work with a certain expectation only to get burned at a much later cut off date. Contrary to even software development, which is notorious for getting a fair rate on the work performed, book development is very subjective besides being based on a future revenue model.

In software development, you can easily know if the project is working or not, it either does "x" computation or it doesn't. When you write a book, feedback takes longer and you may go into it head first unknowingly if there is any 'water' at the end, which takes us to point 3 : getting some type of compensation for your work.

Returning to the same software development analogy, if your application does what was agreed upon you should get paid that part, its that simple, even if someone else ends up finishing up the work, it would reek heist if they said : "Your application logic needs to be re-written, we won't be using it, you will need to take a cut".

Call it what you will, but in book development since the publisher does not make any money until the book hits the shelves, you won't see a dime until you and the co-authors work together on getting the manuscript finished, and here is perhaps the difference between working with a small and big publisher.

Not only did my particular publisher hold all type of payment indefinitely even though I delivered beyond the first milestone, but they encouraged me to continue writing in order to not hurt the timeliness/deadline of the book, yes you read correctly, they wanted me to continue head on without any type of financial assurance on their part, talk about not putting their money were their actions were.

It is of course just business, but when your facing diminishing returns on the time invested in writing, some type of assurance should be essential for you to continue, even if its a $200 or $500 check that will say : "Here is our guarantee we won't pull the rug out". Always keep it in the back of your head that books can be cancelled -- YES its not strange for a book to be completely scraped, just like software applications -- and what happens in those circumstances is that you will be left hi and dry with 100+ or 200+ pages that will never leave your writing cohort, not to mention you won't get neither the marketing value of being an expert on the subject nor a dime for your work.

More than you bargained for ? It was for me ! But I am not quite finished, in the last part of this three part entry I will give you my final thoughts on writing a technical book and who should actually consider such a feat.

Bottom-line Getting a contract and hard work are only two of the ingredients needed to get a technical book done. There are many things that are rarely talked about, hopefully with this advice you will take heed of your editor's feedback, the impact a co-author can have on a book and the potential money behind writing a book.