How To Become A Technical Writer

• How good are you at the topic you are writing about?
• How much time you are willing to spend each day?
• Do you need to do research on the topic?
• What level of user you are targeting - beginner, intermediate, or expert?
• In essence, it all depends on you and your skill level.

It takes me an average from nine months to 15 months to write a book. My first book took me more than a year and my last book took me about nine months to finish. You get the idea.

How much money will I make?

The question most people have on their minds is, how much money do you really make from a book? Well, it actually depends. It depends on how successful your book is. If you are authoring your first book and you are not popular in the developer community, chances are your book will be an average book.

For an average book, a publisher expects to sell between 5,000 to 10,000 copies over the first couple of years. An average technical book price is $45 and a publisher expects to get between 40 to 50 percent of the sale price. So a publisher actually gets $20 per book. As an author, an average of 10 percent royalties is an average rate. So you actually make $2 per book. After selling 5,000 copies of the book, you will make about $10,000 from a book.

So now here comes a question for you. Are you looking for fame or money from a book? If you are going after the money, considering the amount of time you will put into writing a technical book, it is not worth your time. You would rather make $10,000 by working for a couple of weeks at a rate of $100 per hour. If you are looking for fame and name recognition, authoring a good book is perhaps not a bad idea.

Work after publishing

Once your book is published, your work is not done yet. If you want to make the book a successful book, then you need to work on promotions. Mention the book in your blogs and on your websites or the websites you visit often. DO NOT talk about your book on unwanted forums. It will be considered as SPAM and will give you bad publicity.

Online communities are one the best ways to promote a book. You may go to several online communities such as C# Corner, MSDN, Code Project, Code Guru, and StackOverflow, and most of them allow you to publish a free chapter from your book. In your chapter, do not forget to mention the link of the book. Also become a regular author on these websites, and you may want to mention your book at the bottom of your article. This will give you a market larger than 10 million developers.

Regularly visit forums such as C# Corner Forums and Microsoft forums and reply to posts that are related to the topics your book covers. Answer the questions and also mention to go to your book page to get more details on that specific topic.

There are several podcasts, live shows, webinar hosts where you can go as a Guest and talk about your book and promote it. You can also giveaway books at events.

If you do not have a blog, start a blog. Remember, do not SPAM. You may publish small tips or articles from your book and mention your book at the bottom of the blog. Do not overdo it. Do not post the entire book photo on the blog. That may not look too good.

Benefits after publishing

Once you're a published author, and your book is out there, there are several direct and indirect perks. Not only do you earn respect among the developer community, but you also get some free passes. I got a chance to meet our respected Mr. Bill Gates because of my GDI+ book that was published in a distinguished series with Don Box and others.

Here are some of the benefits of being a published author that may not be applied to all of you.

• You make some money. Sure you do but this is not the main benefit.
• You're seen as an authority of the topic. That means, you're invited to speak at conferences and events. You get more exposure publicly and that is where you can shine even more and market yourself. When you speak at events and conferences, that is where you can benefit a lot. You can promote yourself. If you are a trainer, you can promote your training company or consulting. If you are a developer, you can promtoe your consulting work.
• Publishers will contact you to write more books.
• Training companies will contact you for projects and jobs.
• Your public profile stands out which is an achievement in itself.
• You're asked to be guest on online shows and podcasts.

Cheers!