Here's How to Nail Down Your First Assignment as a Collaborator
If you lack substantial published writing credits, you'll have to pay your dues to get your first assignment. This means you'll need to do the first one for no money upfront and a 50/50 split of future royalties with your expert.
You may feel like screaming, “Hey, wait a minute. This isn't the speedy trip to big money that your title promised.”
Ah, but it is.
Consider the alternative. You don't have any credits for published writing. Unless you do something drastically different from what you have been doing, in five—even twenty-five—years, the odds say you still won't have any. Compared to that, writing one book for no money upfront and seeing it on bookstore shelves a year or two from now is rapid entry into paid publication. It's not a tortoise and hare race; the race is between fiction's comatose turtle and nonfiction's healthy jackrabbit.
