I meant “paid off its advance through royalties”. Sorry! Everyone’s path is different, but generally speaking, if you publish enough blog posts (especially on

I meant “paid off its advance through royalties”. Sorry! Everyone’s path is different, but generally speaking, if you publish enough blog posts (especially on LinkedIn), someone from a content shop will notice and ask you to write a book or create a course. Both flows are similar, but I’ve only done courses and can speak to that in detail. You propose a course. The content manager you work with decides if it fits their learning plan or whether there is demand for that kind of material. If they think people will view the course, you’ll be asked to come up with a course summary. DevOps and Kubernetes are super hot right now, so these were easy for me to think up. Here, you’ll pitch the course. What is it? Who’s meant to view it? What will you cover? This gets reviewed. If it looks good, you’ll be given a producer, and they will ask you to write scripts. Sometimes the content manager will ask for a demo of how you’d present a course. Here, they want to see whether you have enough “presence” to instruct. Sometimes they’ll provide feedback for you to fix, but this didn’t happen in my case. You’ll also get an advance, with the first half being paid out around this time. These advances aren’t like the music industry where you use the money to pay for production and marketing. It’s literally money in your pocket. Script writing can take FOREVER. especially the first time. It took me three months to write enough scripts for a two hour course. There’s a lot of back and forth. Since my courses are very hands-on, I also write lots of code and test everything while putting the scripts together. Very difficult to do all of this with a full-time job, doubly so when that job is demanding! Once the scripts are cleared, you’ll be asked to record. There are lots of different ways this can go. Mine are audio-only with a terminal walkthrough, so I just recorded and screen capped everything. Some courses have live-action and acting. These require studios. I haven’t done one of these yet, so I can’t speak to it. Beta testing happens after recording. People internally go through your course and make sure that everything gels. Sometimes you’ll need to fix stuff after this. Once beta tests complete, your course goes live and starts racking views! You also get the other half of your advance. You get paid royalties for every learner who views your course. I don’t know the specifics of this, but it’s kind of like YouTube’s ad platform. However, you don’t earn anything until the grand sum of your royalties exceeds the advance you were given. Depending on how your course performs, this can either never happen or it can happen very quickly.