I too was one of the contributing authors on iPhone Cool Projects and I also had to run around chasing people to get paid my "advance" months after the book had

I too was one of the contributing authors on iPhone Cool Projects and I also had to run around chasing people to get paid my "advance" months after the book had already been published. I did have a contract in place before starting, but Apress just ignored it, and the only way I was able to track anyone down was to ask another more popular author to help me find someone who could get me paid. My contacts at Apress basically just ignored my emails and phone calls. None of that even touches on the antiquated process where I got to spend hours screwing around with a bunch of confusing MS Word templates because most of an author's time is clearly best used trying to correct style errors. The entire process had me wondering if this is really how these books get created. If it is, I decided it definitely isn't for me, especially considering the minimal pay. Needless to say, I had a pretty awful experience with Apress too, which is a shame, because I'm not a prolific blogger like Mike, and getting to have my name on the front of a technical book was a really exciting achievement for me. I'm proud of the work I did, but not really sure that I'd ever want to go through this again.