Becoming a Contracted Author

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The author shares the experience of becoming a contracted author of Guyuehome, including the reasons for signing the contract, the original intention of writing blogs, getting to know industry bigwigs, the situation of manuscript fees, etc. The author also mentions the hobby of robot development and the expectation that the manuscript fees can cover the costs.

签约作者

Guyuehome is one of the largest robot communities in China. I bought their open - source robot OriginBot last November, and thus got in touch with them. Later, in January this year, I signed a contract with Guyuehome and became their contracted author.

There are three reasons why I agreed to sign with Guyuehome:

  1. Guyuehome has a good reputation in the robot field. I hope to get in touch with more bigwigs in the robot industry through this.
  2. After signing the contract, I’m required to publish at least one blog per month. This is a kind of self - discipline for me, and I hope this requirement can help me keep writing for a longer time.
  3. There is a manuscript fee.

I started publishing blogs on my own website in the second half of 2020, mainly sharing technical knowledge. I think this is an important reason why Guyuehome was willing to approach me.

When I decided to start writing blogs, on the one hand, I was influenced by Ruan Yifeng. I thought it was cool to have a personal website named after myself. On the other hand, I hoped to increase my influence through more sharing.
Becoming a contracted author of Guyuehome is the first thing that benefits from my blog - writing. It took about two and a half years from when I wrote my first blog.

Regarding getting to know bigwigs in the robot industry, about two months ago, someone in the contracted - author group added me on WeChat. After a brief chat, I found out that he was really a bigwig. He has published 300 original blogs with a reading volume of over 2.5 million, and also published a book titled “Practical Guide to UAV Programming from ROS1 to ROS2”.
At the beginning of last year, I also had the idea of writing a book. At that time, I wanted to write a book about Terraform. Terraform is regarded as an orchestration tool in the public - cloud era in the industry, and it is a new tool. There was no complete tutorial or book about it in China. But later I gave up because the audience was too small. Even if I could write it in the end, I’m afraid there wouldn’t be many readers.

Regarding the manuscript fee, I received my first manuscript fee at the end of February, and I even posted about it on my WeChat Moments.
In fact, the manuscript fee is really not much. If calculated by hourly wage, it’s probably only 1/15 to 1/10 of my salary. But it means a lot to me.

At the beginning of 2021, I set a small goal for myself, hoping to increase my income by 20,000 yuan besides my salary and investment. This goal has not been achieved yet, because I found that it’s quite difficult to increase my income by even 1,000 yuan apart from salary and investment.

In 2021, introduced by a friend, I helped a team develop a system. It took about 20 hours in total, and they paid me 6,000 yuan. But this was a one - time thing and not sustainable. Moreover, this kind of “part - time job” is essentially selling my time once, which is the most basic way of making money.

Becoming a contracted author of Guyuehome, publishing works on an excellent platform like Guyuehome can increase my influence. During the process of writing blogs, I can also improve my skills because I need to keep learning. And I can get a manuscript fee (although it’s very little). The key is that this is sustainable. As long as I’m willing, I can keep going.

So far, through the manuscript fees, I’ve basically earned back the money I spent on buying the OriginBot.
Robot development is an expensive hobby. I hope that in the future, the manuscript fees can cover this part of the cost.