PHP Classes

Have Your PHP Book Reviewed

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The PHP Classes site is reviving its sections for book reviews and tutorial articles. This is an initiative to give more exposure to the work of those that can teach the PHP developers sharing their knowledge about important subjects.

The PHP Classes site book reviews and blog articles are notified by email to over 400,000 PHP developers. This initiative is a great opportunity for authors to expose their work to the PHP community at large.

Article authors and book reviewers may also receive be rewarded either monetarily or by getting free review book copies provided by their publishers.

Read this article to learn how you can have your PHP book reviewed, or you can publish interesting blog articles and be compensated for sharing useful knowledge with the PHP community.

If you are a book publisher you should also read the article to learn how you can reach out to have reviewed in PHP Classes site books of the interest of the PHP community.




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Contents

The Importance of Getting Visible Book Reviews

Bringing Books to Book Reviewers

How You Can Get Your Book Reviewed?

Compensation for Reviewers

How can I Become a Reviewer?

Writing Tutorial Articles

Compensation for Tutorial Article Writers

Be Invited to Write Tutorial Articles

Sponsored Articles about Commercial Products


Book cover Estar na InternetThe Importance of Getting Visible Book Reviews

Let me tell you first about a short story. In 1997 I have written a book. It was published by McGraw-Hill, a well known publisher at the time. It was not about PHP. It was about the Internet and was targeted to people that did not know anything about it.

By then the publisher told me it was a best-seller but I do not recall having made a great deal of money from it. Maybe that was due to the fact that it was written in Portuguese and it was released only in Portugal.

The publisher gave away free copies of the book to newspapers and magazines that publish book reviews. That is fine but since Portugal is a relatively small country, the marketing effect of getting some book reviews on printed media is always limited.

Nowadays the Internet is widespread, so getting some visibility to your book is easier. On the other hand there are many more books being released, competing for the attention and the money of the potential readers.

This is where sites like PHP Classes can help getting your book stand out and become visible to a large number of potentially interested PHP developers. When a book review is published, the site sends a notification by email to more than 400,000 of the over 1.3 million users that have registered to the site since it was started in 1999.

If your book is good and recommended, publishing a review in the PHP Classes site may help you get lots of readers.

Bringing Books to Book Reviewers

The PHP Classes site has a books reviews section since the early days. Over time many books have been reviewed, mostly by myself. The idea was to generate some revenue from affiliate program commissions. However, I have given up book reviewing for a while. The time spent working on reviews was not worth the affiliate commissions it generated by then.

Still book reviews are useful to help readers find good books that teach what they need to learn. Therefore, recently I decided to ask some of the most active contributors, if they would be willing to write reviews about the useful PHP books. Several users accepted the invitations, so starting now you will be seeing new book reviews regularly.

How You Can Get Your Book Reviewed?

The basic requirement to have your book reviewed, is that you must provide a review copy of the book for the reviewer to do his work.

The next obvious step to get your book reviewed, is to get in touch with the site by sending a message to info at phpclasses.org. However, not all books qualify to be reviewed. There must be at least one reviewer interested to review your book.

If you propose a book to be reviewed, I will ask a list of potential reviewers if they are interested.To increase the chances of your book attracting of potential reviewer, the topic of the book must be of the great interest of the PHP community. Here is a list of topics that tend to attract more interested PHP developers:

- Performance Optimization

- Security Defense Methods

- Popular frameworks

- Popular PHP applications (Wordpress, Joomla, Magento, etc..)

Compensation for Reviewers

Writing good book reviews takes time and skill. Therefore it is fair that each review be compensated somehow.

For reviewers of books that they did not own yet, the basic compensation may be to get a free review copy from the publisher. Even if they publish a review based on an ebook version, some publishers may also send them a free printed version.

Additionally the PHP Classes site may also pay a monetary compensation to be agreed, especially for books that the site got review requests from the author or publisher. This compensation is funded using advertising revenue, as affiliate commissions tend to not be sufficient to compensate the reviewers.

How can I Become a Reviewer?

If you would like to apply to become a reviewer, just send a message to info at phpclasses.org. I will verify if you are qualified enough to be a reviewer.

At the very least you must be able to write English correctly. You do not need to be a native English writer. Do not worry, all reviews are reviewed by me before being published, so the review text may be corrected to avoid eventual mistakes.

You must also know very well the topic the book is about. Having related work published in a public site will help you to be accepted as reviewer. Although it is not absolutely mandatory, if you are already a contributor of the PHP Classes site and have published packages in the site, that will be definitely a positive point to get you approved as reviewer. 

Writing Tutorial Articles

Writing tutorial articles is very similar to write reviews. The difference is that reviews tend to be brief and only mention what the book is about, while tutorials tend to be more in depth and teach how to do things step by step.

Here are some examples of book reviews. Here are examples of tutorial articles.

Compensation for Tutorial Article Writers

In general, good tutorial articles require more time and skills to write. Therefore the PHP Classes site is paying monetary compensation to authors of good tutorial articles, unless the author does not want to be paid, for instance when he just would like to publish good tutorials for the pleasure of doing it.

The actual amount to be paid is agreed with the author before publication. The payment is sent via Paypal when the article is published.

The site also accepts opinion articles on the main blog. However, in general authors of opinion articles do not get a monetary compensation.

Be Invited to Write Tutorial Articles

Tutorial article writers can only publish and be paid for that if they are invited by the site. Currently, only developers that have contributed to the PHP Classes site, for instance submitting packages of PHP classes, can be invited to write articles. This requirement helps verifying if the developer has the necessary skills, thus leaving out users that just want to do it for the money but they are not qualified.

So, if you would like to publish a tutorial article in the site but you have not submitted any package to the site, the first thing you need to do is to submit a package and wait for it to be approved. Then the site will send you an invitation to send article proposals. You will also be invited to participate in a closed discussion group on which we discuss the topics of articles to be published.

That invitation was sent to all authors that have published packages in the site. If you have published any packages to the site in the past but you did not get this invitation, please send a message to info at phpclasses.org, so I can send you the invitation.

Sponsored Articles about Commercial Products

The PHP Classes site also publishes occasional articles about commercial products of interest of the PHP developers. The site also accepts sponsorships of the Lately in PHP podcast. That helps the companies of the products to get more visibility and customers to their products. Here are some examples of sponsored articles.

Sponsored articles and podcast episodes are accepted paying a fee. If you have a company that sells products of interest for PHP developers, send a message to info at phpclasses.org to know about the details of publishing sponsored articles or feature in podcast episodes.

Conclusion

The PHP Classes site community is reasonably large. Publishing book reviews and articles are a great way to expose your knowledge to the PHP community.

Please post a comment below if you have questions or other enquiries.




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  Blog PHP Classes blog   RSS 1.0 feed RSS 2.0 feed   Blog Have Your PHP Book Re...   Post a comment Post a comment   See comments See comments (0)   Trackbacks (0)