This makes me crazy and immediately tells me that person hasn’t thought out a business plan at all. What if your website person decided having her own business wasn’t her thing? What if she got discouraged waiting to make enough money to live on? What if she was just too lazy to work hard enough to make money? Your work would already be done no matter what she did.

The author I mentioned who said we’d all share in the “royalties” was one of those. First of all, he was self-pubbing, so it would be profits, not royalties. And he had no marketing plan for selling the book. I can’t remember the exact number, but I pointed out to him the profit per book in Kindle form, and if he charged this much, his profit would be this much, split between him, me, and his cover designer (yes, he was trying to make this deal on multiple fronts). He would have to sell multiple thousands of books at the price he was thinking, just to pay me a portion of what the work was worth. His cover designer was a friend who was doing it for free, and I had to write the author a firm but polite letter that reminded him I was a professional editor who worked to help support my family, that I was not his friend before we’d started working together, and that I wasn’t going to allow my paycheck to rely on whether his books sold or not.