About a year ago I set out to write a series of blog posts on the basics of monetizing your mobile apps with advertising. The series received great response from the community and we decided to publish it as a free ebook and even print a few copies.

I enjoyed the experience of putting my thoughts on the subject on “paper”, but, to be honest, I wanted to write the series and a book I’m writing now more than the whole thing on just advertising. That said, at the time Windows 10 wasn’t out yet but was clear on the horizon, and I felt that a lot of things will change once it is out. So, being lazy as I am, I decided to postpone the “marketing and monetization” book for later, and that’s how the advertising 101 book came to be.

Now that Windows 10 has been out for a while (at least on the desktop and new phones, cough, cough) I feel like the time has come to try and collect the collective wisdom of the Windows developer community, mobile developer community in general, mix it with official “party line” from Microsoft and produce an ultimate guide to marketing and monetization of apps and games on Windows 10.

The way I see it today, the series and the book will consist of 4 main parts.

Part I. Why? What? When?

In Part I we will discuss how you approach building the app or game before you even get started. Maybe before you even got the idea. The goal of this part is to crystalize your motivations and set out a course forward based on them.

Part II. Getting return on your investment

User acquisition tends to be expensive these days. While “get a million users and figure out business model later” may have worked in the past, it could be pretty expensive to get there in 2016 and beyond. So, having a good understanding of how these user acquisition efforts will pay off, would be great before spending time and money on getting people into your app.

Part III. User acquisition

Getting your business model right is great, but even the best business model is nothing when you have no users. Getting Windows users to use your apps and games is a challenge of its own and deserves the longest section of the series.

Part IV. User retention

Getting people to download your app is one task, keeping them coming back is another. In a world where selling apps and games upfront for a meaningful amount of money is not the norm, this becomes as important as any other part of the equation.

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So far I imagine around 30 potential chapters for the series, but I want to collect as much useful information and practical insights as possible. And for that …

I NEED YOUR HELP!

I want these series and the book to be as good as humanly possible. While I’ll be writing what I’ve learned from numerous conversations with developers, marketers, Microsoft employees and our own experience with AppRaisin, I would love to include guest posts/chapters covering the insights in one of the areas outlined above. If you’ve built a successful app or game business on Windows, or, otherwise, haven’t been as successful, but learned a valuable and practical lesson, please contact me at alan@adduplex.com or @ailon on Twitter. Hopefully you’ll agree to write a guest post or aside to one of the chapters in the series, share valuable experience with the community and get a few users for your app or game along the way.