Comments on: How much work is writing a book?

By: dot tilde dot

dot tilde dot — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:28:14 +0000

ryan, thank you. you nailed it.
.~.

By: Ryan Russell

Ryan Russell — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:40:57 +0000

One of the questions I often get is, how much can I make by writing a book?
And I have to stop them and say, whoa, hey, you’re doing it wrong already…

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:40:23 +0000

Hi Baron, I missed the part about not having a production schedule. We had a very clear 22 week schedule for that part with accountabilities and deliverables. It got sort of thrown out the window because we went into a compressed schedule, but we had a guideline.
I do think that it’s hard to predict the outline to text and content and revision parts. Some authors go from outline to text and then don’t bother revising. Others hone. At least based on what you said, though, it should have been clear to O’Reilly that you’d hone.

By: Baron

Baron — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:38:11 +0000

Thanks Adam. I appreciate your comments. And it very well could be true that I’m being unfair to O’Reilly, but I only see my side of things.
On the other hand, one of my major issues with the scheduling was not that we didn’t know in advance how much work it would be — but that even after we’d spent a lot of time, and had a detailed outline or even 3/4 of the content written, that we couldn’t get guidance on how much time it would likely take to finish what we’d started. I couldn’t even get guidance on how much work the production process would be. That’s something that I think experience can actually predict. I certainly think I could predict it myself now that I’ve been through it once. But as a first-time author I was really asking for this help and didn’t get it.