Need a bit of Direction...

To Tha Moon!

Cosmic Mongoose
Hey MongooseMatt,

I have several projects I'd like to publish under TAS. When I worked in Graphic Design, I was able to figure out how long it would take me to do a project.

I'm not sure how to do that putting together a book.

Would you be able to give me some pointers on setting a deadline for my projects so I can get them going?

Or even tell me what to do like I'm one of your Employees?

I'd appreciate any help you could give me,

Kelly aka Spinward Scout
 
Umm, kinda like asking how long a piece of string is :)

Take spacecraft, for example. A 20 ton launch may take just a few minutes, your average small trader or patrol craft maybe 10-15 minutes (stats plus background lore). Something big or weird or both may take half an hour - or more. Vehicles, about half that unless you are doing very high end military stuff.

An adventure, if you know what you are doing and how before you touch the keyboard, something like 14-30 hours for the first draft, double that for editing and re-writes.

This is all just for raw text, of course, but you should be able to spec the graphic design requirements for yourself?
 
As a rule of thumb I estimate an average of one hour per A4 page in 9pt font including images. Incorporating feedback / edits took me roughly 10% of the initial authoring time.

These figures are based on having written 3 technical books of 450-500 pages each.

Naturally, your mileage will vary - hope this helps.

And more power to your elbow. Authoring is hard…
 
just for what its worth with nearly 20 years under my belt doing fandom RPG creative writing and setting detailing and with projects still left undone.. that I tell myself I'll come back to. But then Traveller happened to me, who knows when or if I'll ever return to them haha.

my advice is deadlines are for jobs... and if you treat it as a job.. it becomes work. Thus not fun... and whatever deadline you set will get passed faster than trying to do 55 on I-95 in the DMV. If you are inspired by the subject the material will just flow out of you and the last thing you'll think of deadlines. In the creative zone....
 
There’s certainly a huge difference between writing short articles and writing a book. Individual chapters are more analogous to an article - chapters are often thematic in nature.

I do agree passion is essential for creative writing regardless of whether highly technical or sci-fi / fantasy.

Setting sensible objectives works for me. I try for 5-10 pages a week which translates to 5-10 hours writing. Each book took 6-8 months to write consuming much of my spare time whilst working full time.

I write this more for those considering contributing content and suggest starting small. FWIW I’m considering writing small vignettes - the kind of “thing” I want to drop into my Traveller campaign which doesn’t require much preparation time. Perhaps a book consisting of many vignettes in the fullness of time
 
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