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I have an agent

Ovid on 2002-09-30T16:43:16

Kind of weird, but I now have an agent for a tentative book deal. There is no book contract yet and certainly no guarantees. In fact, I have nothing but a possible schedule that requires me and a co-author to each churn out over four and a half pages a day for three months. Is this doable? Given my writing experience, this seems like something that can be done, but not easily. I would hate to sacrifice quality for quantity. There would be no point in writing.

All in all, I think I can sum this up as a definite possibility of a firm maybe of three months of agony. Clearly, I'm not as bright as I thought.

Secret Agent Man?

samtregar on 2002-09-30T17:18:22

I'm curious, why did you get an agent? Is there an upside that I missed out on?

As far as whether 4 pages per day is doable... Well, I definitely couldn't do it but writing speed is a personal attribute. Have you ever written a chapter-length article? Figuring out how long it took you might give you a good estimate for how long it will take you to write a chapter in your book.

Also, does that time estimate include editing time? I found that I spent almost as much time editing my work as I did writing new material.

-sam

Re:Secret Agent Man?

Ovid on 2002-09-30T18:03:20

Of course there's an upside to getting an agent. There's a percentage of money that I no longer have to worry about spending :)

Seriously though, I was contacted by another individual and the agent/author relationship was already set up and I was merely being contacted by a potential coauthor. Personally, I'm fine with that. I used to sell cars (don't hate me for it!) and while I'm good at negotiations and paperwork, I prefer to minimize that. If someone else wants a percentage to handle those details, I can live with that. As I have no expectations of getting rich off of this, I suspect that increased earnings due to a new item on my resume will offset any potential losses to an agent.

My coauthor is writing a sample chapter to estimate his writing speed and I'm waiting for some additional material before I can start the same exercise. I can't see myself cranking out four quality, well-researched pages a day for three months. And as far as I am aware -- still waiting for some details -- the estimate is for the first draft.

On the other hand, I'm single (again) and have no children, so if I'm willing to ditch all of my social obligations, I have plenty of spare time -- assuming I don't keep working weekends.

4 pages per day?

autarch on 2002-10-03T02:02:34

Well, you didn't say if you otherwise have a job, and how many hours per week you work. If you have a 40 hour per week job, I consider highly unlikely that you'll do 4 pages per day (which means 28 per week). That comes out to a chapter per week _non-stop_ for 3 months.

When writing the Mason book, I was working about 30 hours per week and I did not write nearly that fast. Maybe I wasn't pushing myself very hard but I found that I had to be in a certain frame of mind to produce anything decent. It wasn't entirely hard to get into that frame of mind, but I couldn't do it if I was really tired or whatnot.

Now, once I got into writing mode, I could easily crank out more than 4 pages at once, but there's no way I could have done that every day.

It's hard to estimate how long the writing took, since about 2/3 of the way through both I and my co-author (Ken Williams) took some time off to beat the at-that-point unreleased Mason 1.10 into shape, because that's what we were documenting.

Doing that coding in turn required us to go back and revise chunks of the book.

But if I had to take a guess, I'd say I wrote about 150 pages (in O'Reilly page sizes) over the course of six months, which is nowhere near what you're aiming for.

I'm married, though I have no kids, and I do have other volunteers things I work on besides my paying jobs, but nonetheless, I think you are grossly overestimating your speed, unless you have literally no other work to distract you.

Re:4 pages per day?

Ovid on 2002-10-03T22:05:03

I do have a full-time job, but I am single, so that helps. I do have a fairly active social life, though, so that's something which needs to get tossed by the wayside for a while.

do {
  unless ( $working ) {
    write( $stuph ) && undef $social_life;
  }
} while ( ! $dead );

My coauthor and I are still working out deadline details, but I have no idea how this is going to turn out. There are a few other ingredients which have been tossed into the mix, so time will tell.

I still have a heck of a lot of writing to do, though, no matter how you look at the situation. This is going to be tough. On the other hand, who doesn't want to be underpaid for the privilege of throwing away their social life? :)