I do technical writing for my living these days. Yes indeed: it is often very hard, slow work to do well. Assignments often seem to be in a state of perpetual slow motion.
It is wise to keep in mind that the industry standard for an experienced, professional technical writer is that they should be able to achieve approximately a page per work day of finished work, not counting review and editorial re-write cycles. So if your book is planned to be 100 pages in length, figure on at least 100 full time days to get the first draft completed... When it seems to be going too slowly, I think about my projects in that time scale and they all fall into about that rate on average. (Professional technical writers on staff rarely get a full work day of writing per work day in, there are many other facets to working for a large company that consume work day time, so the actual output is usually about a half to a third that volume.) G On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 2:09 PM, Mark Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: > Well it is. > > For those who don't know I'm in the midst of writing my own Photoshop > textbook for the classes I teach. I've found plenty of good Photoshop > books but none really structured for a semester-long course on > Photoshop. So after years of frustration I gave up and started working > on one of my own. > > Given the glut of Photoshop books on the market, I'm not holding out > much hope of finding a publisher, so I'm setting up everything for > self-publishing. Which means I'm not only writing the book, I'm doing > all the photography, illustration, graphic design and page layout. > Damn, it's slow. > > Anyway, I just needed to vent. Carry on. -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
