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by timbutlerau
3627 days ago
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As someone who's currently 1/3 of the way into doing exactly what you've been asked... I'd advise you to really strongly consider the time it takes. I was wrong by a factor of 4. Thinking I could spend an extra few hours a week takes hours a night. Expect no support, their staff are only there are a conduit to move things around. The other thing that shocked me is how crude it all is. The publisher I'm engaged with only has email and word docs. No form of document management nor version control outside of manual naming of the documents. Even if my book sells well, it won't cover the cost of the time if I'd simply consulted that many hours. If you are considering it for the money, don't accept. If you want to study a subject in detail and get partially paid for it, then it might work out. |
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What I thought would be a quick few hours a week thing turned into taking up all of my free time over the weekends. And writing the first draft isn't even the most difficult part. In the review stage, you'll be revisiting stuff you wrote more than 5 months ago and we amazed at what a poor job you did then. Of course, time constraints make it impossible to re-write the whole thing, which is something we programmers like doing so much! So you do the best you can and move on.
And the tooling is non-existent. Word documents and emails are what I had to deal with. There were multiple instances in which I was editing the wrong version of the chapter, or the editor was looking at an older version, etc. I hope better tools exist for this process.