I feel like setting yourself a "words/period of time" ratio is only good if you do not fear deleting these words afterwards. It's like setting a "LOC/period of time" ratio, focusing on removing bugs and increasing features (as an f-score ;-)) is a better optimization objective, but you've got to start somewhere...
That's a very good point. These 1000 words often get replaced or deleted. I guess that in many creative activities it's painful to edit down, but it usually pays off. Sometimes you don't just delete what you wrote but you rephrase it. I find it much easier to formulate a complex idea when I already have a first version in front of me (even if it's terrible), than to start from nothing.
If you don't fear deleting words you wrote, it's unlikely you'll be able to finish writing a good book. You're either be too paralyzed to write anything, or you'll write garbage (because all first drafts are garbage) and then be unwilling to revise it.
I don't think prose maps neatly to programming. With code, the endless abstraction features of the language make the ratio of LOC/# features very fungible and gaming the former often doesn't help the latter.
With prose, sure, the structure and outline of your book will affect its size, but my experience (60k words into a ~90k book) is that a certain amount of material takes a certain amount of words and you just have to work to get through them.
Writing is a marathon and it helps to have some mile markers.
Like Louis I started writing a book[1] after reading Nathan Barry's Authority. I did it mostly as a learning exercise, and boy did I learn a lot. For example, the first email I sent to my list had blue underlined words that were supposed to be links but didn't get linked. Never gonna let that happen again.
Writing and self-publishing books seems like it might be a little faddish lately, but I couldn't be more excited. A book, even a short one like mine[2], lets you expand on thoughts so much further than you can in a blog post or a tweet. I'm delighted to see all of this longer form thinking taking place in our community.
This is exactly how I see these new ebooks, not so much as actual competitors to the oreilly kind of books (because they are more concise), but as longer form thinking than blogs. There's a lot of enthusiasm on self-publishing books, and maybe it will be short-lived, but I hope that in the long term we'll have more and more experts in our community who will share their knowledge on niche topics in the long, self-contained and polished form that books are!
It was a fun surprise to casually read through this and then see my blog mentioned. Glad my work is an inspiration! Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.
That's a pretty good summary. Writing a book is hard, but it is rewarding to actually publish a book.[1] I'm still not sure how I feel about selling them with an average price of $80 though. I'd probably make more money overall that way, but I haven't been able to make myself do it yet. Perhaps at some point.
