Job Vacancy - Full-Time Writer Required!

[Mouseferatu]

In my experience, a thousand words a day, with editing, is a relaxed 2-6 hours work every day. Two thousand words a day is a marathon that you can't keep up forever. Ten thousand words a day is the marathon you perform when you are about to miss your deadline. Of course, I have been told about writters to produce several thousand words a day consistently but a thousand words a day seems to be the norm.

Mark Charke

Really? I find that surprising. I was under the impression that I was on the slow-to-average end of things, professionally-speaking, with an average of 2,000 to 2,500 words per day.

 

[trancejeremy]

500 words is about a page in a word processor.

I'm not a professional writer, but I generally produce a review of about 2000-2500 words in about 4-6 hours. (Granted, reviews are much different, but eh, I don't get paid.)

Plus, if it's d20, you can simply copy and paste open content. That was done for about 60-70% of the first two OGL Books, both of which were done by staff writers (I believe). The 3rd one is mostly original material, but was done by a writer who apparently used to be a staff writer, but quit so he could do a better job. (Based on comments he's made.)

 

[RSKennan]

2,000 words a day is about par for the course. I've frequently done about 5,000, and the most I've done was 16,000 in 32 hours. The thing is, I tend to write a lot more than what I finally submit. The extra words give me a buffer to choose the best material.

BTW, Ari, I've admired how prolific you are, and how you always seems to hit the nail on the head. If you're going out for this position, it's going to be interesting.

 

[Cavalorn]

The 3rd one is mostly original material, but was done by a writer who apparently used to be a staff writer, but quit so he could do a better job. (Based on comments he's made.)

Whoa, hold up a minute.

I didn't quit Mongoose so I could do a better job. I left (under extremely amicable circumstances) because a) I knew that if I kept up the pace then my work would start to suffer, though by all accounts the Mongoose crew were happy enough with it to date, and b) I wanted to get cracking on the children's books I'd been putting off for the last year.

I had the time of my life working for Mongoose. It *is* hard work, but it's rewarding and it gets your writing into print.

FWIW, I produced 128 pages a month while I worked for them.

 

[Scribe Ineti]

In my experience, a thousand words a day, with editing, is a relaxed 2-6 hours work every day. Two thousand words a day is a marathon that you can't keep up forever. Ten thousand words a day is the marathon you perform when you are about to miss your deadline. Of course, I have been told about writters to produce several thousand words a day consistently but a thousand words a day seems to be the norm.

I love reading about other writers' experiences!

Is that for gaming in specific, or writing in general? When I write short stories and longer fiction, I can usually crank out 1000-1400 words an hour if the muse is really whispering in my ear. I can maintain that pace for maybe 2-3 hours before I have to slow down.

I usually manage to get a ~5000 word short story done in 2-3 days.

However, I know writers who write that in a day, every day, seven stories a week or six novels a year. They really scare me.

The last large RPG product I did was about 23,000 words and a bunch of stats. The stat blocks took me two weeks to put together, which I got the vast majority of the non-stat writing done over a long weekend. Given the choice, I'd rather have spaced it out, but I wanted to get it done ahead of deadline so I could get it off my plate.

 

[Lizard]

<<Of course, if there's a specific word count the writer is supposed to hit in a month, say 80,000 as a guess, then you work as many hours as it takes you to hit that mark. >>



In my experience, a thousand words a day, with editing, is a relaxed 2-6 hours work every day. Two thousand words a day is a marathon that you can't keep up forever. Ten thousand words a day is the marathon you perform when you are about to miss your deadline. Of course, I have been told about writters to produce several thousand words a day consistently but a thousand words a day seems to be the norm.

To me, 3500 words a day is easy; 5000 words a day is a solid days work.

 

[takyris]

First, it depends on what we mean by "day". If "day" is "when I get home from my real job", then that really means "the hour or two I've got after dinner and before bed". If "day" means "all day, this is my real job", then that really means eight-plus hours.

I can pretty consistently do 2k words/hour while writing fiction, and I can maintain that for as long as I need to maintain it. That's rough-draft mode, of course -- it usually gets edited down to 1500 words/hour when I go through and start snipping and trimming.

If I got the job, I'd have no problem maintaining the word counts they needed, because I'd be leaving my existing job. The 30k words-in-a-month thing could be challenging, since it'd be stuff I'd be doing after getting home from my current job, but I can always beg my wife for a free day or two over the next few weekends and just burn through a fair chunk of it -- in addition to cranking out 2k/night on the nights when I'm home before eleven.

For the marketing copywriting I do, things are usually slower, primarily because I'm constantly looking things up and checking facts. (And also because my job isn't exclusively copywriting -- when you have to break for twenty minutes to go carry boxes around or help with the horses, that cuts into the writing zone...)

 

[Scribe Ineti]

If I got the job, I'd have no problem maintaining the word counts they needed, because I'd be leaving my existing job. The 30k words-in-a-month thing could be challenging, since it'd be stuff I'd be doing after getting home from my current job, but I can always beg my wife for a free day or two over the next few weekends and just burn through a fair chunk of it -- in addition to cranking out 2k/night on the nights when I'm home before eleven.

Is that including time to create stat blocks and the like?

 

[takyris]

Nope. I'd probably throw stats in there during the revision process. The first pass would be the fluff, not the crunch, unless the work was supposed to be about the crunch, in which case I'd do all the crunchwork first and then put the fluff in later.

 

[Charke]

Writing for mongoose

The monthly word count is scary business indeed. I recently agreed to do some modern NPC stat blocks, a 4-5000 word job, and gave myself two weeks to be safe. It took four weeks. That the material was new was half the problem - every number had to be checked and double checked and then the list of requested changes came in. Custom systems (or just changing from 3.0 to 3.5) are brutal because you've got to check facts you "know" because they might have been changed in the new system.

This has affected my role-playing as well. I've become a monster rules lawyer, scrapping most of the house rules and leaning on the core rules. The funny thing is, using the core rules really works. Players don't need to ask what the house rules are - they can just look them up.

We used to use Knowledge (monsters) but in 3.5 they have divided monster knowledge among the various knowledge skills, giving every player a chance to shine with their class speciality.

Mark Charke