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Topic : Re: How much time do you spend writing one page on average? I'm writing a technical book about one programming technology and would like to compare how much time other authors spend on one page - selfpublishingguru.com

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Billing by time for technical writers is an important aspect of the work. At IBM we used the following guidelines:

1 page is 250 words (this reflects the fact that "page" is an outmoded concept but is still widely used for billing)
1 person-day is 8 hours
1 person-week is 40 hours
1 person-year is 2000 hours (useful for salaried employees being billed out or paying contractors; this includes an assumption of 2 weeks vacation)

We then determined writing stage (research-only, new content, rewrite, update) and assigned a number of pages per work day based on that. (Again, "page" was used as a generic term describing sections of online help or other output.)

In most projects that I was involved with, we were doing new content for an existing product, and we ended up with an average of 2 pages per day. That's essentially 4 hours per page, which seems incredibly unproductive, but if you take into account research, testing, editing, and production, it's not as crazy as it sounds. Also, it is not all the same person's time (editors, testers, and production assistants are often separate from the writer). I think the environment in which most tech writers work would:

be more productive due to fewer policies and procedures
reflect a solo effort where the writer is doing all the tasks (leading to greater efficiency but perhaps a need for more downtime in the calculation)


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