: 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

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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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I don't work in pages, and don't know many technical writers that do. They work in sections, which can vary. I think that on average I probably spend an hour or hour and a half on a page writing/rewriting. After that, post copy/tech edit, it can be higher.

This excludes research/ screen shots.

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What is a page? These days, unless you're doing layout, too, a manuscript page can be any length.

I agree with Dori in that creating and documenting examples is probably the most time-consuming part of the writing process. (It's killing me on a book I'm working on now.)

On books that are strictly how-to, without having to provide tutorial-style exercises, I can run through a printed page of a Visual QuickStart Guide (with layout) in about an hour.

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Sorry, but about all I can say is: it varies.

Is there a particular publisher/series this is for? That would help me give a general estimate. For instance, it should take less time to (imo) write a page for a Dummies book than a Head First book.

In addition to your list, I really tend to burn up hours in two other areas:

Research
What do people commonly want to know about this particular topic?
Tasks/Examples
For programming books, I need code to demonstrate usage and syntax—so add on time to invent examples, and then code and debug them.

I've found that these can take up as much time again as all the actual writing parts put together.

And of course, what's one page in a word processor will only occasionally translate into one printed book page.

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