craigslist: Freelance Writer - How-to-book on Brewing

Hmmm. I'd do it if this were me 5 years ago as a recent college grads

 

Translation: Please plagiarize a book on brewing in 3 weeks for nearly no money. Don't worry, you don't have to put your name on it.

 

Yikes. When I wrote Everything Homebrewing I had 3 months to write 80k words. I turned in ~109k words in 3.5 months and dropped it to 92 k over the next few weeks - which then turned into 82k when published. The whole process took 6 months in total. I was annoyed at the amount of stuff cut. I can't imagine trying to come close to justice in 30-40k and not getting any credit.

To give you an idea - my next book Experimental Homebrewing (with Denny Conn) was ~70k words and took a year to write.

 

Dumb. I hope they fail miserably.

 

This won't take off because the concept has already been done. It's called ' Homebrewing for Dummies.'

 

Classic SF Bay move.

 

I'm not sure that this is the same concept that the Craigslist ad is going for, but Homebrewing for Dummies is actually a good book. It's what I used to go from extract to all-grain in 3 batches. And the author of that book, Marty Nachel, did get and deserve credit.

But I think ATPCA has it right - it's difficult to write a good book on homebrewing that provides a unique contribution. I guess the unique contribution has something to do with format and layout. No one is going to get rich doing this, I think it is safe to say.

 

Does that happen a lot in publishing? Follow an outline and not get any credit on the final? Suppose its no different than other creative fields - I'm a designer and I certainly don't get to put my name on everything. But that seems like A LOT of work.

 

ghost writing a homebrewing book...so you think Rachel Ray is trying to get into homebrewing?

 

Straight to free Kindle e-book, chock full of totally inaccurate information and absurdities.

 

Varies a lot from publisher to publisher. Much of my experience has been a publisher saying "hey, we'd like to do a book/column/feature around the idea of X. Can you generate a proposed outline? The piece needs to be Y pages long and targeted to around Z words with approximately N recipes."

That was pretty much what happened with the Cider book. we had to use the outline stage to help the publisher understand what would be a reasonable book for the target audience. Here's what the revised outline for Cider looked like. (more changes happened during editorial to shorten the number of chapters, etc)


(Here's where the outline for Experimental Homebrewing started - this was at the "throw it at the wall" stage)

But.. having said all that - yeah, there are gigs where you're totally a word monkey. Those would drive me batty! When I can bear down, focus, leave my usual day job and close myself off from the world I can jam 3-4k words in a day - once I have the plan. But I can only sustain that pace for about 10 days before my brain tells me to take a long walk off a short pier. If I didn't have the control over the flow and outline, I'd probably hit that wall faster.

 

Thanks for the info Drew, interesting.

 

Interesting article on the subject of cookbook ghost writing.

I took two years to research and write American Sour Beers, but in the year since then it has gone through the publisher, two tech editors, an editor who improved word choice and flow, layout, and finally a copy editor. Not sure how many changes were made compared to the average brewing/cooking author, but I was involved with the edits at each stage.

After how much time I've spent I can totally understand why someone running a restaurant wouldn't have time to deal with it.

 

I'm with the StockingofLongEndurance on this one. It's amazing how much back and forth and work there is for any of these books. For anyone who doesn't have a long term friendship with insomnia - trying to write and work a regular job is damn near impossible. If you don't have an understanding boss who is flexible about your focus and timing, forget it. (ETA: I couldn't ghost write a cookbook, I'd want to strangle the ass getting the credit)

I wrote the Cider and Homebrewing book each in ~4 months and not including my outlining and research time. That's the clock everyone thinks of when you say "I wrote a book". Experimental took longer because it was my first time writing with a co-author (who is awesome) and we spent a lot of time working over the concept and trying to find the right narrative. We turned in the final draft back in Januaryish time frame (so ~8 months "writing" [or farting around when I couldn't find the words]) and the book itself won't be published until November, but that's because there was editorial work, layout, photography, etc, etc.

Incidentally, I just reviewed the galleys and it's going to be so awesome that I can't even tell you.

 

I wrote my "proper" book in six weeks. But it is only 35,000 words. It took ten years to research, mind.

The publisher approached me. A book on historic brewing with recipes, 160 pages, 35,000 words, 100-odd illustrations.

There wasn't a great deal of editing, once I'd finished the manuscript, other than cutting stuff out. The process only took a few weeks. Having the structure well worked out before I started writing helped a lot. Once I got going, it was good fun. Because the structure was fixed, I could write it in a non-linear way. I started with the bits I could write out of my head, either chapter or parts of chapters. Then just gradually filled in all the holes, doing the recipes at the same time.

My biggest problem was keeping to the word count. Had it been my decision, it would have been double the length.

 

That was one of the positive and negative of starting without a publisher. I could write at my own pace to my heart's content... 140,000 words mostly on weekends. A couple chapters ended up being dropped, which I wouldn't have minded as much if I hadn't continued to work on them for a year after signing the contract. BP was just happy to have a book that was ready to go when others needed to be pushed back.

 

Word count is always a huge issue for me. I blow through so many counts even after editing. There was a time with Zymurgy (feature article max 2000 words) that I had a subject that I poured about 6k words into and then cut it back to 4k and then they ran it as a double feature.

That's one of the ways having a website (like you, Ron and I all have) can at least pan out. We're using ExperimentalBrew.com as a home for all that content we had to cut out.

And I feel for any publisher trying to hold a schedule with a lineup of mostly part timers.

 

This is my problem, and part of the reason I'm not a published author (in something, my interests are wide), despite having some talent for writing. But heck, we were supposed to write a stinkin' one page essay for a class I was in, and I did.

Single spaced, arial 10 font.

It was one of those subjects I get all soap-boxy on, so naturally I rambled on and on and on and on. Really this forum doesn't lend that well to soap-boxy topics for me, so you guys and gals don't get to see that side of me very much. But trust me, I can type fast, and even when fairly drunk my grammar and punctuation and spelling* are beyond reproach. Content gets a lot rantier as I get drunker tho.

But anyway, the one page essay took less than 30 minutes to write, and about two fucking hours to decide what to cut when I found it it also had a word limit.

Don't think I have the desire to write a brewing book. If I did, it would probably be titled "Brewing with Al, the KISS method" or something that would get immediately rejected by the publisher, which would then piss me off. This guy's "competitive" rate would have to be a LOT to get me to spend my next three weeks off of school writing. I could do it, but I don't want to.

Not that I have delicate feelings when it comes to writing (or brewing). Best advice I got was when I went to edit a manuscript for a book for someone I know. They said "don't spare my feelings, or you aren't doing me any favors." Same goes with any writing, and with reviewing my beers. I blow enough smoke up my own ass without someone being less than genuine about what they think of my beer.

But reviewing and editing someone else's work is still much easier than having someone else review and edit your work.

I'd have to be paid handsomely to ghost write anything for anyone. Which might be slightly ironic since I don't use my real name online, so the amount of my perhaps hundred thousand posts** on various forums and blogs that is credited to me is negligible (a few people know my identity, and I'm not really trying to hide it. But it's not something I think you should advertise online if you discuss topics such as antivax morons, alt-med charlatans, etc. Those people tend to harass and threaten you and publish your home address and shit like that online if you successfully derail their plans for financially gaining off the ignorant or uneducated).

EDIT: found a typo. there are few posts I put on this page that are more than one paragraph that I don't edit several times after posting.

EDIT 2: but the time limit on editing is absolutely essential for forums where contentious topics are discussed***. If you don't limit editing, then after someone's big pile of horse-crap is torn to shreds by the facts, they will retroactively edit what they said, which actually makes the total amount of horse-crap in the world go up. Which is bad, because already we're in a situation where there is more horse-crap in existence than can be accounted for by the number or horses who are crapping.

*and footnotes

**since I started posting on bulletin boards before the internet even existed, and I have posted a lot, I don't think 100,000 would be an unreasonable number. Of course many of those posts are short sarcastic / smug comments, but still, I've put a lot of shit online, some of it very long and detailed. So I can credit all that work to a figment of my own imagination, but you probably couldn't pay me to put 1/100,000th of it on something that some other real person would get credit for.

***which isn't really this one, but still, time limits on editing are good.