LTArmstrong wrote:LTArmstrong wrote:
You should never pick delivery dates at random. In business, the way to handle a delivery date with unknown variables, is that you assume a worst case scenario, and then you add a time cushion on top of that. You never get in trouble for delivering your product before your drop dead date. But you always get crucified, when you miss your delivery date.
Baen could have given out (or still could give out) a very conservative delivery date (ie September 30th, 2016), and everyone would have relaxed, and quite worrying about the 1st half of the book until sometime close to that date.
The people at Baen know their business variables. They could have, and should have, figured out and communicated a realistic but conservative, new delivery date for the 1st half of the book to their customers.
Quote RFC:
I understand what you're saying, by and large, but the problem is that determining a "realistic date" in this case simply wasn't possible for Baen. Any date they gave you would have been based on the dates I was giving them and my dates to them were "unrealistic" for several reasons. i told them inititally that they'd have the book by mid-March, and they did . . . except that it needed radical surgery and I asked them not to put it into any bundles until i had time to make the necessary fixes. At that point, I was supposed to deliver the next Safehold book by April 30. That was my date, nor Tor's. At that point, the book would have been early. Life, health, IT, and family issues intervened; I actually got the book delivered on August 2nd and turned to Shadow.
Ect.Ect......
RFC:
I will bow before your knowledge of the publishing business. And simply state that, normal business rules must not necessarily apply to the publishing business. I especially respect your opinion (in addition to respecting your opinion just because it is your opinion) because, as you stated, you have worked in other business endeavors before ever writing a book. So you have a pretty good understanding, on how business deadlines work. So if you say this is an exception to the general rules of business, then I accept that judgment, and will shut my mouth.
I don't want you to "shut your mouth"!
I think you have every right to your opinion. My real point this time isn't that the publishing business is fundamentally different from any other business model but rather that the circumstances were unique and the spanner in the works was coming from my end.
I don't like missing deadlines, even if
most of mine (historically) have been self-imposed; that is, I've gotten the book in early, not late. The main exceptions to that have been collaborations where there were problems making schedules mesh.
In this case, we have something of the "perfect storm."
There were three major novels in my production queue:
The Road to Hell, Shadow of Victory, and
At the Sign of Triumph. The last of them was supposed to be
Triumph and, in my original Visualization of the Cosmic All (to quote Mentor),
all of them should have been handed in by April 30. That was the delivery schedule prediction that both Baen and Tor had from me, and I fully expected to make it.
I didn't.
First,
Road to Hell took almost twice as long as I'd originally projected. Only a small part of that extra production time was due to the fact that Joelle was a first-novelist. A lot more of it was due to the fact that
I had been away from the literary universe for so long that I essentially had to research it as if the first two books had been written by someone else entirely before I could prepare and update the tech bible for Joelle. It turned out to take a lot longer than I expected it to, so we were about two months late turning that book in.
Second, the "concertina effect" hit when I started work on
Shadow of Victory. That book was supposed to be in by about the end of January, and it wasn't. It wasn't as late as
Road had been, although the fact that it had already been pushed back by the earlier book meant that it's delivery schedule was two or three months behind the prediction. The problem was that when I finished the first draft of it, Toni and I both agreed that it had some significant problems. I needed to think about how to fix them, and because I was coming up on my deadline for
Triumph,, I set
Shadow aside (with Toni's concurrence) to work on the Tor book.
That book was originally slated for an April 30 delivery date, but I didn't even get started on it until the end of April. So I did a roughly 320,000 word book between May 1 and August 1. (That, by the way, works out at 4,112.5 words per day, assuming that I was able to work every single day which — as I suspect will become clear below — I was not.) The book ran longer than I'd expected, and in the middle of all of this I had health issues (including passing a kidney stone, which I do not recommend to anyone),
Sharon had health issues (including not 1 but
2 broken feet), we had three previously scheduled convention obligations (including two weeks in Europe), and I had not 1, not 2, but 3 IT breakdowns (which is why I now have 3 entirely new desktop computers and 1 entirely new laptop). I simply offer all of this is a partial explanation of why
Triumph took the entire three months I had originally predicted, but started
4 months later than I had anticipated.
Third, once I had
Triumph completed and sent in, I went back to
Shadow. By this time, while working on the Tor book, I had figured out what I needed to do to fix
Shadow. What I'd expected to take about 10-15,000 words ended up taking about 25,000 words, which was fine, but I was also waiting for some editorial work that I needed from a couple of other people. And there were more Real Life™ issues that got in the way.
At any rate, having handed in
Triumph by 1 August, I confidently expected (is this beginning to sound familiar?) that I would be able to wrap up everything that needed to be done (remember, that I was thinking in terms of no more than 15,000 words and that I normally actually average about 5,500 to 7,500 on a normal working day) in about 1 week, which would have gotten the book to Baen by about August 8. It would have come in in electronic format which would have gone directly into the EARC bundle and would easily have met Baen's original August 15 schedule. (I think that was the original schedule, but I'm not really positive, because I don't usually work very much and that side of the business.)
Up until that point, they had every reason to think they were going to make their delivery date. And the additional problem that they had was that when they asked me where I was on it, every time I told them — honestly, as far as I knew — "a couple of more days." There were issues involved that had nothing to do with other people or, for that matter, with Baen. For example, I had yet another computer failure and had to replace a pair of hard drives. (And before anyone asks, we're still trying to figure out what gremlin is eating hard drives in my office. Surge protectors, battery backups, every damn thing you can think of, and they still "just died." Fortunately, in the middle of all this I decided it was past time that I installed my own server and I've worked on dropbox for a long time now, so I wasn't losing data when computers went down. What I was losing was hardware that would let me
do anything with the data.)
There were also email issues between me and two people in Europe, and at least 3-4 days got lost because people on both sides of the Atlantic were waiting for responses to emails they'd sent but which hadn't arrived. There were some transatlantic phone calls to straighten some of it out, too. And, I should point out, that in a normal production schedule, losing three or four days here and there would
not have had any significant impact on the ultimate delivery date.
At any rate, I finally finished it and finally handed it in. But right up until the time that I actually got it mailed off to them, they honestly and legitimately expected it momentarily.
The parade of delays that hit my writing schedule this year is not something that they could allow for in the normal parameters of the publishing business. It was a factor of the creative process that they literally
could not predict. It wasn't something that lent itself to huddling and coming up with a "safe" delivery date, although they could have simply said "You know what, we're not going to promise it before the first day of October." I kind of think that that would have had some negative repercussions, but unless they wanted to allow themselves that kind of cushion, they couldn't
really come up with a realistic "long stop" date. So they did what I think was probably the best thing they could do, and simply told their customers that this particular piece of product had been delayed and that it would be delivered as soon as it was deliver
able. they did
not say "It's delayed because our damned writer is so far behind schedule," which would have had the virtue of honesty, because they are too professional and too courteous
to their writers to do something like that. These are class people with whom I've worked for thirty years, which may explain the reason I feel a mite . . . protective towards
their reputation.
You may disagree with their decision in not coming up with a sufficiently late delivery date rather than simply saying there'd be a "delay," and that is absolutely you're right. I simply feel that you are hammering Baen a bit too stridently for something that was
my fault. I try hard to be professional about what I do for a living, and — speaking
as a professional — if there is a production/delivery delay which results from problems at
my end of the process, I don't feel that it is just, fair, or reasonable (a) for the readers to blame the publisher or (b) for me not to own up to the fact that the delays were
not the publisher's fault.
So that's why I responded to your posts on the subject. Not to tell you to shut up, although I will confess to feeling a certain moderate amount of exasperation after I felt that I had made it clear that the delays were my fault and not Baen's, but to . . . "set the record straight," I suppose. That's important to me, which is why I've taken the time and killed enough photons to provide this explanation.
At any rate, the book is in and I hope that you and everyone else will enjoy it when it is — finally — delivered to you.
Take care.
)