

Show HN: Site calculates how long it takes famous authors to write books - batub
http://rabbitwriters.com/

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dalke
Out of curiosity I looked for Isaac Asimov, but he wasn't there. Instead, I
looked at Mark Twain. The site only lists his novels, and curiously one of his
short stories. Twain wrote a lot of short stories (also available in
collections) which aren't on the list.

Also, it uses a line graph to connect publication dates and word counts, but
the line between those points is meaningless. At best it should be a step
graph, where the height is based on the number of words for a publication
divided by the time between publications.

Otherwise it looks like Twain wrote less and less from 1875 to 1880, until
finally publishing The Prince and the Pauper.

~~~
batub
I'll look into the missing short stories. The tool I created that aggregates
all the metadata is pretty good at finding novels, but it still needs A LOT of
work with short stories. It'll probably be easier if I focus on collections,
though.

Yeah, after thinking about your comment, a line graph doesn't make a lot of
sense. As you said, it kinda skews the viewer's mind about how the author was
writing his books. I'll look into step graphs and change all the graphs soon.

Thanks for the feedback! This is just a pet project, but it's nice to have
some helpful criticism.

~~~
dalke
You're welcome. The premise is nice - how long it takes famous authors to
write books - it's just that the graphs don't answer that question.

It looks like you made the change to a step function. I think you have the
direction wrong. Consider C. S. Lewis. I don't think he wrote 150K words per
year for almost 5 years to produce the 36K words for The Lion, The Witch, and
The Wardrobe.

Lewis was also an essayist. Take a look at
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis_bibliography](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis_bibliography)
for the many essays not included in your list. In fact, the bio says "His most
distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity ..." but
Mere Christianity isn't on the list of books.

Or consider that 'The Great Divorce' was originally written as a serial for
The Guardian, and at the same time as writing 'That Hideous Strength', so it's
not that he worked full time on first one then the other.

I hope your project it's a labor of love, as the complete answers (the sort
that won't irritate fans or detailed oriented people like me) will get you
bogged down in details that require a lot of manual research. But you'll have
the admiration of the few who really do care.

~~~
batub
So you think a right step graph would work better? I changed the graphs to
have a right step instead of a left step, but the graphs still don't make a
lot of sense. The lines in the graphs are supposed to represent the time it
took between publications, but I think people are thinking that the author was
writing at a constant X amount of words for however long the line between
publications is.

Yeah, there's probably a lot of books that were being written while others
were being finished up or started as well. When I first started developing
this, I thought about finding data about how long it takes an author to WRITE
book X, Y, or Z, but I couldn't find accurate information about that for most
authors. So that's why I decided to use publication dates. I understand how
people think that books are written in a linear fashion - one after another -
because of this, but there's not much I can do about it, because most authors
don't share this information and a lot of ones are already dead.

For the missing works, I'll have to revise my tool to find anything that are
not novels or just enter the data for essays, short stories, collections, etc.
manually, though that'll probably not be feasible time wise.

~~~
dalke
Assuming all the information were available, I would like to see how many
words (of the published version; not all the intermediate drafts) were written
during a given year. If it took 2 years to write 100,000 words for a release
on 2014-01-01 then 2012 and 2013 would be at 50,000 words each. That would
indeed be a 'constant X amount of words for however long the line between
publications is'.

(This also assumes no publication delay. I have no idea how to tell how long
it took to get edited and reviewed.)

It's possible to fake it. You could compute the average publication rate then
backtrack that amount for each publication date, assuming a constant rate.
Then let overlapping publications sum, and use a smoothing function to
interpolate.

It's still a mess. Especially if there are any posthumous publications. Yes,
getting the actual rate requires a lot of research, including perhaps talking
to people who study those authors. Eg, a Twain scholar probably knows a lot
more about when things were published. But this gets into serious labor of
love (or Master's thesis) territory.

~~~
batub
hahaha, I like working on this, but researching each individual publication
sounds like something that I wouldn't be able to do. What I'll probably end up
doing is open sourcing the database + website and allowing others to
contribute. Again, thanks for your help.

