John Soares, author of Writing College Textbook Supplements
All professional writers, of course, have deadlines. Writers of college textbook supplements and ancillaries must be especially certain they meet deadlines, because missing deadlines throws off publication schedules and can cost the textbook publisher significant money.
So use deadlines as a way to motivate yourself to get the work done. A key way to do this is to set a series of deadlines that you must meet so that you finish the overall project on time. For example, if you are writing lecture outlines for a textbook with 15 chapters, and you have 30 days to do the project, you must do one chapter every two days.
If you only have a few chunks in your week to work on the project, you can set a different deadline of four chapters a week, allowing you to do all four on the weekend if necessary. (Check my math on this latter example and you’ll see that you finish about three days early; this will make your editor happy.)
(This entry is based on an excerpt from Chapter 8, “Getting the Work Done,” from John Soares’ e-book Writing College Textbook Supplements: The Definitive Guide to Winning High-Paying Assignments in the College Textbook Publishing Market. You can download the Detailed Table of Contents and first two chapters for free.)
