The Stages of a Biography

Stage One:  Evaluation

This section should help you respond to the questions on our form. If you’re not comfortable with typing, see the Technical Note below (after Stage Seven).

Rough Estimates Only
Your Time	Our Time	Cost to You
~2-4 hours	1 hour	Free
This is actual writing time; you’ll likely want to spend more than a few hours thinking about the project.	If you want a more detailed evaluation, it will probably be charged by the hour.

Stage Two:  Organization/ Outlining

Our approach to writing a book is a very traditional one, and we believe the effort you put into developing an outline will be repaid many times in both the quality of the final text and in the efficiency of getting from start to successful finish. We’ll encourage you to do many versions of the outline, thinking each time about how you can best represent your subject while also keeping the reader interested and connected. We’d expect to be very actively involved in this stage.

Rough Estimates Only
Your Time	Our Time	Cost to You
~8-16 hours	4-8 hours	$200-$400
The first iteration might be a challenge, but things will get easier.	We’ll need to bounce this back and forth a number of times. Also a few conversations.

 

Stage Three:  Information Gathering

Once you have the outline, you need to follow through on getting the raw material. That means interviewing friends, family, colleagues, looking for letters, diaries, blogs, Facebook pages—whatever it takes. As you move through this process, you’ll likely learn more and want to modify the outline. That’s a good thing.

We’ll expect to be fairly lightly involved in this stage.

Rough Estimates Only
Your Time	Our Time	Cost to You
~10-30 days	1-4 hours	$50-$200
It’s usually a good idea to record interviews; you’ll have to get the subject’s permission to do that, of course.	The occasional phone consultation is likely all that will be needed.

Stage Four:  The First Draft

This is where you turn the outline into something that resembles a real book. To borrow from the people at Nike, we recommend a “just do it” approach for the first version of the first draft. In other words, write out everything you want to say without worrying too much about the style or the technical aspects of writing (punctuation, etc.). When the text is fully laid out, you will go back and edit.

One nice thing about this approach is that it makes good use of your time. Writing the first draft will take some focus, which may mean you’ll need to set aside blocks of time here and there. But after that you can edit in small quantities of time:  waiting for your spouse to get ready to go out, sitting at the dentist’s office, maybe even during TV commercials.

You should understand that going through multiple rounds of writing, revising, and editing is perfectly OK. In fact, all the best authors do it.

Rough Estimates Only
Your Time	Our Time	Cost to You
~7-10 days	3-10 hours	$200-$500

Stage Five:  Editing/ Getting Comments on the First Full Draft

Before you send your first draft to us, we’ll encourage you to share it with people close to you. Writing groups are a great option if you can find one nearby. There’s a popular misperception that great writers are born and don’t need advice. That’s not true. We all benefit from comments and suggestions from others.

After you’ve had that strong input from those you know and work with, we’ll offer our advice. How much? It will all depend on how far along you are at this point.

Rough Estimates Only
Your Time	Our Time	Cost to You
~5-10 days	1-3 hours	$50 to $150

Stage Six:  The Final Version

Once you’ve finished a full first draft (which will likely involve many iterations), it’s time to do the final editing. At this point, you’ll make another pass for content and clarity, then complete the annoying technical editing. Again, our contribution will depend on where you are.

An important point to consider here:  as you work through the drafts, you’ll be learning a lot about writing. First, you’ll become comfortable with producing clear sentences and paragraphs. You’ll also re-learn the fairly simple rules of grammar and punctuation. This means that as you produce that final draft you’ll automatically fix most of the errors. (The skills you acquire in this process might also be very valuable at work.)

Since no one catches all the errors in their own work—you’ll have looked at it too many times to see everything—some proofreading will still be necessary. One option we’ll suggest for the final stage is finding a friend or family member to do the technical editing—this is slow tedious work that adds up fast at $50/hour. If someone owes you a big favor, this is a good place to call in the chit.

Rough Estimates Only
Your Time	Our Time	Cost to You
~2-4 hours	0-many	$0-lots
	We recommend you do this yourself or get friends to help. We can do it, though.

Stage Seven:  Production/ Adding Media

Whether we’re talking an e-book or a traditional printed version, making it look right can be a lot of work. The addition of photographs or illustrations also adds complexity, as does the addition of a website. You can do all this—it’s not that hard—or we can do it. Or some combination.

Rough Estimates Only
Your Time	Our Time	Cost to You
~2-4 hours	0-many	$0-lots
	We recommend you do this yourself or get friends to help. We can do it, though.

Technical Note:  If you don’t type, don’t worry.

There are several effective ways to dictate to a computer. Dragon Dictation is one. If you use a Mac version 10.9 and later of the OS/X system has very good speech to text software, even off line. You can get the same quality with IOS 8.0 and later on the iPad, but it only works online. There are other options. You’ll probably have to do some typing to edit, though.

More Information

·       Perspectives on Biography

·       How Much Will it Actually Cost?

·       The Stages of a Biography

·       FAQ

·       Questions to Get Started

·       More Thoughts on Autobiography

·       Writing References for Garrison Walters