Metrics of Writing
A Romantic Valentine’s Day Shelf Life
Today is a soft and romantic Shelf Life in honor of Valentine’s Day and that’s why it’s about metrics. I actually don’t do Valentine’s Day. The real reason today’s Shelf Life is about metrics and not romance novels or something is because (A) I forgot it was Valentine’s Day till I typed the date into the file label and (B) I don’t know anything about romance novels.
February is the time of year when young folks’ thoughts turn to love and Hallmark cards, and at the company where I work everyone’s thoughts turn to setting their annual work goals. At my company we do our annual review before the end of the year and we set our goals for the next year after the beginning of the new. In this way we have a few weeks in between that are like the tail-end of the Mayan calendar, where the solar and the lunar year don’t quite match up and you have some time off the books that the gods can’t see. We are in the final days of blinded (corporate) gods and we all have to get our goals recorded for posterity.
I have spent a lot of my career managing new and early career production staff editors (editorial assistants, assistant production editors, and so on). I have also spent a lot of my career (a good bit of it overlapping with the above) managing publishing teams or participating in publishing leadership in the orgs for which I have worked. This background is to give you an understanding of where I come by my love of applying metrics to word-related work.
I’ve helped a lot of junior editors starting their careers learn to set annual goals in an effective way. Folks who are new to a business environment sometimes will come to you with goals that boil down to “I will get better at editing” or “I will edit more” or “I will complete more edits on deadline.” None of those is useful.
I’ve talked about SMART goals in Shelf Life before, lots of times actually, like in every New Year’s post, so I don’t think there is a need to revisit what that all means and how to set SMART goals. Today I’m focusing on the M in SMART—measurable—because that is a part that is often challenging for people when it comes to word-related work and productivity: The quantifying part.
People who do other stuff—non–word-related work—also have trouble quantifying their work sometimes. It’s not just the people who word work. But the people who do word work are the ones who will shrug and say “I’m sorry, I was an English major, I do not know how to do this.” That’s why I am offered goals like, “I will improve my editing skills.”
How will you benchmark the level of your editing skills now?
How will you benchmark the level of your editing skills at the end of the review period?
How will you test and quantify improvement in your editing?
Point the first: Assign and capture metrics.
For that matter, what does it mean to be better at editing? Does it mean you miss fewer mistakes in the text? Does it mean you edit more quickly or more efficiently? Does it mean your authors are happier with the edited manuscript you give them back? Those are things that can be measured.
To know if you have achieved a goal, you have to know when you start what successful achievement of that goal looks like. If you set a goal to “improve” something, you have to know how you will measure your improvement and you also must determine how much improvement will have meant you are successful. Perhaps you set a goal to edit manuscripts faster this year. If you work 5 percent faster this year than last year but you introduced 5 percent more errors than last year during the editing process, did you succeed? If you worked 1 percent faster this year and no quality measures decreased, was that 1 percent enough of an improvement for you to consider your goal was met?
Point the second: Use the metrics to determine not only the presence of change but the amount of change.
I’ve worked at places where work quantity was tracked at the “book” level. Meaning, “a book” was the smallest unit of work. Our metric was “how many books.” One person might edit 50 books a year and another person 150. Does that mean the second person did 3 times as much work? Or do you need more information to make that determination, like:
How many pages in each book?
How complex the page layout of each book?
How many tables, figures, and illustrations in each book?
Producing 50 four-color, multiauthor textbooks is a lot more work than producing 150 one-color monographs. There are a lot of ways to capture more useful data about work quantity, like:
Quantify words (rather than “books” or “articles” or “pages”) processed.
Assign complexity scores to incoming work based on a scoring rubric.
When you assess work quantity more granularly and with better data, you can share the workload more fairly among the workforce, too. But that’s neither here nor there.
Point the third: Capture meaningful metrics, don’t just slap a token unit on your goal for appearances and call it good.
Okay, so, I’ve talked about a lot of stuff that doesn’t get down to how to capture writing metrics and I’m almost going to get there soon so stay tuned. We’re not there yet. I am going to reference a lot of these concepts and examples again when I eventually get where I’m going.
The last thing I want to talk about before getting “into it” is the triple constraint concept of project management, which is that: Budget, scope, and timeline are linked such that you cannot change one without affecting another. Want it faster? Then it’ll be more expensive, or we’ll have to omit some features (scope). Want it cheaper? Then it’ll take longer or we’ll have to omit some features. Want to add more features? Then it’ll take longer or cost more.
Or, as the tailor says, “I can do cheap, fast, excellent work—but you can only pick two.” Fast and cheap, quality suffers, Fast and excellent, cost suffers. Excellent and cheap, time suffers.
I suggested this in the above example of editing 5 percent faster than in the previous year but at the cost of introducing 5 percent more errors during editing. (That would be egregious in practice, but it’s a theoretical example.) I bring up the triple constraint because, when you’re setting a goal to improve timeliness, or quality, or whatever, you have to be mindful of what other factors may be affected and include those in your success criteria.
All this to say:
Tired: “I will edit faster this year”
Wired: “I will complete 10 percent more edits (than prior year) on or before deadline, without effecting a drop in quality as measured by increase in the quantity of proof corrections”
When it comes to writing—or editing, or art-making, or other hard-to-quantify endeavors—the two places to begin looking for meaningful metrics are:
Input; and
Output.
Those are actually the best places to start looking for meaningful metrics on anything, I think, so actually writing isn’t special at all. But it’s special in that sometimes we—as writers—have a hard time tracking and measuring output (especially).
For the purpose of this Shelf Life article you are reading right now, let’s consider that:
Input is anything you put into your creative endeavor, including the time you spend on it and any money you spend on things like supplies, lessons, professional review or grading of your work, and so on.
Output is what comes out the other side of your creative endeavor in the form of finished (or unfinished, as the case may be) creative work, which can then be evaluated for quality, quantity, timeliness, revenue generated, and so on.
Quality
I’m starting with quality because it’s one of the hardest things to measure effectively in writing. Writers are not always great at gauging the quality of their own writing, which can be really evident if you’re an editor but which anyone can learn by reading through the author-drafted summary text for books available on KDP.
Quality of writing is best assessed by combining one’s own, objective-as-possible evaluation with the review of neutral third parties like a critique partners or a beta readers. Self-reflection is important for the writing growth process but so is getting feedback from unbiased sources. The author is naturally biased regarding their own work, though, in my experience, some are biased toward and others against.
When measuring quality or setting quality-related goals, I suggest you don’t regard “quality of writing” as a single factor but rather keep in mind its many facets, such as:
Voice
Clarity
Word choice/sentence fluency
Innovativeness of idea
And so on
If you want to focus on improving the quality of your writing, choose one or two tenets of quality to focus on instead of trying to improve the quality of your writing, in all ways, across the board, all at once.
Quantity
You can measure the quantity of both your input and your output to get good information.
Your main measure of input is time—the time you spend writing (or on writing-related activities like outlining, editing, submitting manuscripts for publication, et cetera). How much (of anything, but we’ll consider money specifically later) do you put in to your writing success. For example, you can set a goal to spend more time on your writing.
Output is often measured by words or manuscripts (or pages)—that is, how much did you write? How many words, how many articles, how many books, how many stories? You might also measure your output in other ways than content generation, such as:
How many agents queried?
How many full requests from those queries?
How many stories submitted for publication?
How many accepts and how many high-tier rejects from those submissions?
How many rounds of editing completed?
How many stories (or another unit) shared with your critique partner, critique group, or beta readers?
When measuring quantity or setting goals based on quantity, keep in mind the example of “books” versus “words” as the unit of measure above and choose your unit based on your goals. If your goal is truly to write more, then it makes sense to set a goal of words rather than completed stories—50,000 words is more than 25,000 words but either unit could be “five complete stories” depending on whether the stories are 5,000 or 10,000 words each. On the other hand, if generating words is no problem for you have trouble finishing what you start, then you may be better served measuring success by number of completed stories rather than the number of words you set down.
Productivity
Productivity is a metric that measures output quantity with respect to input quantity. Or to be more specific, output divided by input. Whereas above, we considered tracking simple quantity—that is, more words written or more hours spent writing, productivity could be calculated, for example, as words written per hour spent writing.
Let’s say you wrote 10,000 words in February compared with 8,000 words in January, a 25 percent increase in output quantity. However, if you spent 10 hours writing in February and 8 hours writing in January, your productivity stayed level at at 1,000 words written per hour. On the other hand, if you spent 16 hours writing in February (625 words per hour) but only 6 hours in January (around 1,333 words per hour), you then saw a productivity decrease in February over January even while you had an increase in simple output quantity.
Budget
When it comes to money, there are three metrics I find valuable for writing, which are:
Money spent; and
Money earned; and
ROI
It doesn’t cost anything to write, but other writing-related activities do cost money. Hiring an editor, a proofreader, or a cover designer to help make your manuscript salable. Submission fees for journals or entry fees for contests. Word, Scrivener, or another word processing software if you don’t like what’s available for free. Classes, workshops, and webinars to hone your writing skills. If you have a goal to invest in your writing career, you might want to measure how much money you spend on it.
Money coming in, revenue (and, after expenses, profit), is the amount you earn from your writing. If you sell your writing to publishers, magazines, journals, or directly to consumers, or if you win money from writing contests, or if you receive income for a Patreon or Ko-Fi or similar in exchange for or in support of your writing, then you might set a goal to earn a certain amount.
Return on investment (ROI) is usually calculated as net income divided by the cost of your investment times 100. If you have both writing-related outflow and income, you can set an ROI goal.
Control and Lack Thereof
Before I sign off, I just want to add one more thought about writing-related metrics, which is that some of them you control (within reason) and some are out of your control.
For instance, within reason, you can control how many hours you spend writing or how many words you write. You might make your goal or you might not, but unless something truly unforeseen happens and sends your life off the rails, whether you achieve your goal in time spent or words written is in your control.
You don’t control how many customers buy your book, or whether an agent offers representation, or how much money you will win from contests. Those things are out of your control right from the get-go, unforeseen consequences or not.
You can control whether and where you make your book available for sale; how much you charge for it; how much time, effort, and money you put into marketing and advertising; but you cannot control your sales. You can control how many agents you query, and how many contests you enter, but you cannot control the outcome of those queries and entries. I always recommend setting goals that are within your control to achieve or not. For instance, if you want to sign with an agent this year you might set a goal to query 100 agents or you might set a goal to get one offer of representation. Although both things could very well happen, only one is within your power to achieve.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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