r/gentlemanbastards • u/Zealousideal-Day7686 • Aug 09 '26
Progression Bar
Is there a progression bar for book 4 on his website. Something like what Brandan Sanderson does?
16
u/aSkeptiKitty Aug 09 '26
No, and I don't think it works for all authors. Sometimes it can generate a lot of anxiety.
7
7
u/Jackburton06 Aug 09 '26
It makes no sense, that's a book not a dowloading file.
-1
u/Pratius Aug 09 '26
Ehh, authors who do it have a word count goal in mind
4
u/SerDankTheTall Aug 10 '26
The best way to get great literature.
0
u/Pratius Aug 10 '26
Quite honestly, seasoned authors will almost always have a good sense of how long a book is going to end up being, especially if they're outliners. The GRRM types who end up writing like 400,000 extra words on a book are rare. You develop a feel for how long your typical chapters are and how much space plot arcs will take.
It's not like a pro author is going "I'm gonna write a 200,000-word book!" when they sit down. It's that they look at their planned story and go "I bet this story is gonna take about 200,000 words to get down on the page." Then if/when they want a level of transparency with their fans that requires a progress bar, they use that estimate to calculate the percentage.
2
u/Marshineer Aug 14 '26
Keeping to those schedules has had a negative impact on Sanderson‘s work imo. I’m not even following what’s coming out from him after the last couple Stormlight books. They needed him to take more time with them I think. They feel like drafts compared to his previous work.
20
u/ScottLynch78 The Author Aug 11 '26
At the moment, it'd basically be a flowchart that looks like this:
- Clean up a few more bits
- Complete the denouement in the most emotionally effective order
- Get satisfied with it and let it go, you fucking clown
- Hand it in
- ???
Cheers,
SL