I've been working on my first book with Manning (should be out in the next few months).
Without the structure a publisher provides it's likely I would not have come even vaguely close to finishing.
The marketing is icing, really.
Without the structure a publisher provides it's likely I would not have come even vaguely close to finishing.
The marketing is icing, really.
Another thing I did was plot my word count per commit. Once per week I would post it to an internal channel at work and add a sentence or two summarising my week. The most interesting thing is that while my output could fluctuate a lot per week, the overall trend was fairly stable.
I didn't feel like I was being made to follow a template. In fact the TOC changed a lot over the course of writing.