Author's sheet - a unit of measurement of a writer's work

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Ever since people began to write, this activity is perceived as work. And like all labor, the art of wielding a pen must be paid.

How to measure writing

Humanity carved lines on stone, then special boards covered with wax were used, and even later paper appeared, on which information was recorded with ink and goose feathers. The invention of the printed method of making books created the conditions for mass reproduction, and quantitative assessment became a topical issue not only for authors, but also for manufacturers of this specific product that brings knowledge to humanity.

Currently, the author's sheet is considered the main unit of measurement for the volume of a printed publication. To a person who is not initiated into the details of the publishing business, this term says little. For most people, a sheet is just a piece of paper with text printed on it on one or both sides. In fact, the concept is much more complicated.

Why did they call it that?

The first books in the history of mankind were published in In folio format. To do this, a matrix was createdwhich mirrored texts and images protruded from its main plane. The technology roughly corresponded to that used in the creation of engravings, which set the high cost of early printed editions. The expression in folio is translated from Latin literally as "into a leaf", from which, in fact, the typographic term arose.

Typewritten

In the twentieth century, writers created their works in two main ways. In addition to talent, rich imagination, life experience and high moral character, they needed a fountain pen or typewriter. The poet (or writer), carried away by rhymes or twists and turns of the plot, was not up to counting the number of characters. He could only take into account the number of pages. Companies in the publishing business quickly established a correspondence according to which the volume of an author's sheet corresponds to 22-23 pages of typewritten text. After that, it became much easier to calculate both the amount of the fee and the cost of a copy, based on the circulation. The concept of a page was also subject to standardization. It is considered to be completed normally if it contains approximately 30 lines (give or take one). Moreover, each of them contains approximately 1860 letters, symbols or spaces. The distance between the lines can be single, one and a half or double, depending on this, other print parameters change, such as the number of characters per line, margin sizes, etc. In any case, in order to type the author's sheet, it was necessary to hit forty thousand times on the keys of a typewriter. All 23 pagesshould have a standard size of 29.7 x 21 cm, which corresponds to the A4 format. Single-sided printing.

With computer typing

It was difficult for writers of the very recent past. Edits led to damage, the texts had to be reprinted many times, then read again, find flaws, and again on a new one … Now it's another matter. Convenient text editors of popular software shells facilitate the work of writers by carefully pointing out typos and syntax errors, and any editing comes down to hovering over the right place, moreover, and replacement options have already been selected. Such convenience does not always result in high artistic merit of works, but in technical terms, progress is obvious. With computer imposition, the author's sheet is equal to forty thousand characters with punctuation marks and spaces. The possibilities of statistical accounting of the volume of the work are included in the functions of all programs designed for text typing and editing. Of course, you do not need to adjust the text to fit the round number, an approximate match is enough.

There is another, approximate method of calculation used by modern prose writers. Just look at the properties of the document. In DOS format, one author's sheet takes up 34 kB of memory.

Graphics in author's sheet

Everything is clear when it comes to textual information. But in real life, the situation can be more complicated. For example, most textbooks, scientific monographs or research papers cannot be imagined without diagrams,tables and other graphic reinforcements of the presented material. Fiction can also be illustrated. How to count author's sheets in this case? This task is somewhat more difficult, but also has a solution.

Illustrative material is considered as follows: 30 dm² of their area is one author's sheet. Usually, each "picture" is provided with explanatory text, its volume is taken into account according to the usual rules. Thus, the proportion of illustrations is calculated by the ratio of their area to the total volume.

What is the translator's sheet

Translation is not an easy job, and it requires not only knowledge of a foreign language, but also certain creative abilities, and in some cases talent. Samuil Marshak, Pasternak and other poets were able to convey to our reader the works of Shakespeare and other foreign authors while preserving the style, style and all the subtleties of the era in which the original sources were created. Not everyone, of course, can be geniuses, but the need for high-quality translations has always been, is and will be. It is noticed that the volume of the source differs from the size of the final material, therefore, when concluding a contract for this difficult work, publishers apply multiplying factors. This is done simply, the size of the author's sheet of the original is multiplied by a certain number. For English, the coefficient is 1.2, and for Hungarian, which is more difficult to translate, it is 1.4. Of course, the final calculation is made based on the size of the final result, but it has been empirically established that from one pagePortuguese text is about a fifth larger than Russian.

Rhyming Leaf

From the outside it seems that life is easier for poets. Their author's sheet consists of 700 lines, regardless of their length and number of characters. However, such a system of calculation only seems to be beneficial. If the question is about the payment of a fee (which is rare these days), then achieving such recognition is not an easy task in itself, and absolutely unattainable for cunning poets who strive to make lines shorter. When publishing a work at the expense of the author, such a system, on the contrary, is more profitable for the publisher, which issues an invoice based on the number of author's sheets.

All this, by the way, also applies to prose writers. It is very difficult to create a talented work that the reader would love. Aspiring writers should think about this before calculating their future fees.