Now, please don’t get me wrong. I love helping out others, especially Indie authors. After all, I wouldn’t be here today had not some lovely people taken the time to help me out.

However, I do suffer from a chronic shortage of time. This is partly because of my reluctance to say no when people ask me for help. In my defence, though, most people are not entirely accurate when they estimate how long it will take to complete a given task.

Therefore, I think we need to be honest about, say, how much time our request for a “quick read” or a “quick review” will take. After all, unless we’re Steven King, we can’t seriously expect people to read our 500-page-long book in a weekend now, can we?

After all, we can no longer afford the luxury described in The Gentleman’s Handbook of Etiquette and Guide to Polite Society (1860), which clearly advocates ignoring time constraints:

It is not considered fashionable to carry a watch. What has a fashionable man to do with time? Besides, he never goes to those obscure parts of the town where there are no public clocks, and his servant will tell him when it is time for dinner.

So, in the interest of helping out my (unfashionable) fellow authors, I have compiled this handy time reference guide, based on Marco Kaye’s Corporate Time Equivalents:

From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's books

If you have a minute to spare, why not read my children’s book, Runaway Smile, for free? Unless you want to go the extra mile and review it. In which case, you’ll need no more than five minutes. Promise!