Writing a Novel a Year? Slacker.

[Steerpike]

Interesting article. I think it will hold particularly true for what would have been mid-list authors. Whereas someone like George Martin can spread out the time between books and be guaranteed an audience, I think the majority of authors, those who make a decent living at it, perhaps, but won't be household names, will have to increase output or risk being pushed aside by authors who have.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/bu...-slacking.html

[Benjamin Clayborne]

I've thought about this. My NIP is just about done and it's taken me the better part of a year to finish it (mostly because I've been writing in my spare time, which is not abundant). If I was writing full-time I'd probably be able to finish a novel this length (175k words) in half that time.

I wonder, though, whether a particular author needs to have continuous output if their work is good enough. If someone becomes a fan, they aren't going to forget about you just because it's been a year. Or maybe I'm wrong, and younger folks are used to that phenomenon; if you really don't publish something every few months, they'll move on and not look back. Seems kind of unlikely.

[Steerpike]

I think it depends on the kind of author and the level of popularity. There are some authors whose books I will buy as soon as they come out. I don't care if it has been one year or ten since the last one. There are a lot of others where I might read a book and enjoy it, but it's not enough to put the author on my list of absolute favorites. If the author has another work or two out there, I may well pick them up but if I don't come across anything of theirs for a while they tend to fall off my radar. Instead of actively seeking out their work, its more like a few years later I see their next book and think "oh, yeah, I remember this author," and by that time I may or may not pick up the book.

[Claire]

I wonder how this will play out in the fantasy genre in particular. The books are often much longer than in other genres, the series more drawn out. I wonder how many fantasy readers will start to expect greater output, short stories in between, etc.

The trouble is, there is always someone willing to go to great lengths to achieve success, which spurns the rest of the pack along lest they be left behind. You see it with kids in sports - parents who are willing to pay for personal training, year round coaching, etc. even for kids who are like 8, hoping to get them out in front of the competition. Other parents see it happen and don't want their kid left behind. The same phenomenon could be happening with authors - some authors try to churn out more work to get ahead of the competition and the others feel the pressure to keep up, since they know there are those who will be willing to go that extra mile.

[Phil the Drill]

Steve Erikson for instance did this it seemed. Like clockwork a new Malazan Book of the Fallen would come out. GRRM, not so much.

I think there is a benefit to keeping the flow going with a series and not having too much time in between. Some readers have short-term memories and they don't stick with a series if there hasn't been a new entry in a while.

[Benjamin Clayborne]

The old industry model was all about distribution, and secondarily, about marketing. Distribution is now basically free; which means that marketing is going to be the most important thing. Whoever markets the best is probably going to earn the most.*

* I am talking out of my ass.

[Leif GS Notae]

The old industry model was all about distribution, and secondarily, about marketing. Distribution is now basically free; which means that marketing is going to be the most important thing. Whoever markets the best is probably going to earn the most.*

* I am talking out of my ass.

Considering they are depending on you to do a lot of the heavy lifting, it is more and more likely every day.

I think the problem here is that we aren't taking into account actual lives being lived here. People have children, jobs, cars to pay for, so on and so forth. Special people with no lives (me) can crank out 25K words in a day, or aim for 175K in a two week span if needed (one hell of a way to spend a vacation), but those moments are few, even for me.

Of course, I am also the proponent for smaller novels that use the readers imagination to fill in gaps and not beat them over the head with my "Brandon Sanderson Must Explain Everything" derp stick. There is a balance here, something only you can discover.

[Amanita]

This can work for novels that are part of a series of relatively small books. The same goes for things like crime novels with an established setting and relatively clear plotlines.
But stand-alone fantasy novels with fresh world-buildung and plotlines in this number? Hardly possible to do well. I see some of those "mass-production" books in bookstores, usually they're full of (badly-used) cliches, lazy plot twists and even plenty of technical mistakes. I hope this is not going to be the standard for everyone soon. Making something good requires time, no matter in what field.

[Chilari]

They say of services, you can pick two of good, fast and cheap. I think a similar thing applies to novels, only replacing cheap with long.

Having said that I think it depends on the time a writer has available to them. I could probably produce a novel in a year if I wrote 750 words per day, took a month off after completing the first draft, and worked at the same pace on rewrites and edits. It might not be as good as I could make it - I might want to do a second round of rewrites and edits, for example, which might not fit into the year. But it wouldn't be awful. I don't think, working full time, I could produce anything worthwhile in less time than that.

But to be honest I'm not so sure speed is so much of the essence here. While the ability to flood the market can certainly help build name recognition, I think the author of that article has rather missed the point as far as online publishing is concerned. It's a more immediate medium which means it takes less time to get from completing a novel to selling it, and it does mean there's no necessity to go through an editor or publishing house to sell your novel, meaning a lot more novels will get published simply because there's no quality threshold or publisher's budget limitations stopping any novel that's written from being published. That means the market is already saturated, though. Having ten novels instead of five means your name appears a little more often, but amongst however many hundreds or thousands of novels published the same week as your novel, it's not going to stand out unless it's good - or has been seen, if it's been reviewed and the author has responded very negatively to an overall not very positive review. But that's not the kind of publicity anyone wants.

When it comes to ebook sales, I understand that there are a few which sell very well, but the vast majority - 99% of all those published - don't sell particularly well. Those that do sell well do so because they are good and because they have been marketed well, with luck as a factor in there too. So maybe the way to earn money selling ebooks isn't to crank out as many books as possible and hope standard levels of sales across many books adds up, but rather to take a little extra time to craft a book worth reading, and then put effort and time into marketing your book.

[Steerpike]

Chilari - I think you make good points, but I should point out that the author wasn't merely expressing an opinion. Apparently the traditional publishing houses are asking their writers to do this, and it isn't sitting well with all the writers for obvious reasons. So while I think it is true that speed shouldn't be of the essence, it apparently is increasingly of the essence with the traditional publishers, and if that trend continues then I suspect as those publishers draw in new authors they're going to lean toward those who can meet this sort of demand.

With eBooks...I don't know. I hope you are right. But from what I've read of the very successful eBooks sellers (the ones that aren't traditionally published but made their careers from eBooks), the advice tends to indicate that volume is very important.