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/b...-writers-cramp-a-book-a-year-is-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.

 

[Philip Overby]

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.

 

[Chilari]

Ah, fair point. I'd forgotten about that bit. I read the article yesterday and had forgotten.

To be honest I find that worrying. Partly because I'm not sure I could meet those demands, but mainly because it feels like industrialisation of fiction - which can hardly end well as regards quality.

 

[RavenBower]

What is a little amazing is that they're trying to pawn this off as being new. It's not. 5+ years ago I remember a dialog/article with NY published authors in the paranormal, suspense and romance fields telling fledgling writers to enjoy their pre-published years and the ability to dawdle over manuscripts, because post-publication they were expected to put out 2-4 books a year (sometimes under different names).

So this isn't new to the industry as a whole, but is perhaps new to certain genres.

To some degree it might affect quality, but on the other hand, it might lead to more cutting edge fiction. Like Leif pointed out, fiction where the reader is actively imagining instead of descriptions and interior character rants that go on and on and on for pages. You know, the kind of thing readers like me get bored of and skip

Who knows, maybe the fantasy genre will grow because of this and that would be a good thing!

 

[RavenBower]

Or hey, authors could break a lot of those door stop books down into two books instead, which would easily generate a 2+ book a year output for a lot of fantasy authors. It could even bring more readers into the world of fantasy reading because the sheer size of a single book intimidates some readers even if they'd love to delve into fantasy. Broken down into two different novels, that same story might end up in the hands of more readers.

 

[Christopher Wright]

The main problem with this is the time it takes to edit and revise to make something presentable.

I could knock out a rough draft of a 115K word novel in a month or two. But it would have atrocious spelling, punctuation, grammar errors, lots of infodumping, and would need re-work. Add time to revise and edit and we're talking at least 4 or 5 months IF I DO NOTHING ELSE, and as someone who has a full-time job and is the father of a three year old[1] that's not going to happen.

If you can put out 4 books a year and the quality of each book is good then you should absolutely do that. On the other hand, don't feel pressured to put out something before it's ready. The great news about being able to do things like self-publish, etc, is you can make sure your backlist is always available. So even if you only put out a book a year, in ten years all of those books will still be available to anyone who wants to buy them.

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[1] This is also known as "having a full time job."

 

[Steerpike]

Ah, fair point. I'd forgotten about that bit. I read the article yesterday and had forgotten.

To be honest I find that worrying. Partly because I'm not sure I could meet those demands, but mainly because it feels like industrialisation of fiction - which can hardly end well as regards quality.

I think, as with other art areas where there is a certain amount of "industrialization," there will always be room for people who don't follow that path to be successful. These may not be the top earners, by and large, but I don't think there is any reason a writer couldn't still be successful. If traditional publishers are increasingly pushing this kind of scheduling, then maybe there is a shift so that many of the other types of writers are self-publishing.

 

[Steerpike]

I could knock out a rough draft of a 115K word novel in a month or two. But it would have atrocious spelling, punctuation, grammar errors, lots of infodumping, and would need re-work. Add time to revise and edit and we're talking at least 4 or 5 months IF I DO NOTHING ELSE, and as someone who has a full-time job and is the father of a three year old[1] that's not going to happen.

Yes, I think that is fairly characteristic of writers. I remember reading something from a published author about how writers spend too much time editing, and I got some advice along similar lines from another guy who publishes at a pretty fast rate. It's tough, because ultimately I guess the writer is in the best position to determine when the work is ready, but I sold my first stories a few years ago when I actually changed my approach to it. My first sale basically a first draft that has been checked for typos; no substantive changes. The next one went through one full edit. I think I did two passes on my children's book - one for typos and one for substantive.

I can't comment on any individual directly, of course, so this is just a general statement, but I do believe that many writers, particularly when starting out, spend way too much time editing. I've seen many people in writing groups that can't even finish a work because of incessant editing.

I guess it depends on what you're producing, though.

 

[Penpilot]

I can't comment on any individual directly, of course, so this is just a general statement, but I do believe that many writers, particularly when starting out, spend way too much time editing. I've seen many people in writing groups that can't even finish a work because of incessant editing.

I guess it depends on what you're producing, though.

I think maybe it's because some just don't know how to approach editing. I used to waste my time working my sentences over and over even though it was just the second draft and there were bigger story issues to deal with. I'd end up scrapping scenes and paragraphs I'd spent hours on because they no longer fit.

I was working from bottom-up instead of top-down.

Now I edit the big picture problems first and work down and it saves me tons of time. Polish is a very appropriate word because it's like working with course sandpaper at first, and with each pass, using a finer and finer grain. And to push the analogy further, could you imagine trying to polish something with only access to fine grain sandpaper? It'd take forever.

 

[Devor]

I think this is great, y'know, for those authors who work for a publishing house full of editors and promoters and other supporting systems.

For those of us doing all of the work ourselves trying to self-publish, it's not a good thing at all.