Time frame for writing a novel in today's market

[Steerpike]

This pertains to traditional publishing, not to self-publishing.

I've read some posts and had discussions recently with people who are in various states of revision on their novel-in-progress. In many cases, the writer is years into a project. One writer who I met with at a local writing group is around 2 1/2 years in, expects her next (and hopefully final) revision to take six to eight months, after which she thinks it will be ready to go to a publisher.

The reason I bring this up is that published authors I've talked to recently say publishers are increasingly expecting faster output. I've heard more than once that you need to be on pace for a novel a year at the least, particularly when starting out (obviously, if you're a perennial best-seller the rules can change). One of these authors was able to quit her day job to write, though she's by no means famous. The other doesn't make enough to quit non-writing work yet.

Questions:

1. Have any of you heard anything that either confirms or contradicts what these people have said?

2. Do you think a novel per year is a reasonable pace, particularly if you're a newly published author who has to hold down a day job still?

3. If you don't think you could meet this pace, would a fast publishing cycle for traditional publishers tend to push you toward self-publishing, where you don't have to answer to anyone else's schedule? (NOTE: even for self-publishing, I think you need to meet a fairly vigorous schedule of publication if you want to build a reader base).

 

[Chilari]

I worked out that Terry Pratchett has, on average, published one book every 8 months since the first book he published. This includes collaborations like Good Omens but does not include ancilliary books without much of his verbal input like the Art of Discworld or the Discworld Mappe. I did include Blink of the Screen, the recently published collection of short stories. So that's not much a confirmation of expectations of publishers as a statement of what is possible when writing is your full time job (which may well impact upon what publishers expect - they've seen it done before, so why shouldn't a writer meet similar targets?)

I think even a new writer with a full time job could potentially produce a book in a year. Allow 4 months to write the first draft at 1000 words a day (achieved in an hour on a good day, two on a bad day, so not impossible to achieve if you're really working on it), then say a month off, for the sake of tidyness. Then another four months on the second draft, rewrites, edits and so on. Then give it to a few beta readers for a month. Then spend the last two months of the year refining based on beta readers' feedback, perhaps with one final quick beta read in there too. Start to finish in 12 months. Theoretically possible for even soemone with a full time job (though I'll admit I've not accounted for kids, because I don't have any). In practice it's up to the individual writer and their work ethic.

As to whether it is a reasonable pace I can't comment. Possible, yes, reasonable for someone with a full time job depends on circumstances. For someone like me, without commitments like children or pets and with the benefit of youth and good health, I would say it is perfectly reasonable. But for someone who doesn't have those benefits I have it might not be reasonable at all.

As for publishing method, there are a lot of factors involved in the decision of whether to publish traditionally or not, more just than publication schedule. I think publication schedule would be a minor thing because even self-published, ideally I would want to produce a lot of material quickly so my readers have something to move onto once they've finished with the first book. So no, I don't think that would put me off traditional publication.

 

[BWFoster78]

I don't think that I could do epic fantasy in less than a year, but I could certainly churn out something in the 60 - 80k range pretty fast. Ten weeks at 8k/wk would do it. Follow that with another 10 weeks for edit and revision, and I think it would be ready for an editor.

My first novel took a lot longer, but I learned a lot. I think my pace will seriously improve.

 

[Zero Angel]

Everything I've read not only confirms this pace for novels, but also expects secondary works as well. I've always had in my mind 4 "works" a year as a standard professional writer.

How do I rank? This year I've released my novel and 1/5 of part 1 of my nonfiction math book. I further expect to release parts 2 and 3 this month as well as at least one short story. Depending on other jobs, I also plan to release a novella.

Now that said, I don't really count my first novel. Even though it's a huge time sink with marketing, leading up to publishing, and now looking for agents, more marketing and everything else: I wrote the first draft almost 3 years ago. I'm much more proficient now, but unless I can start making money doing this, it's not going to be possible for me to maintain any sort of this advanced rate moving forward.

Now, I work 3 other jobs (just got the third today, whoo!). For full-time writers, I am surprised so many produce so little! If I could write full time I would release a full length novel every year with at least 2 novellas and 5 short stories as well as nonfiction material. And I think that would be a reasonable full-time job.

 

[Penpilot]

Questions:

1. Have any of you heard anything that either confirms or contradicts what these people have said?

2. Do you think a novel per year is a reasonable pace, particularly if you're a newly published author who has to hold down a day job still?

3. If you don't think you could meet this pace, would a fast publishing cycle for traditional publishers tend to push you toward self-publishing, where you don't have to answer to anyone else's schedule? (NOTE: even for self-publishing, I think you need to meet a fairly vigorous schedule of publication if you want to build a reader base).

From interviews I've heard, and getting a gut feel from what's being said in them, I get the feeling that authors do feel the pressure to increase output. But hasn't that always been the case? There are some average writers/authors out there who get work because they can write really fast and produce acceptable quality stories. I'm sure we've all read books where the story isn't terrible but the whole thing could use another editing pass.

I think for me a novel a year is doable. I've written 100k in two months before and it's not too hard if you have discipline. Editing is what usually gets me. But a lot of the major issues I find could be prevented if I had just planned better. Spending a day figuring out the right questions to ask about a story and answering those questions before writing can save a weeks and months of editing time. My next novel, I'm doing lots of planning before hand, and I plan on having a first draft done in 2-3 months. Famous last words... hahaha...

 

[Caged Maiden]

I'll tell you one thing I noticed. Last year, I wrote a novel, 95k words, in 8 weeks. It was over last november's nano, and again in June nano camp, and the novel isn't half bad.

When I keep up a 3k a day pace, my work is cleaner, better, and I don't suffer the wastes of time associated with a slower pace (having to re-read before writing, having to look back through research because I can't remember details, forgetting names of secondary characters, inconsistencies because the story morphs as I write it over months, etc.). I thinkif writers keep up a good pace, they actually become faster for a number of reasons. If it were up to me, I'd write novels very quickly, and then take a break between works, say a month off before editing begins.

 

[Zero Angel]

I'll tell you one thing I noticed. Last year, I wrote a novel, 95k words, in 8 weeks. It was over last november's nano, and again in June nano camp, and the novel isn't half bad.

When I keep up a 3k a day pace, my work is cleaner, better, and I don't suffer the wastes of time associated with a slower pace (having to re-read before writing, having to look back through research because I can't remember details, forgetting names of secondary characters, inconsistencies because the story morphs as I write it over months, etc.). I thinkif writers keep up a good pace, they actually become faster for a number of reasons. If it were up to me, I'd write novels very quickly, and then take a break between works, say a month off before editing begins.

That's a great point. Not to mention your writing tools (i.e. brain) are well-oiled and not suffering from rust!

 

[ThinkerX]

Hmmm...I banged out the initial draft of 'Labyrinth' in about six weeks, if memory serves, with a bunch of other work and family stuff taking up a lot of my time. I didn't start seriously revamping it until about six months ago, and I've let myself get distracted with challenge stories, reading other peoples books, ect. It might be ready in a couple of months...but it is also only a 40K novella. If I opt to do the sequel...probably a month or two for the first draft, and several more months to get it polished. That would bring it up to around 80-90K, I think.

Likewise, I started working on 'Empire' shortly after joining this board - not quite a year ago. I finished the initial draft of that in a couple of months, and intend to get back to it once the current revision of Labyrinth is settled. I hope to have it knocked into publishable shape by March or April (I figure I'm entitled to the occasional delusion) - but again, its a novella. However, I'm also figuring on a couple of novella length sequels to Empire, so...

 

[Graylorne]

I sold my first three Revenaunt books in one batch, nr 1 published in may last, nr 2 coming next month, nr 3 mid-2013. That's three books in about a year-and-a-half, in a small market. Luckily these three were already written, but even so I was working on the revisions of book 1 and their impact on book 2 at the same time.

My translated editions will probably appear with a year's interval.

Experiences since then told me that I should not sign a contract for anything new under a year. It would be easier if it was a book in the same series, but I see with Scarfar how much time research is going to take for something with a new and less familiar background.
NaNo tempo is acceptable for a month, but I wouldn't keep it up forever, even though I'm writing full time these days. Perhaps age does tell?

I just skimmed the bibliographies of three major genre writers and all of them have at least a year between books (Robert Jordan, Raymond Feist, Robin Hobb). This isn't a scientific result, but it gives an indication.

So I'd say that even in these days of instant gratification one book a year should be the minimum.

 

[Androxine Vortex]

I read somewhere that Dan Abnett has had about thirty novels published In the last decade!

 

[Zero Angel]

I read somewhere that Dan Abnett has had about thirty novels published In the last decade!

I don't know about Dan Abnett, but John Ringo has over 30 books published since 2000.

 

[BWFoster78]

I don't know about Dan Abnett, but John Ringo has over 30 books published since 2000.

I love John Ringo's work, but you can tell that the writing is rushed. The quantity does not surprise me.

 

[Graylorne]

Reminds me of the late great Edgar Wallace, who write 175 novels in 30 years, not all of star quality. But I don't think you can use any of these gentlemen as a standard.

 

[Steerpike]

Dan Abnett is good. And prolific. Also, if you look at the length of the books Steven Erikson puts out, you can see that he has churned out a large amount of material over a relatively short span of time. Some people can do it, and do it well.

So when you have people in a writing group who are taking three or four or five years to complete a novel, I suppose the realities of the marketplace are worth mentioning.

 

[Leif Notae]

it isn't so much you need NOVELS every six months, it's "you need a story every six months". This is why the market is all hot to trot for novellas or novelettes. It helps build your catalog and keeps you in the minds of your readers for a while. People are finding it really difficult to accept waiting two years for something that might take the writer 160 hours to write (depending on speed of typing, edits, etc).

EDIT: Statistics for hour quote are writing a 75k word novel and the ability to type at 30 wpm. This will give you about 42 total hours to write a first draft. Remaining 120 are slop for edits, discussions, transmissions, and praying.

 

[BWFoster78]

So when you have people in a writing group who are taking three or four or five years to complete a novel, I suppose the realities of the marketplace are worth mentioning.

I guess it depends on their goals. If a person desires to make a living as a writer, that pace probably isn't going to do it. If the person wants to create the best work possible, then that pace is probably spot on.

I also think that speed should increase with experience to some extent. I find that I don't have to spend as much time as I used to to produce the quality I want.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

If I was writing full-time, I'm pretty sure I could easily put out a decently-sized good-quality novel a year. THE QUEEN OF MAGES took a year when I was writing 1-2 hours a day.

 

[Kevin O. McLaughlin]

This is more complex than it looks.

Thanks to the rush of successful indies, there are some things VERY clear now which used to be more obscure. In the long ago past - you know, two years ago and before - publishers rarely wanted more than one work, maybe two, per year from a given author because there was concern about those works competing with each other. Also, because most fiction doesn't make money for publishers, or not much, publishers wanted to hedge their bets against poor or mediocre releases by getting more different writers' work up. This spreads around their risk.

But what we're seeing now is hard evidence of several facts:
Writers with more works up sell more copies of each work.
Writers sales tend to increase with each new work.
Writers who produce more works per year (short and long) tend to stick in readers' minds better.

So yes, even mainstream publishers are pushing to see writers produce more works, if not novels, then things like tie in novellas.

Now, here's the sticky bit. Math time:
Assume you average a thousand words per hour. I do about 1500 avg, other folks are slower and do 500. But let's borrow 1k for ease of math. Assume you work on writing only five hours per week. That's 260 hours per year. If you spend as much time in revision as you do writing the first draft (some writers spend more time, others much less), you can produce about 130k words of revised, ready to publish writing per year, more or less. That's a good sized book, two short novels, five or six novellas, or a 100k novel and a novella, or any sort of mix. You could go with a 100k novel and six 5k short stories. Whatever.

If you want to double your output, the answer is simple: double your input. In other words, put in more hours behind the keyboard. If you work ten hours per week, you double your annual output.

Work full time, and you're putting in about 2000 hours a year on writing. Even if half of that is revision, that's a million words of revised fiction per year. And we're not talking about a marathon pace, here. We're just talking about a normal, 40 hour a week job like most people work. Of course, most small business owners work a lot more than 40 hours per week during the early years, pushing 60, even 80 hour weeks pretty regularly.

It's an odd thing about the writing profession that folks think they ought to be able to make a living on one or two books per year. I mean, one 180k word book takes perhaps an hour a day, every day, to complete and revise, if you take a year doing it. Ask anyone else in most professions what they'd make working an hour a day, and if they think they'd make ends meet.

The fact is, most people who make all their money writing work full time hours. They write multiple books per year - Dean Wesley Smith and Kevin Anderson have averaged 5 a year for their careers. Sometimes they publish under multiple pen names to avoid the "compete with other works" issue. Sometimes they do other sorts of writing, like John Scalzi (who does a lot of nonfiction and business writing alongside his fiction). The writers who can make a living on a book a year are outliers, and pretty much always have been.

Now, you don't need to write full time to get some writing up and earn some money at it. But the bottom line is, the more hours you put in, the more work you will produce. The more work you produce, the more you can publish. The more you publish, the faster your fan base will grow and the more sales each new work will tend to accrue, plus more sales of backlist as new fans find old works (remember, backlist is forever now!).

So, to answer the questions:
1) Yes, major publishers are catching on to the idea that more works per year is a good thing, and are beginning to encourage writers to produce more.
2) Pace, however, is entirely personal. The more you write, the better your career will do. The less you write, the more slowly your career will build, in general anyway. If you're working full time, spending time at home with your six kids when not working, and your only writing time is a half hour on the subway going into work and a half hour coming home, then maybe you're doing all you can to write that hour a day, five days a week. If you could pull another hour a day in the evening, you'd double your output - but whether that is worth it is up to the individual author.
3) My feeling is that if anything, a fast pace is even more important and helpful for indie writers. If you're self publishing, you can produce all your work, with no issues about pen names to divide your fans. This is an enormous boon for self publishers. In fact, one of the main reasons so many self publishers are refusing offers of publishing from major publishers this year is because of noncompete clauses which would prevent them from self publishing.

We're back in the roaring 20s again, guys. Back then, the writers who were making it used to burn out manual typewriters. Just abuse them into the ground, one a year or more sometimes. Some of them were incredibly prolific by today's standards. Slower writers can still build a career. But faster writers (remember, that means writers who work more hours per week) have a strong advantage.