Yes, I'm still mining the question session we had awhile ago for blog post material.


How do you feel about publishers pushing their authors to write more books a year? In the past a reader would be lucky to get one book a year from their favorite author and now they want 2-3 books, short stories, anthologies, etc...

How can an author handle all this pressure?

I think that the advent of computers has really sped up the process.  I'm comfortable writing 2+ books a year, because this seems to be my optimal speed.  Some people write faster.  Some slower.  I'm not sure that any publisher would twist a writer's arm to get them to work beyond their optimal speed, but I do believe that writers tend to overextend themselves. 

Let's take writer A.  Writer A has a successful Series 1, which isn't breaking any sales records but is selling solidly.  Writer A is committed to three books, 1 book a year, 10K advance for each.  Writer A can't survive on 10K per year, so she has a day job.  She's desperate to quit it, because like most writers, writer A hates her day job.

So writer A writes a second series.  Yay, the publisher buys Series 2, with an advance of 20K per each book, one book a year.  Okay, so roughly it seems like 30K per year or so.  Pretty good.  Unfortunately that 30K is broken into chunks, and there are new fun expenses: health benefits, etc.  Writer A knows that:

a)  If she gets the second series going, she has to quit her day job or she won't meet the deadlines
b)  If she quits her day job, she won't make the ends meet

But our Writer A is human.  She loves her books, wants to see them in print, and the lure of writing full time is so tempting.  She quits her day job and takes the deal.

Six months later, Writer A is having hard time scraping enough money for Ramen.  Part-time job is out of the question: she'd have to work at least 20 hours a week at probably $10 and hour (going by part-time AA rates in my area), which amounts to big fat $800 a month before taxes and a huge drop in productivity on the writing front.  That's assuming she could find a part time job.  Writer A knows she's pretty much screwed.

She picks up Series 3.  Sure, it's only 10K a book for two books, but that gives her that much needed Ramen cash and she can still stay home and write.  And that's one way overextension happens.

It must be said that a lot of publishers will actually try to limit how much you produce, especially when you're an unknown author.  STEVEN KING (he, whose name must be spelled in all CAPS) is so huge that his fans don't even pay attention to titles any more.  They see his name and automatically buy.  Writer A has very little name recognition and her base isn't that devoted.  If she puts out too many books in the same genre, she will compete with herself.  Publishers know this.  But writers still like to eat their Ramen .

Of course, we could make our Writer A insanely happy by having her hit some sort of giant bestseller list and having her publisher swoop down on golden wings and offer her a ridiculous amount of money for the next three books in her series, but unfortunately that almost never happens.