‘Prolific’

‘How many books do you write per year?’

How this question haunts me. The answer could be ‘too many’ or ‘not enough’, depending on which measure you’re using and even depending on my state of mind at the time.

Even the definition of what is a prolific authors isn’t clear. My three books per year are a lot for some, but less than many other authors manage (and this isn’t a new thing. Authors of mass-market paperback books have always been prolific, even before the advent of the word processor).

I spoke to my mum recently and she told me she was surprised to see I had two more books out that she has to get copies of. I love that she wants to own and read them all, but we’re getting up to… (let me count)… sixteen now! I can’t ask someone to read sixteen books just because they’re related to me.

In general, I think there are too many books available these days (and I say that knowing that many of mine – any of mine – probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the proliferation of ebooks that is both a wonderful thing and also making it impossible to earn a fair income for the time spent writing a book). Authors learned that the Amazon algorithm sat up and took notice if you released many books fairly quickly. Volume is the only way to earn money with books, so if you can’t expand your readership, you need to write more books for your existing readership to buy.

Here’s the awkward truth: I would probably write less if I didn’t feel some pressure.

I love writing. I get up each early each day very happily, raring to sit down at my desk and create the next scene. I 100% believe this is what I’m best at. But sometimes I wish I had another job and writing was creative experimentation that was only about crafting the best book I can craft and not about selling that book to the widest possible audience.

I’m incredibly fortunate as an author that my first book was contracted just before my youngest child started Kindergarten (and we’d moved countries, so I’d been under-employed for some time and then unemployed). We decided I’d be a full-time author for a little while to see if I could kick-start a career that way, since our finances were settled without me working. It was a very slow start, but I did everything I could – which was mainly write and write and write.

Volume is the only part of the process I have control over, so of course I push myself.

I’m musing about this a lot right now because I have some uncertainty this year around publisher issues – uncertainty that is more of an opportunity than anything else, but it motivates me to write even more to give myself the best possible chance. But at some point, something will suffer for all of this more.

The first assumption is that writing quality suffers. I’m not sure how far this is true. Certain genres require research and reflection and I’m sure those types of books would be lower quality if rushed for a deadline. My books too have a research requirement that definitely slows me down (and I wouldn’t have it any other way, because it’s in the research that I usually find the soul of the story).

But in my own experience, the books I wrote quickly don’t seem to be any worse than those that took longer, so I try not to worry about that. In fact, the more I write, the better I get at the technical aspects (putting a sentence together, building tension across a scene and a whole story etc).

That said, sometimes I wish I could take some extra time and write something really special (it would still be romance LOL) – something purposeful and reflective. With my deadlines and the Ferris Wheel of publishing, I don’t feel like I have the time to really purposefully craft a story.

But maybe readers wouldn’t want that anyway. I have no desire to write literary fiction, so I’ll always be immersed in the story and the characters, without searching for a deeper meaning, but I do wonder if I could do better if I had the time and space to reflect and really dig into the story and the characters – and bring them to life with more thought and care in the writing.

All of this to say, I just finished a first draft of a book (a kind of scary book that doesn’t yet have a home and might never find one…). I’m immensely pleased with it (and it was fairly quick to write in the end – I can’t say exactly how long it took, because I had copy edits and two proofreads and a bit of another manuscript in the middle of writing it). But I have a deadline for a book that IS contracted, that I now have to write, and I kind of wish I could have a break instead.

Publishing tells me, the faster I can write, the better, but I don’t want to force it. I still have some time. I think I need to think and reflect and put some brain work in before I start writing again.