Alive & Knitting
writing, knitting, and other tangled webs we weave

Aug

15

Serving Two Masters – Part I

Filed Under Publishing

Nope, this isn’t about kinky sex. This is an answer to the question that new authors ask all the time.

How do I write for two houses simultaneously?

It’s a good question, but not an easy one to answer. It’s not an option that works for everybody, for a whole bunch of reasons. We’ll take it apart, identify the variables and consider them.

We’ll start by looking at you, because everything you do in this biz should proceed from who you are, how you work, what you want and what you can reasonably expect to get.

And the first part of that is your productivity.

You need to know how prolific you are before you can even consider writing for more than one house. Unfortunately, a lot of new authors don’t really know how prolific they are, because they’re squeezing in writing time between a day job and real life, stealing minutes that they believe they won’t have to steal once they sell and make gobs of cash. Reality check #1 – you may not be able to quit your day job immediately upon selling. You may never quit your day job. You may always have to keep a part time job to cover those payment droughts that are inevitable in any writing career. So, figure out how prolific you are RIGHT NOW and work with those numbers until something big changes. If nothing else, this is your worst case scenario.

A.
How many hours do you work a day?
How many words do you write each time that you work – on average?
How many days a week do you write?
Okay, what’s your average weekly word count?
Monthly?
How many vacations do you take? How many weeks a year will you lose out of this total?
What’s your annual total word count?
How much do you revise? How much do you chuck? Adjust your totals if your net word count is more than 5% different from your gross word count.
How much do you research? Allocate your research time to each book, tally it up and take that time out of your monthly word count.

For example, I write five days a week. I write, on average, 3000 words a day – fewer at the beginning of a project, more at the end. This gives me a weekly total of 15,000 words, 60K a month. It sounds great, but I know that I hit great word droughts. There’s one at the middle of the book that lasts one to two weeks while I mentally arrange the furniture for the second half of the book. I also spend at least two weeks reading and researching before starting a book (AKA making librarians crazy). So, I adjust my total word count downward to about 40K NET words a month.

B.
What do you write? Or, more importantly, how long are the books that you write? Get the word count and figure out how many books you write a month (it’s probably going to be a fraction).

I write books that are 100K in length. So, I write 40% of a book per month.

Clearly, if you write shorter books, you might write them faster, but that’s not a gimme. Be sure you haven’t mis-allocated your research and dreaming time.

Novellas, for example, take me a ridiculous amount of time comparatively. I can’t write a novella in less than a month, even though it’s only 20K words total. Experience, many late nights and much anxiety now means that I don’t take on a novella unless I have six weeks free and clear to write it. The disproportionate amount of time novellas take me means that either the project has to pay really well, or that it’s really interesting and the timing is good enough. If you love writing novellas and zip them off quickly, you might find precisely the opposite is true for you.

C.
Consider your answers. How many books per year do you write?

Don’t extrapolate wildly and say “oh but I WILL write twice as much once I sell!” Work with the numbers we’ve calculated here. If you believe you can and will write more, well, do it first before you count on it.

Using my word count from above, I write just shy of five books a year — 4.8

If your answer is two books a year or less and you are writing romance, then you cannot keep two publishers happy. You must assume in romance that each house will want AT A MINIMUM a book from you every eight months. If you’re hot and they’re enthused, they’d prefer every six months. In series these days, if you’re hot and they’re enthused, they’ll take a book every 60 days. If you are not this prolific, put all thoughts of working for two houses right out of your head.

D. Over time, identify other variables and factor them in.

There are always contributing variables. In my experience, it’s hard to be in full press when personal crises erupt around you. If your mother is sick, or your dog died, or your kid is failing math, or you’re moving (or renovating) or you personally are booked for surgery, you’re not going to making your word count. (Or if you are, it’s probably crap.) If you change sub-genres, your count may drop as you learn the marks. These are the contributing variables from the real life end of the spectrum.

There are also contributing variables from the publishing end. Once you sell, there will be calls about cover art, revisions, line/copy edits, page proofs, back cover copy to write/revise, review quotes to gather, marketing plans to plan and execute, signings to book, option proposals to write and conferences to attend. A lot of things that you don’t do as an unpub will suddenly show up on your radar — and publishers tend to think that you’re just waiting for them to send you something. Many of these things will arrive on your doorstep with very short turnaround times, maybe they even need to hear back today. How about right now?

I like to write four books a year. This allows 12 weeks per title. Technically, even allowing for my research and extra buffer of time, I should be finished a book in 10 weeks. Allowing 12 weeks gives me the time for these other variables. If the books are complicated or involve more worldbuilding than is typical, I prefer to write 3 books a year, allowing 4 months for each one.
Theoretically, it diminishes my stress level, although that’s a hard thing to argue ’round about week seven! laugh.gif

So, work it out ladies. How long does it take you to write a book, allowing for all this extra stuff?

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