QUILLBLOG

Genre writers resist the book-a-year “hamster wheel”

Having anyone want to publish your stuff is good enough for most writers. Having a publisher want more of your stuff seems like an unattainable dream.

But for some popular writers, publishers often ask for too much.

From The Boston Herald:

In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that.

Many top-selling writers, such as John Grisham and Mary Higgins Clark, have turned out at least one book annually for years. Now some writers are beginning to grumble about the pressure, and some are refusing to comply.

Not that writers are being explicitly harassed, but costly advance marketing plans are increasingly tied into the expectation that the most profitable authors will have a new book out at roughly the same time each year. In today’s intensely competitive marketplace, readers will turn to another author if a writer fails to come through at the usual time, which could cost a publisher big bucks.

Many writers below the top tier are also being urged to pick up the pace. In some cases, publishers have made a book-per-year promise an explicit condition of taking on a new author.

[...]

Some writers contend the time pressure corrodes their work.

Boston’s Dennis Lehane tried the book-a-year pace once, to his regret. He had written a second book by the time his first novel, A Drink Before the War, was published in 1994. He wrote a third book, he said, “blazing fast, a real fluke.” His fourth took 2 1/2 years.

“Then they asked me to turn a book around in a year,” he said. “I did it [Prayers for Rain in 1999], but the week it was published I realized what would have made it a really good book. The anger of that realization haunted me. I said I would never go back on that hamster wheel. It’s what led me to write Mystic River. ” He took two years, published it in 2001, and it was his biggest book. The 2003 movie won two Academy Awards.

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