How to Plan a Writing Career, pt. 1

What can anecdotal evidence and clichés teach us about career planning?

Are you new to writing? If so, you’re in for a helluva ride. If not, there’s still good stuff here. I’m going to break down how to get your career started as a writer using hard data, amateur analysis, and a healthy dose of assumptions over several parts. We’ll look at how long it takes to do things at your speed, what equations you can use to plan your career, and how to put it all together. In this post we’ll focus on how many books it takes to get published and how long it will take you. We start here because it will help you plan the next chunk of your career, backwards.

It takes ten years to be published, or ten books, or both, according to the writing community at large. These numbers are accurate for the majority of the population, but you can’t apply statistics to individual cases. There are always exceptions. Brandon Sanderson wrote twelve books over thirteen years (according to Wikipedia). Patrick Rothfuss took fifteen years to write Name of the Wind (interview). Alexa Donne wrote five novels before being published over an unknown timeframe (from her videos).

Most authors seem to write one or two books a year.

Here’s the rub. If you know anything about statistics, you know that small sample sizes from non-random populations are a terrible place to start making predictions. And that’s all we have. With enough research you could probably get 30 - 60 data points of published authors and how many books it took them to get published, and how long. But what about self-published authors? Plenty are published on their first book, but are largely unsuccessful. Then there are all the writers who aren’t published yet, and may never be published. How do you get those numbers or figure them in?

We can’t get good information, and experimentation is right out; the subject matter is too subjective.

So instead we focus on “common knowledge” and anecdotal evidence. Which brings us back to ten finished books and ten years. The accepted data points. Given the range discussed above, this is as likely as any other guess. Plus, how many times have you heard of “ten-year overnight success” when talking about an author like George R.R. Martin?

We’re going to go forward with this assumption: ten finished books over X years equals publishable material.

First, we have to define our terms. A finished book is one which is the best you can make it without professional help. This includes multiple drafts (number up to you) and at least one beta read and a draft following it. Publishable material is a finished book that an agent or editor will be interested in (traditional publishing).

So, this is where you pick your timeframe. We will assume the “average” of ten years for the purpose of future discussion, but how long this takes is up to you. Remember, our definition of success here is getting to a publishable novel, not being published. That involves a lot of other stuff I’ll cover in later blogs. If you can’t wait, check out KM Weiland’s blog or the Writing Excuses podcast (which has an entire season dedicated to career planning).

Ten books in ten years. That’s our starting point. However, writing ten bad books won’t get you published on book eleven. The key is to keep challenging yourself with every book so your skills keep improving.

For now, let’s focus on how to apply the above.

How much writing is one book a year? That depends on a few things. The easy answer is pick your genre and get the appropriate word count then divide it up into words/day. For example, Fantasy manuscripts should be 100,000 words (for new authors), so writing one a year means 274 words/day. The average writer manages 500 words/per hour when they’re on point, give or take 250 (there may be some rounding). So that’s 30 to 60 minutes a day of writing every day for a year, right?

Sure, if you’re writing a masterpiece in one draft.

Once you start figuring in drafts, things get wonky fast. There’s a wide range of draft counts amongst authors, and we’ve already discusses how unreliable the data set is. Anecdotally, three to four drafts seems to be the sweet spot amongst the writers I’ve studied so we’ll assume four to keep it simple.

There’s a few ways to slice this next part, but my favorite is to use planning and time. You don’t need to write the novel and revise four times all in a single year. Instead, you could write your novel in six months (548 words/day), then put it down for six months while writing the next. That gives you two full drafts (of different novels) in one year. Next, you edit each novel in turn. In my experience it takes half as long to edit as it did to write the previous draft. So if it took you two hours a day to get those 548 words, then it’ll take you one hour to edit them the first time (draft two), then a half-hour the second time (draft three). Draft four is special.

This is because each draft is a different kind of focus.

The first draft is you telling yourself the story. The second draft is you fixing all the broken story elements; you delete huge portions of the book and replace them. Progress is non-linear. Some days you get through 1,000 words or more. Others you only write another 200-300 from scratch. The third draft is a clean and polish. The fourth draft is the draft you do after getting critiques from beta readers. This is my process, I recommend trying it out then binning it if it doesn’t work. But that’s another topic.

So you spend six months on draft one, three months on draft two, 1.5 months on draft three. That’s 10.5 months. Then you give the book to some beta readers for a couple of weeks. Your fourth draft will vary, but we’ll assume it takes two months or less. That’s fourteen months. But, if you work on two books at once as detailed above, switching off each draft, then in 28 months you get two books. Then you do it over again. If you want to conform to the one book, one year method, you need to cram some extra time in somewhere.

The reason I recommend this rather than just pounding away at one book from start to finish has to do with how our brains work. My bachelors in psychology makes me dangerous, so be sure to consult an expert on what I’m about to say.

Work you’ve done is evaluated differently by your brain than work done by someone else. This is because you have a natural bias for yourself, one way or the other. If you suffer from depression and anxiety, you are likely more critical of yourself than others. Those without those disorders tend to overestimate their skill and ability. But with time your distance from the work grows and your brain disconnects a little bit. So if you stay away long enough, you can fool your brain into thinking this isn’t your work and have a more objective view of it, which results in better drafts.

That’s all for this one. Why not figure out your writing speed and your target year count? That will give you a road map for how much work you have ahead of you.

In part 2 we’ll discuss fitting in other tasks such as research, craft study, and pleasure reading. Now get writing!