Limits in Writing and Publishing…
Everyone Sets Their Own Limits…
Actually not completely true. Everyone’s limits are set by what they learned from others, mostly non-writers spouting myths they learned at some point.
And there are major myths that most writers never get past.
- — Writing Fast Is Writing Poorly
- — Everything Must Be Rewritten
- — Everything Must Be Perfect Before Publishing
These myths and so many more are what limits each writer. And the myths were encouraged by agents who were never writers and also traditional publishing that could only handle so many books from a writer, usually just one per year.
And the fear of what others will think stops millions of writers from ever even getting started.
If I asked each and every one of your how many novels you could write in a year if life left you alone and all you had to do was write, the answers would vary all over the map, totally depending on what you learned from others, including such stupidity like “The creative voice gets tired.”
Limits are taught by non-writers in fiction writing. And almost never challenged with reality.
Math Alert!!!
Say you are a fairly normal professional fiction writer doing about 1,000 words per hour which includes a break. Clean copy, one draft and done.
You need weekends off, so you write 260 days a year. Wait, you need a two week vacation, so you write 250 days per year.
Hang on to your shorts, folks… here is the math.
— 1 hour per day of writing is 250,000 words per year finished. Say your novels are 60,000 words, so that is about four novels per year.
— 2 hours per day is 500,000 words a year. That’s around eight novels per year.
— 4 hours per day (half day) is 1 million words a year (Pulp Speed One) That is 16 plus novels per year.
THAT IS WORKING HALF TIME…
Right about now a lot of you are reading this and your training from non-writers is kicking in and saying not possible and do on. Check in with yourself… I bet you are saying… “But what about rewriting?” Or “Wouldn’t writing that fast hurt your creative voice or wouldn’t your stories be dull and poorly written?”
You know, the myths I mentioned above.
Reality is that the more you use your creative voice, the more it wants to be used. It never gets tired and you are the only thing that limits it.
Now imagine you do 40,000 word novels. 25 novels per year. About one every two weeks… Hmmm,
And I don’t take weekends or weeks on vacation, so if I wanted to do 25 novels, I would need to write about 3,000 words per day for 14 days to get a novel over 40,000 words in two weeks. Hmmmmm… 3,000 words per day or about three hours for me. A ton easier than writing a new story every day. Some off those suckers went up to 5 and 6 thousand words.
So Harvey set a challenge for me. He did 27 ? novels, one every two weeks, before taking a break.
And I would do all my own covers, have a VA flow them into Vellum and another VA load them.
So I would basically be publishing a novel every two weeks once everything in the system got going.
Sounds like a ton of fun to me and a great challenge.
Now check in with yourself on all the negative thoughts about all this and realize some non-writer in your past taught you all of them.
5 Comments
Aniket
It couldn’t be more timely Dean! Thanks for this post. I was wondering about the limit I might have placed on myself about the word count for a day, or a word count for a project. I’ll have to revisit and find a way to break it.
dwsmith
As a friend reminded me, life events play an important part in this. I could not have thought about doing this with the recovery from the shoulder surgery or the recovery from the business issues. I can now because I am working to get even more healthy and a lot of life events have dropped away.
Harvey Stanbrough
Hey Dean, Thanks for the mention.
My streak ran from 19 October 2024 through 19 July 2025, so 21 novels in 42 weeks before I stumbled over a minor life roll and broke it. Some of those were in my current Blackwell Ops series, but a few were one-offs.
(I also did all my own covers, etc., plus I ran a short story contest and published the resulting anthology and then a collection of my own stories during that time. But I’m only officially counting novels, not major pubs.)
Anyway, I climbed back on Heinlein’s Rules and released my next novel on 11 October 2025. So for the “year” beginning October 19, 2024 I had 22.
I have another novel that released yesterday, 25 October, and another one that will release on 8 November.
For January to December 2025, so far I have 16.
My remaining pub dates for 2025 are 11/15, 11/29, 12/13, and 12/27. I’d ask you to wish me luck, but we both know luck has nothing to do with it. (grin)
Also I look forward to watching you whip my butt (from a distance) in 2026. (grin)
dwsmith
Wow, Harvey, that is fantastic. What a great challenge for me to work towards. I need to start on the 10th and do one year, so 26, to make sure I have 23 published in my 75th year on this planet.
Since for me that is about 3 hours a day, I will be doing all my normal stuff like teaching and editing. But I am also thinking of doing a collection every two weeks as well, getting all the stories from Smith’s Monthly into collections. Far more than 26 ten story collections…
I will do all my own covers and I may do layout in Vellum as well of the novels and collections. But going to need to have help loading them up, which I have already in VAs. No employee of WMG will be involved. (except for a few VAs). If I find after the first novel and collection or so that it is working out, I will then start laying out Smith’s Monthly issues as well.
Going to be a blast.
James Palmer
Great advice, Dean, and easily doable. If you get out of your own way there’s no limit to what you can accomplish.
I write 1,000 words an hour, or more, if I’m really humming. That’s all I can do with my day job, but that’s enough. I’m actually shooting for four or more novels a year. Actually, four Kickstarter campaigns per year, one every quarter. For my next campaign I’m planning on doing a trilogy, which I’m working on now. So at least six books in total next year.