Write A Book A Month - Please Don't

How often should you publish your books and short stories to keep readers interested?

This article was first published on Medium but has been re-written and expanded here.

I recently read an article on Medium about writing books. The author suggested that writers begin by writing short books, all good so far, and then went on to say you do not need to write a book a week (oh, good), maybe one a month or every two weeks, whoa, hang on there, just back up.

I do not want to read a book written in two weeks or even a month. OK, maybe Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange or Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, but not many others. Ian Fleming could write a James Bond book in about six weeks and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the first Sherlock Holmes in about the same time.

Those writers were good, most were at the peak of their craft when they wrote quickly, they had editors, proof-readers and the staff of their publisher’s offices to correct their mistakes and check they had not written unreadable drivel. Most indie authors do not have that sort of support.

John Creasy wrote over 500 books under various pseudonyms (that’s about six per year), I’ve read some of them, they are good, engaging, fun and fairly short. But even he revised five or six times and often submitted them to this publisher 12 months after the first draft.

So how often should writers produce a book or a story? Before you subscribe to read the rest I will point out that I don’t know. It depends a lot on whether you are a full-time writer, how long your books or stories are and most of all, how inspired you are.