Why Quality is Not About Talent
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
( The dates are in the past, but the information is still relevant. )
In the January 2015 issue of this e-zine, I wrote an article titled “The Success Equation,” which spelled out my ideas at the time for why some authors are successful and most aren’t.
Over the past six years, I’ve honed those ideas by teaching them at conferences and by putting them into practice in my own life.
This year, in this e-zine, I’d like to walk you through my ideas as they stand right now. I’ll teach you what I’ve been doing since 2015.
I recently wrote a blog post, “The Success Equation,” that briefly summarizes the five factors that drive success.
Two of the factors
that drive success (Target Audience size and Quality) have to do with
your writing craft, and I’ll begin the discussion of those in this
month’s Craft column.
A third factor that drives success is your Discoverability. This is a large topic and is going to take months to cover. We’ll get started in this month’s Marketing column.
A fourth factor that drives success is your Production, and that’s the subject of this column.
The fifth factor that drives your current success is something you have absolutely no control over--the success you’ve had in the past. You can’t change the past. But you can change the future, by taking actions now in the present to make today more successful. Because today is the yesterday you won’t be able to control tomorrow.
Why Production Matters
What is Production? It’s the speed that you publish your books.
If all other things are equal, the author who publishes five books per year is going to do better than the author who publishes one. And the author with ten books published in past years will do better than the author with only one, because some marketing methods only work when you have several books published.
That’s why your Production matters. If you want to be more successful, do your best to maximize your Production.
You might argue that the Quality of your work will suffer if you publish five books per year. That’s true for some authors and not for others. I would never tell you to publish shlock, just to publish fast. I don’t write five books per year, for three reasons:
- I have a day job that consumes half my time. It’s a fun job that I love, and it pays well, and I don’t see any reason to give it up. I get to do science, and I get to write code, and they actually pay me! What could be better?
- The books I write are huge. The last novel I wrote was 180k words. My current work in progress weighs in at over 240k words.
- The books I write take a lot of research. My readers know that I connect a lot of dots. That’s my superpower, and my readers like that, but connecting dots takes a lot of time. I try to spend several weeks per year doing on-site research for my books. Time spent on research is time spent not writing. It is what it is.
So how do you set your production rate and then live with it?
Your Production Rate
The two factors you need to look at are these:
- How long does it take, realistically, to write a book?
- How many hours do you have in your time budget per week?
Once you know those, you can figure out a reasonable production rate.
For myself, once the research is done, I can write 500 to 1000 words per hour. So a book of 200k words would take 200 to 400 hours to write. And it would take another 200 hours to edit and polish.
My current time budget for writing fiction is one hour per day, every day of the year. As of this moment, I have a streak of 506 days in a row, writing one hour per day. (The only exceptions are when I’m sick or traveling. Every other day of the year, I work. That includes Christmas. And my birthday. And weekends.)
Once you know how long it takes to write a book and how many hours per week you write, you know your optimal production rate. In my case, let’s say the book will take 500 hours at 7 hours per week. So that’s about 72 weeks. Which is why I can’t publish even one book per year.
A Production Plan is a Production Habit
If you want to boost your Production, you need a Production Plan.
And a Production Plan is just another name for a Production Habit. A famous writer once said, “I write when the spirit moves me … and the spirit moves me every day.”
Stephen King writes 2000 words every day. That’s over 700k words per year. That’s Production, and that’s a key element of his success.
Your life will change amazingly if you create a Production Habit.
So how do you do that?
You do it by making it ridiculously easy:
- Make a firm promise to yourself that you’re going to write every day of the week for at least 5 minutes. (You get to decide whether that means 5 days per week, or 6, or 7.)
- Back up that promise with an accountability partner. If you miss even one day in a given week, then you owe your friend a $50 Amazon gift card. (It doesn’t have to be exactly $50. Make it a number that will sting, but won’t impoverish you.) You should have no problem finding a friend who will agree to be your partner on this.
You might argue that 5 minutes per day is too easy.
Yes, it’s easy. The easiness is the point. 5 minutes per day is perfect when you’re starting out. Because when you’re starting out, the value is not in the 5 minutes. The value is in creating the habit.
After you’ve spent 30 days doing 5 minutes per day, your habit will be pretty well in place. Then ramp up the time commitment to 10 minutes. Or 15.
Then after another 30 days, ramp it up again.
At a certain point, you’ll reach your natural limit for the number of minutes you can work in a day. For me, at this point in my life, my natural limit is 60 minutes. I don’t have more. So I make every minute count. Make yours count too.
A year from now, when you look back on your Production for 2021, you’re going to be astounded at how much you’ve achieved.
Astounded. Next year, this time, you’ll see.
Homework:
- How many words do you plan for your current novel? (50k to 100k is a typical range.)
- How many words per hour do you write, on average? (500 words to 2000 words per hour are typical.)
- How many hours do you estimate it would take to write your book and edit it and polish it? (Some writers need as little as 100 hours; others might need up to 500.)
- How many hours do you think you can budget each week for Production? (Most professional writers are producing new content between 5 and 20 hours per week.)
- Now do the math: How many books can you write in a year? (1 to 5 are typical.)
Please note that it’s OK to not be in the “typical” ranges quoted above. The point of the exercise is to define a Production rate goal that works for you, in your life situation
About The Author
