And In Primus the most important bit of wisdom I shall depart is also the most difficult and useless to thee.  For it is this: you must give yourself permission to write the stink bomb.  The words wafting off your pages will and must repulse you with every word you write.  Yet without cease or fail you religiously return to pound out more onto your word processor.  You must solemly vow to never go back, never edit, never delete!  These words until you reach the end of your manuscript (that way when you do go back to work on stuff before you're done, you are 'sneaking' around for a few words instead of giving yourself permission to look at how terrible the stuff is) .

They analyze them so they know what ads to offer you. Not the same thing as selling. Nobody sees them.


Well, other than the NSA, of course.

I would quibble with this.  To my mind your statement would be true if:

1) you are working for a publisher

2) writing is a part time job

3) writing is just something you do for fun and to see if you are any good/can make some money

However the successful indie guys I've been watching.  They all write a book every 3-4 months without fail.  Go any longer than that and as an indie guy you start to lose the interest of your readers but more importantly sales fall off to nothing.  My advice would be that if you want to see if you're any good write whatever.  But at the point you're ready to go serious and writing is your full time job.  Then its got to be 3 books minimum per year on your mainline series and the other one per year can be whatever.

That said you can cheat around this 3-4 books a year writing plan if you've got a backlist of books you've already written and just slowly intersperse them in amongst your new writing.

On the making a living off your writing front you could sacrifice readers continued interest if you're getting a couple sales per day off your backlist.

But that's just my 0.02c

Its all about life goals and choices.



The Deposed King