[Luffy]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Not a book, but I did write some short stories (and one on Mobileread, last year), and a lot of photography tutorials a few years ago. Writing takes a HUGE amount of time to get it right. Even when writing stuff you know a lot about (in my case, photography), it's nearly impossible to just write and be done with it.

Originally Posted by BookJunkieLI

I write fanfiction. I have also written a full length novel. I know a number of writers - both fanfiction and professional.

Most full-time writers, with no other job, average at least 5 to 10k words a day 5 days a week unless they're working heavily on revisions or plotting.
Most part-time writers, working part-time, can average about 1 to 5k words a day, more on weekends.
Let's take the 5k average. 5k times 5 days is 25k words a week. That's 100k words in a month. Depending on the genre the average novel length is 65k to 80k. Harlequins tend to be in the 55 to 70k range while Science Fiction and Fantasy tend to be in the 90k and higher range. Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series averages in the 100 to 125k range. Which means an author could have a rough draft written once a month. So given time for revisions and editing, then yes, it's possible to produce four or even more novels in a year.

There are, of course, exceptions to this. I personally know two writers who regularly churn out 40k or more words a day. By regularly I mean more than once a week. Is it all great work immediately ready for publication? Hell no, but that's why it's called a rough draft.

As for being able to keep up that kind of pace? It's called a job. Writers who take their craft seriously and don't prattle on about the "muse" and being "inspired" sit their butts in a chair and write for set amounts of time every day. If they're a full-time writer they typically portion out their day for specific tasks with actually writing being the major portion of their workday.

All writers produce clunkers along with polished gems. Anyone who claims they haven't is lying. But saying that all of an author's work must be crap if they have a high-production volume is disingenuous and tells me you haven't bothered to read any of their work. I have read Mercedes Lackey and Barbara Cartland and Nora Roberts. Actually I've works by all of the authors I mentioned in my first post. And I will admit Cartland's novels were a little simplistic but that doesn't make them bad. But let's look at some other authors who haven't been so prolific to have produced 100s of works but have produced over 50.

Stephen King
Agatha Christie
Joyce Carol Oates
Anne McCaffrey
Erle Stanley Gardner

I dare you to tell me all of their work is crap.

edited: Nevermind on Piers Anthony. It's been decades since I've read his work and due to my age at the time hadn't noticed certain 'themes' in his work that are just creepy.

Hey Katsunami and BookJunkieLI, thanks for addressing my question, grammatically wrong though it was. The chat between you two has been great to follow!

I'm siding with Katsunami. BookJunkieLI, I respect your opinion, but what you have not addressed is that however many hours have gone into a book, readers often choose poor to mediocre work and turn them into bestsellers.

Here's an answer that someone had written online concerning readers :

" First we must ask how good people are at making judgments. Judgment is based on prior experiences and accrued knowledge. We can judge the quality of something by comparing it to other, similar things, and by comparing it to a set of rules about what makes something 'good'.

The worse something is, the easier it will be to see that it's bad. Almost anyone who walks into a house that is missing a wall will immediately recognize that this is a low quality house. But it's hard to tell if something is very good. Few people would be able to recognize a drainage or insulation problem, because it requires more experience to see such things.

Take a worn-down house that isn't up to code, give it a new paint job, new carpets, new fixtures, and suddenly, the average person will see it as a 'quality house', while an expert will not be as easily fooled. Books can be judged in a similar way, and the more complex (or subtle) the techniques used, the harder it will be for the average person to recognize that it is good.

The idea of 'crowdsourcing' is that you will usually have someone in a group who has more knowledge in a subject than others, and hence, will be able to provide knowledge or information about that subject. This is how something like Wikipedia gets written: the experts in each area come forward and share their knowledge, because groups of people contain a lot of different experiences.

But this is different than taking the average opinion of a group of people. Crowds are good at basic information, but the more specialized it becomes, the worse the crowd gets. Anyone who has seen 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire' has seen this effect. The person can ask the crowd for their opinion, and the more difficult the question, the less useful the crowd will be.

Crowds are not going to pick terrible, stupid books (or movies, or whatever), but they also won't be able to pick good ones. At best, they will pick kind of average, low-quality stuff that isn't awful.

But that's not the only factor in how people choose. The average person also likes things which are familiar, recognizable, and fit into their worldview. This means that a crappy book can be more popular if it tells people what they want to hear and does so in a familiar, comforting way.

This is how genres develop: authors follow their own interests and create familiar things that people will respond to. In C.S. Lewis' works, you have some very common ideas and philosophies. They might not be productive or even healthy, but many people respond to them because they find them familiar, comforting, or self-justifying.

One of the hardest things for a person to do is to disagree with the methods of someone who they agree with. We tend to want to be confirmed; when we see someone who has reached the same conclusion as we have, we tend to feel sympathy for them, even if their methods are underhanded or unskilled.

Another problem is that you can only like a book if you know it exists. The reason for the popularity of many books (like Harry Potter or Twilight), is that a reader for Barnes and Noble decided they could be successful and gave them a large advertising budget. Copies of the book were put at the front of the store for everyone to see, so it's not surprising they became more successful than the books crammed in the shelves in the back, and all because of one person's decision.

So, just because something is successful doesn't mean it's good, because there are many factors that go into success, and quality is not one of the major ones. The books must pass a certain low threshold for quality, but beyond that it depends more on whether the book is well advertised and whether it fits in with what people already think.

People happily consume low-quality goods because it's easy to do so. Whether it's a lamp from Walmart that breaks in two months, an Ikea shelf that starts to collapse as you build it, A McDonald's meal that provides a great deal of fat and little nutrition, or a cliche novel with no content or originality, popular things are often low quality.

If the average person has relatively little experience or knowledge, it shouldn't be surprising that they make decisions to support things which are of low quality, because they do not have the ability to recognize high-quality items, and because low-quality items are often advertised to them aggressively.

This doesn't mean that something that is successful must be of low-quality, or that things that are unsuccessful are of high quality. Sometimes high-quality stuff becomes successful, and sometimes, when a hipster says you've 'probably never heard of' some band, it's not because he's found something cool, it's because they suck.

But popularity is not a sign that something is good, or that it's worthwhile, or that it will be remembered. Many of the bestsellers of the past are ignored today, and even in the Victorian period, there were jokes about how bad popular novels were."