Basket Writing: 10 Novels, 10 Pen Names
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jules said:
According to some of the more experienced and successful folks here, it's not the least bit hit&miss. A good novel is one that gets published, a bad one is one that doesn't. Ergo, if you write a good novel, it is destined for publication, and vice versa.
Or, to quote an answer I was given here some while back, "how difficult is that?"
caw.
pianoman5 said:
And why anger God with gratuitous coffee tables when there are so many other wonderful tables to bang your shins upon? End tables, console tables, folding tables, dining tables, multiplication tables (although I suppose that one is more for banging your head, rather than shins....I swear, until I worked in retail I never realized how many half-wits can't take 50% of $10
Kelly, Loyal Supporter of GIATT (Gratuitous Insertion of All Table Types)
Aero said:
I think the part in bold is where you're getting stuck. Why are you waiting for something to come along? I don't think anybody is suggesting you should. If there really truly is nothing that needs modifying, then you can be confident that you have written the best book you can. But can you objectively look at your own work & see that? W/ 10 novels in 12 months, do you have time to submit to beta readers & see what they think, to ask someone to go through once & edit to see what your eager eyes missed & then fix it? Are you going to catch that coffee table you forgot to add. It's there in your mind, it might not seem to be missing to you when you reread it. But Susie Q. might read it & say, "Hey, how can this character trip over a coffee table when it wasn't there before?" & then you realize that you missed it. (We are talking figuratively about the coffee table of course.) If you have nine other novels in the works, you might not have time to add to that novel yet, even if you did have Susie Q read it, & maybe you've forgotten by the time you get to editing. Or maybe you think it's supposed to be in book number 6. Or maybe you finally go back to add it & realize that you totally hate that plot point anyway, & instead you're removing the part where you tripped the MC.
You seem to be missing the point of the editing process. I wrote a novel in a month, & thought it looked pretty good for such a novel. I went through & edited it once & gave it to a friend to give me comments just on plot (Though I told her that anything she saw, she could tell me about). She gave me a couple of points that I worked on. I gave it to my mom (a teacher, & I know she'd be honest w/ me) when I was home for Christmas, & she caught a lot of grammatical mistakes, a couple of sections that made complete sense to me (as I wrote them), but completely lost her, & a mistake so huge (& yet a single word that was out of character for the MC) for a MC's thoughts, that I couldn't believe I had missed it. What else I will find as I, or others, look at the novel is yet to be seen. I can't publish it 'til the other's done, as chronologically it's the later of the two, so I have time to perfect it, & will take my time to perfect them both (unlike the NaNo novel, I'm editing as I go on the other).
Editing should be an active process of improving your work. Not sitting on it waiting for further inspiration, or adding coffee tables for the sake of adding things.
chaostitan said:I swear, until I worked in retail I never realized how many half-wits can't take 50% of $10
Well, 50% is half, isn't it? So, if you split $10 in half, you get either 1 or 0 dollars. Easy!
Sorry, back to the topic...
Aero said:
All right. I'm willing to believe you can write 5 publishable novels in a year. I've come across a few people who (with practice) can sustain that kind of output.
Firstly, there is, even at 1 a year. When you release a second book, it will persuade bookshops to order new copies of the first, so that they can have two of your books sitting on the shelf. Authors with two books on the shelf sell better than those with just one.
Secondly, if you were releasing 5 a year with the same name, the results would be phenomenal. You'd very quickly end up with your own little section of the shelf that people could find easily.
Most people think that both are essential.
I think what you're talking about isn't necessarily a bad idea. I just don't think it's a particularly great idea, either.
I know one writer who has used a large number of pseudonyms over the years, and produces a rather large number of books. She mentions the main disadvantage of her approach here. I also believe she writes somewhere over 12 hours per day. I don't think many people could keep up with her schedule. You may also be interested in this article and this one, where she talks about the difficulties and benefits of working in multiple genres.
Ten
The problem I see with all this isn't the speed of writing. There have been many writers who produced more than ten novels per year on a regular basis. The problem is with "seeing which one will stick." Odds are none of them will stick, or they will all stick. I mean, either you're good enough to write a publishable novel or you aren't.
It isn't like the lottery where one number wins and the rest lose. If you write lousy novels, if you're a lousy writer, then you can write a hundred novels in a year and they'll all be lousy novels. It's easy to say no one can define what a good novel is, but it simply isn't true. There are novels we like, novels we hate, etc., but there are still standards that agents and editors expect, and pretty much all published novels fall within these standards. Ten bad novels stand no more chance of selling than one bad novel, and writing ten novels in a year will certainly up the odds of all ten being bad.
Ideas and plots do not sell novels. Telling a good story, and telling it well, is what sells novels. If you can't do this with one novel, you can't do it with ten. The only benefit I can see from even trying this is that perhaps writign so much will teach you something about writing. Maybe by the end of the year you'll write well anough to sell a novel.
The ten pseudonyms doesn't make sense. That's making it ten times harder to sell anything, in my opinion.
The problem I see with all this isn't the speed of writing. There have been many writers who produced more than ten novels per year on a regular basis. The problem is with "seeing which one will stick." Odds are none of them will stick, or they will all stick. I mean, either you're good enough to write a publishable novel or you aren't.
It isn't like the lottery where one number wins and the rest lose. If you write lousy novels, if you're a lousy writer, then you can write a hundred novels in a year and they'll all be lousy novels. It's easy to say no one can define what a good novel is, but it simply isn't true. There are novels we like, novels we hate, etc., but there are still standards that agents and editors expect, and pretty much all published novels fall within these standards. Ten bad novels stand no more chance of selling than one bad novel, and writing ten novels in a year will certainly up the odds of all ten being bad.
Ideas and plots do not sell novels. Telling a good story, and telling it well, is what sells novels. If you can't do this with one novel, you can't do it with ten. The only benefit I can see from even trying this is that perhaps writign so much will teach you something about writing. Maybe by the end of the year you'll write well anough to sell a novel.
The ten pseudonyms doesn't make sense. That's making it ten times harder to sell anything, in my opinion.
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