Do you know what the #1 thing is that trips authors up when they’re writing?
I’m talking even authors with a great voice.
Authors with an incredible premise for their book.
Authors with all the talent in the world.
It’s TIME.
And specifically it’s time management.
I can’t tell you how often I see writers coming down to the wire of a deadline and not being able to accomplish all they wanted to with their story because time caught up with them. Or they had to extend the deadline and then got stressed because it still wasn’t enough time. (For all of my clients who are reading this and going "is this about ME?" it's not! I know how you all think.)
Obviously, none of us have as much time as we would like, with so many responsibilities and goals and desires pulling us in different directions. (I promise, this will not turn into a “just wake up early and write!” kind of email. First of all, I would never tell you anyone to wake up at 5 a.m.—5 a.m. does not EXIST to me—and I also get that for many people, there is literally not enough time in your day to stretch any further.)
As a romance writer, especially if you’ve already written at least a book or more, it feels like there’s a very loud ticking clock to release the next book and the next book and the next, and there’s not a lot of time to breathe in between. I could go on and on about how this is a function of capitalism, and of an oversaturated publishing market that requires romance writers to produce at a rate that will eventually burn most people out if you don’t put your foot down—but you have probably heard this from me before.
I cannot magic you more time to write, but I can offer you some ideas to help you give yourself enough time to write a great book:
Be realistic
There are a lot of timelines pressing on you as you write a draft: your own internal deadline, the deadline to get it to your editor (the latter two often end up being one and the same), scheduling betas/ARC readers/proofreader/cover artist/etc. Lots of people are counting on you to make those deadlines, so you need to be so for real about how long this is actually going to take you.
Consider the complexity of the story you’ve set out to write, what else you’ve got going on in that time (is there a holiday? is it a busy time at work? are your kids doing multiple extracurriculars that you have to ferry them to and from?), and how much you can write in a day/week/month.
So, if you’ve never written a book in less than four months, but you haven’t started yet and you want to release in September? Let’s not do that to yourself or to everyone else involved in the production of the book. You might not get it out in the insanely short timeline publishing experts “say” you should get it out in, but you have to give yourself the liberty to take a little longer and let your creativity have room to breathe and not feel so stressed out. Do NOT burn yourself out for the sake of a completely arbitrary deadline.
Budget your time
When I was a TA in grad school, I often left my grading until the last minute, which meant I was marking a stack of undergrad English essays in a two-day frenzy. After too many late nights of essays beginning with “Since the dawn of time…”, I finally decided I would divide up the essays so I had X number to grade per day over the week or so that I had before I had to hand them back. Total common sense, and yet it took me years to figure it out.
Do the same with your writing. How many words can you write in a session? How many words do you expect the book to be? When do you want to be done by? From there, work out how many days you need to finish the book.
You definitely do not have to write every day without fail (I actually think it’s better for most writers to not write every single day), but again be realistic about how many days you can write per week and for how long per day. Build in extra time for the days when things come up and you can’t write at all or as much as you’d like, or in case the book gets longer than you anticipated.
Do not fall victim to the pressures of publishing
One of the reasons why there’s a push to get books released multiple times a year is because the market is so saturated that readers will forget about you if you’re not feeding them books regularly. And apparently the Amazon algorithm responds better and pushes you out more when you’re publishing at regular intervals, but it’s not at a pace that most writers can easily maintain. If it’s every four months, that’s three books a year, which maybe you can do once or twice (and that’s not possible for most people), but imagine doing that nonstop, forever. You’d get bored or frustrated or burnt out trying to keep that consistency.
I’m a fan of consistency, but consistency that actually works for you. If your goal is to be a best-selling author or to write full-time, yes, you have to put out a lot of books quickly to start getting momentum—and then you can let off the gas once you’ve got enough of a backlist and a fanbase that you can make money regularly.
But if your goal is simply to write your books, put them out into the world, and hopefully make some money off of them as a part-time gig, there is much less stress on you to release books at an unsustainable clip—a book or two a year is going to be enough for you.
And if you don’t want your readers to forget about you, make sure you give them lots of incentive to sign up for your newsletter (have a really good lead magnet) and to follow you on social media so they know what’s going on with you and can get hyped for your next book.
Don't let time steal away just how good your book can be!
This was originally published in my newsletter. If you want more on what’s new and important in romance writing, marketing, and the romance industry at large, join my newsletter and get my Romance Resource Roundup, a collection of the BEST romance books/websites/podcasts you should be consuming as a romance writer.
