The title of this blog entry poses an interesting question. One to which, frankly, there is no answer. But don’t just flip away because the response is unknowable. Despite this foregone conclusion, the journey of getting from the question to the answer is an interesting one.

While most novelists never write more than one book (which I’ll get to later), some writers are prolific. Stephen King has written 64 novels (seven under the pen name of Richard Bachman), several of which are more than a thousand pages in length. He has also penned 5 nonfiction books and hundreds of short stories, screenplays and collections. I believe he once wrote four books in one year.

Other authors go another route. When J. K. Rowling sat down to write the first book of her Harry Potter series (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone), it was six years before she finally typed The End. The entire Potter series makes use of more than a million words, including a good number of invented ones, so it’s easy to understand why writing it would take a while.

Even that pales in comparison to Venmurasu, a book written by Indian author Jeyamohan. He uses 2.3-million words to tell the story of a rivalry between two ancient cousins who fought for control in the Kurukshetra war. He wrote the book over the course of six years and it would take an average reader about 560 hours to read it. If you read for eight hours a day, that would be 70 days!

Most authors never write more than one novel. This is partly because the business side of getting a book published is one of the most daunting, disappointing and deflating processes one could ever encounter. Uncountable numbers of really good authors never get their books to see the light of day because of the cutthroat business behind the stories you read. You are more likely to get hit by a meteor in the very same instant that you are struck by lightning and eaten by a shark, than get your book published. If you want the definitive lesson in humility, try to publish a book.

By now, you have come to understand why the question of how many books an author writes in a year can’t be answered. There are just too many variables that prevent arriving a golden number. I can say that some writers believe one book a year is a reasonable goal when making a career of being an author, while others would double it. At the far end of the spectrum, some like the idea of four books annually.

The next variable to consider is that writing a book and publishing it are two very different things. I have written a book in a matter of weeks. I have also written a book that took me years to complete. The amount of research, the development of characters and locations and the adaptation of a narrative style are among the many things that can vary widely from one book to the next in an author’s list of credits. That’s why I won’t even begin to quantify the length of time that writing a novel should take.

The real question, for me, is how many books should I publish in any given year? I am an unfailing fan of Stephen King, but I have to admit that his torrid pace of publication has outstripped my ability to keep up. If King were all I read, yes, I could easily handle it. But the truth is that I like lots of writers and really can’t commit that much of my reading time to a single author. Besides, I have to admit that my favorite books of his are dog-eared from multiple readings. I absolutely love The Stand, but when it takes nearly thirty hours of reading time, the tome pushes other books he has written off my shelf.

In the past eighteen months, I have written five books. I have published three, with the remaining two waiting their turn. That means I have published at an average of two per year. That is a pace I like, and about all I believe I can ask of my wonderful readers.

All of this is to say that, despite the fact that my next two books are already written, it’s going to be a while before you see a new one up for sale. It is also to say that I have begun working on book number eight, which you likely won’t see until sometime around the middle of 2023. Then again, since there are no hard and fast rules, I could change my mind.

What I can say for sure is that the next book I will be publishing in just a few months is a captivating take on one of the world’s most famous crimes that will have you questioning everything you think you already know about it.

I can’t wait!