How fast?

The prevailing wisdom for the past year or so has been to  publish as fast as you can , as often as you can. But does this work? Can it be sustained? What's the advantage? Are there disadvantages?

 Of course, the reason I'm asking this now is because after a year or more of intense publishing of books --I just released #13! I find myself without the time to write for the first time in a long time.

I've got one more Merry Men Quartet book to release, but I saved the hardest for last.

This book is the one I wrote with two demanding young children at home and I will be the first to admit that I didn't give it the attention it needed.

All right, I'll be completely honest here--when I read it through after not looking at it for so many years, I hated my heroine. She needs a complete character overhaul. The basic story is all right. The hero is pretty wonderful. But the heroine needs to be completely rewritten, which will, naturally, change most of the book--to at least the intent of it. It will go from be an angst ridden thing to something which I hope will turn out to be more of a comedy (everyone keeps secrets from the other main characters to hopefully humorous affect).

As you can tell, I've got great ideas of how I'm going to rewrite this book, and I'm really eager to get started on it--but my husband and I have just bought a new home. It needs a lot of attention before we can move in and I've got to prepare my current home to be sale-ready (I've got two weeks! Eek!). Which leave me precisely no time to write. I can just barely keep up with the courses I'm teaching and my formatting work.

So what happens to my book? What happens to my attempts at publishing so many books so quickly? Well, life happens. I'm not going to try to kill myself to keep up with a schedule that just isn't possible. In my way, I will do one thing at a time and do the very best job I can at each thing as I do them. The book goes on hold. The house takes precedence just now. And hopefully my realtor is right and once the house is ready, it'll sell quickly. I am working on getting a contractor to manage the renovations at the new place which will free me up to sit in my empty new home and write. I'm rethinking starting my internet until we actually move in, then I'll be forced to write.

But, as I mentioned, I have done my best to publish a lot of books in a short period of time. This is what it looked like for me:

February, 2013 Storm on the HorizonMarch, 2013: An Exotic HeirApril, 2013 In a Beginning, short storySeptember, 2013, Dandy in DisguiseMarch, 2014 Air: Merlin’s ChaliceApril, 2014: Water: Excalibur’s ReturnMay, 2014: Fire: Nimuë’s DestinySeptember, 2014: The Merry MarquisDecember, 2014: Children of Avalon Box SetFebruary, 2015: Under the Mange Tree in Love Least Expected AnthologyFebruary, 2015: Rerelease of Storm on the HorizonMarch, 2015: Bridging the Storm

That’s twelve books published in just two years from February of 2013 to March of 2015. That’s a lot!

And what has this book publishing blitz gotten me? Hopefully, happy readers. But, honestly, my sales haven’t sky rocketed. My name isn’t all that better known that it was two years ago. Yes, I’m earning more money, but only because I have more books for people to buy, not because any one or two books are selling so very well.

Was it worth it? Well, yes. I’ve got lots of books out there, selling. A good number of them I had written earlier or were re-releases which just needed a bit of tweaking before being published. But I’m now at the end of my stock of books. Now, once I’m done with A Rake’s Reward, I’ll be back to writing books from scratch – well, Bridging the Storm was written from scratch, too. But I won’t have any more books in my pocket, so to speak to just pop out there. My publishing schedule will slow down (and not just because I don’t have the time to write). Does this matter?

Personally, I don’t think so because, as I say, my sales haven’t picked up dramatically with the number of books I’ve published. Which leads me to not worrying so much about not having time to write just now. I’ll get my book done because you can’t stop me from writing for very long (I just might go mad, which would not be pretty), but it’s definitely not worth it to kill myself to keep up this push to publish.

What do you think? Have you seen or heard of anyone really hitting it big because of the number of books they’ve published? Or are you trying to do so?