An Open Letter to a 'Wannabe' Part Two

More of L's questions

How many hours does it really take to write a book?

How long is a piece of string?
I have written books in a month or less. I have struggled with books that take months and months and months . . . I am contracted to write a minimum of 3 books a year so I tend to take about 3 months or so on each – but that’s me. Some people write faster some write much slower. Some books ‘write themselves’ other books are blood sweat and tears all the way – pulling teeth would be easier. But how many HOURS? - hours and hours and hours – until it’s done and then some more on polishing and editing it before you send it to and editor, then more on revisions when the ed asks for them.

Just try writing 1000 words - 4 pages of 250 words. You need to write 50 times that to get the word length - and that's without any time for making the characters work, the dialogue sparkle, the plot make sense. . .

To give me an idea of length, how many pages on Word is an average Harlequin book?

A Harlequin romance is 50,000 words - in Word, if you set up a page with 25 lines, about ten words to a line – 250 words a page - that’s 200 pages. But counting the pages is the easy part. Some people find filling them with words easy too – it’s filling them with words that an editor wants to read, that excite the readers, make them care about the characters and so make it worth their while parting with good money to buy it – that’s the tricky bit.



How profitable are they?

The old piece of string answer again. And if this is your main concern, your main reason for wanting to write for Harlequin then you need to be realistic. Writing is not a fast track to making money - even if you were accepted straight away then a book would not be published for a year or more (setting up the printing etc takes that long) then the money only comes in on sales of each book - that can take six months to a year and it all depends on how many you sell and where you sell. The UK market is tiny compared to the American one. Each author gets only 6% of the cover price of each book that sells - not a huge amount!

You can earn money writing for Harlequin – but what amount of money?

Don’t ask me.

I know what I earn – and it’s very nice thank you. It's an imcome that means I don't have to have a day job and it's better than I would have earned if I'd stayed working as a Chartered Librarian (UK) - but that’s after 20 + years of writing, coming up to 50 books, building up a reader base, selling internationally. And Presents is openly acknowledged as the best selling line that Harlequin has. Other writers are more popular – they’ll earn more than me within this line - other authors are in other lines (Romance, Meds, Historicals) some are popular, some less so – some earn ok some don’t.

In the UK, the Society of Authors reckons the average fiction writer’s income at £5000 or less –( $10,000?) a year. But that’s the average. Some earn way more than that, some less some way less. Don’t listen to the stories of big advances, huge incomes, they’re the exception. The JK Rowlings of this world are rare. Very rare.

How difficult is it to be published?
How long is a piece of string?

Some people are accepted with the first thing they write – they are exceptionally lucky. Most people try try and try again. Some never ever make it. Some shouldn’t ever make it – they can’t write but they don’t see it. Some should make it because they are brilliant and original and amazing writers – but they never do. Famous books like Watership Down, Harry Potter 1 were rejected over and over again – others were straight in there with fanfares and trumpets - but how many of them stayed the course?

To have a career in writing, specially in category romances, you need stamina and staying power. You need to keep on writing, keep on being published, keep on pleasing the public, keep on keeping on . . .