[eBooks] How prolific is too prolific?

I've had an eReader for a few months now and I love it. I can't believe I resisted so long.

I do question though, what is ePublishing doing to the art of writing?

I've just seen a post on the facebook from an author* whose work I've seen praised enthusiastically. She posted the cover art from her fifteen ePublished books and remarked that it is hard to believe it is only eight months since she published her first book.

I know eBook authors don't earn a lot per book (or per page read via subscription services) so there's incentive to publish more work (and therefore a trend towards series that go on and on and on and on) but fifteen books in eight months seems excessive.

Is it the case that writers have always been capable of producing publication-quality work at that rate but have previously been held back by the mechanics of getting a "dead tree" book published, or have we as readers dropped our expectations that much?

*I'm not naming the author as I've never read her work and I don't intend this post as criticism of it.

I think you are conflating two different issues. The format, ie eBook or paper book; Standard publishing vs self publishing and vanity publishing. While it is true that the ease of 'manufacturing' eBooks has made self/vanity publishing much easier, there are many eBooks out there that are just different editions of regularly published books that also have hardcover and paperback editions.

There have always been aspiring authors who churned out book after book, but could not get a publisher to accept them, and couldn't afford to print and advertise their books themselves. The difference now is that these people can get their books outthere now. Whether the books are 'publication-quality' will have to be a matter of opinion.

I personally read a lot of eBooks through my library. But they have well known publishers. I have also read a few e-only books that were self published, and am happy to pay (if only through my library fees) the big publishing companies to preselect a choice of books they think have a chance of being commercially interesting. They still publish many more books, even in the genres that interest me than I can keep up with.

Two books a month sounds like pretty good going, but I don’t think it’s that unusual for people who make their living writing “formula fiction” (nurse-doctor romances, that kind of thing) for paper publication, except that they usually write under several different names.

Even serious novelists have been known to get a book down on paper in two or three weeks of frenzied activity — Sir Walter Scott in later life was notorious for being able to dictate his novels faster than most people could read them, for instance — but they generally restrain themselves from publishing more than one a year, spending the time in between “doing research”, “gathering experience”, binging on alcohol and drugs, or pursuing their day-jobs.

There’s a natural human tendency to see a threat in anything important that changes in the world around us, especially as we get older, and journalists live by feeding those fears. But somehow, we seem to survive all the things that have been predicted to destroy intellectual standards (movable type, teaching the working-classes to read and write, railways, television, academic publications in the vernacular, Harry Potter, allowing women to take degrees...). It’s the ones that are going to kill us all and destroy the planet we need to watch out for.

Just to add another factor to everything said here:

Serialization

Since series took over the TV/entertainment market at the beginning of the decade, the idea has spread out to other areas, particularly certain types or genre fiction, and particularly sales channels where reader interaction is monetized at a granular level - say, Kindle Unlimited.

So we're getting a lot of this, indeed. Fantasy novels serialized into, erm, "sagas". Romance novels with more installments than Ian Hamilton's James Bond series. Etc.

It certainly seems to work on an entertainment level.

>4 Kamen_Nedev: Since series took over the TV/entertainment market at the beginning of the decade,

Um, more like the beginning of the last century. Series have been around for a long time. The concept of breaking a book up into "episodes" like a TV show is a more recent ... trend. However, they've been serialized before, as many dime store novels were just chapters, brought to a whole in other places.

Some people like it, others don't care for it.

>1 anxovert: A lot of that depends on the writer. Kevin J Anderson has been known to put out six to seven books a year. Others put out one book every couple of years. (Looking at George R R Martin here.)

Then there's the question of how much do these writers have written before they start putting things out for people to buy? Maybe they had 10 trunk novels, all rejected by the Big 5, and they're just prepping them and putting them out as fast as they can edit/typeset/upload the file.

Also as part of the formula, how many have other jobs and responsibilities that take time away from just sitting and staring at the screen all day? I know a few Stay at Home moms who write two chapters a day while the kids nap. There's a lot to what could or could not be pushing the multiple books from epublishing. And yes, the process from the Big 5 does move slowly.

>1 anxovert:, Could be this particular instance is a case where she had a bunch of novels in a drawer, discovered this self-publishing route, and hauled them all out to edit/publish one after the other.

>5 gilroy:, George Martin .... every couple of years? ..... haaaaaaaaaaa ..... stop ..... can't catch my breath ...... whew, okay. Well, if you count the ones he edits or contributes a little something to, then maybe. But Dance with Dragons was 2011. Ah, and now I see you captured my trunk novels theory already.

>6 Cecrow: I was being generous with Mr. Martin.