An Hour a Day = Three Books a Year? Some thoughts on Productivity

Please welcome guest blogger Kara Lennox

One of the questions I get asked most often is, “How long does it take you to write a book?” or “How many books do you write in a year?” Although the answer is hard to pin down, because every book is different, on average it takes me about three months to write a longish series romance novel, and I end up publishing around three per year.

That sounds like a lot, and people imagine that I am chained to my computer, slaving twelve hours a day. But when you start doing the math, a different picture emerges.

If you write just one page a day, faithfully, you’ll have at least the rough draft of a novel by the end of a year. One page, or roughly 250 words. So all I would have to write is three pages per day to do three books per year. I can knock out three rough-draft pages in less than an hour. I love it that people think I work really, really hard to achieve whatever measure of success I have, but ...

An hour a day.

Okay, that’s not the whole story. A completed, polished novel requires more than just knocking out pages. You have to come up with an idea, brainstorm, do character sketches, work out the plot, research locations and occupations, write, re-write, re-write again, get feedback, submit, wait, get feedback, re-write again … well, you get the picture. It’s not exactly easy, and I do work hard.

Yet, the hardest thing for most writers, me included, is the part that should be easy: Butt in chair, hands on keyboard, writing.

In The X-tremely Productive Writer class, we’ll talk about all those things, internal and external, that get in the way of those pages stacking up. And we’ll talk about how to maximize the time you actually spend writing. Whether it’s time management, procrastination or insecurity that keeps you from starting, continuing, finishing that book, by the end of this class you should have an arsenal of strategies to employ so that you, too, can be X-tremely productive.

(I’m still waiting for someone to option the TV writes. Sounds like a reality show—X-treme Writing. Maybe I could write a book while skydiving.)

The X-tremely Productive Writer, presented by Kara Lennox, runs from July 5, 2011 through August 1, 2011


Kara Lennox (a.k.a. Karen Leabo) has written more than 50 contemporary romance novels for Harlequin/Silhouette and Bantam Loveswept. Since her first novel was released in 1989, her books frequently appear on romance bestseller lists and have finaled in several romance industry contests including the National Readers' Choice Awards, the Holt Medallion competition, and the RITA. Her Harlequin American Romance PLAIN JANE'S PLAN won a Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice award.

Kara is a frequent speaker on a variety of topics at writers' conferences around the country. She also teaches many of her workshops as online classes. Currently she is working on a romantic suspense trilogy, "Project Justice," for Harlequin Superromance, to be published in 2011.

On a good day, Kara writes ten pages before lunch. Visit her online at her blog: http://karalennox.wordpress.com.