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Why Dragonlance's Margaret Weis Left TSR: A Slaying the Dragon Excerpt
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<blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 8703433" data-attributes="member: 28003"><p>Fiction authors are considered above average in speed if they produce one 100,000-word book a year, year after year. A really fast pace is two books in one year. That pace tends to be unsustainable for more than a few years. Sanderson is the exception as a single author, not the rule, and he is successful enough that he has a team to support him doing the day to day business stuff that authors normally have to cover themselves. For the two original Dragonlance trilogies, Margaret and Tracy had one book in 84, two in 85, with the three coming in 86. (Six books in three years breaks down to two books a year.) But there are two of them, and even then, three books in one year is not common, even for a team.</p><p></p><p>I scheduled fiction as part of TSR's Book Department for several years and have done the same for many other publishers. I've written several novels myself. The standard schedule for a novel at TSR circa 1990 was 6 to 9 months for creation, then time for editing, revisions, and production. Around a year from contract to print on the quick plan, and that was fast for the industry. The shortest deadlines for first drafts around that time might be three to four months, but those deadlines tended to lead to heavy revisions and delays at that stage, so the schedules were slowed to give the writers more time. (To be more specific: I signed the contract for the Realms novel Prince of Lies in March 1992, with the first draft due on November 1. A couple additional months were scheduled for revisions as part of the contract. Target publication date was July 1993. This was a fairly typical schedule.)</p><p></p><p>Yes, there were people who could write faster, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. TSR started creating and scheduling multi-author trilogies and series because they wanted to release a new book in a line every four to six months (four for the really successful series, six for the smaller series) and individual authors could not keep up that pace.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="JLowder, post: 8703433, member: 28003"] Fiction authors are considered above average in speed if they produce one 100,000-word book a year, year after year. A really fast pace is two books in one year. That pace tends to be unsustainable for more than a few years. Sanderson is the exception as a single author, not the rule, and he is successful enough that he has a team to support him doing the day to day business stuff that authors normally have to cover themselves. For the two original Dragonlance trilogies, Margaret and Tracy had one book in 84, two in 85, with the three coming in 86. (Six books in three years breaks down to two books a year.) But there are two of them, and even then, three books in one year is not common, even for a team. I scheduled fiction as part of TSR's Book Department for several years and have done the same for many other publishers. I've written several novels myself. The standard schedule for a novel at TSR circa 1990 was 6 to 9 months for creation, then time for editing, revisions, and production. Around a year from contract to print on the quick plan, and that was fast for the industry. The shortest deadlines for first drafts around that time might be three to four months, but those deadlines tended to lead to heavy revisions and delays at that stage, so the schedules were slowed to give the writers more time. (To be more specific: I signed the contract for the Realms novel Prince of Lies in March 1992, with the first draft due on November 1. A couple additional months were scheduled for revisions as part of the contract. Target publication date was July 1993. This was a fairly typical schedule.) Yes, there were people who could write faster, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. TSR started creating and scheduling multi-author trilogies and series because they wanted to release a new book in a line every four to six months (four for the really successful series, six for the smaller series) and individual authors could not keep up that pace. [/QUOTE]
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