Slow and Steady Wins the Race

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

One cool thing about blogging for over ten years is that a lot of the posts form a sort of unexpected diary.  I was glancing over some older posts and came across this one from 2010.   My son and daughter would have been 13 and 9 when I wrote it.  I spoke of our bike ride on a nearby greenway and how we were biking so erratically (my daughter was still on a little kid bike) that a jogger kept passing us over and over again.  He was going slow and steady and despite our occasional bursts of speed,  kept overtaking us.

I made the observation that this was how my writing life worked.  I didn’t go fast enough to get burned out but I didn’t go slow enough to get overwhelmed with the length of the project.Continue reading

How Many Words Should My Book Be?

Man sitting at a table loaded with books.

by Caleb Kaiser, @ReedsyHQ

Word count is one of those things you don’t think about when you start writing the first page of your novel. It’s only after your book is completed, when you’re shopping around for agents or thinking of self-publishing, that you think, “Is my book the right length for selling?”

At Reedsy, we’ve connected thousands of authors with editors, proofreaders, designers, and marketers, and as a result, have access to a lot of data on books—particularly, book length.

Below we’ve broken down our insights on how long different genres of books should be.Continue reading

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