I’ve been reading more and more stories lately lauding prolific writers as though that is the sole measure of how good their books are. For example, a self-published writer just made headlines for publishing 25 books in the last 30 months. Another author, who is only 40 yet has nearly 30 books to her name, was just given a mind blowing sum for two books.

My concern is that is this kind of publicity for writers who used to be considered phenoms is that they are setting unrealistic expectations for the rest of us. Writing books is hard work. It takes time. And there are a million reasons why some writers are faster than others:

• Do they write full time? (Obviously full time writers would write faster.)
• What is the word count expectation for their genre? (YA can be as few as 50K, where as fantasy is usually over 100K)