Love this! It's a story about patience and understanding how many people it takes to get a book out there (and how many other books those people are working on at the same time).
I read an interview with either Warren Murphy or Richard Sapir, the cowriters of the old Remo Williams action novels of the 1960s and 70s, and he noted that one reason they stopped writing the series was that publishing them started to take longer. This was a problem because the series was (to some extent) a satirical take on events of the day. So, for example, Murphy or Sapir would read an article about Nixon preparing to go to China, and then crank out a thriller where their fictional president goes to China and needs saving by Remo Williams. They could write it fast and it would come out just 3 or 4 months after they conceived of it, landing on the rotating wire racks in bus stations all across this great land to coincide with Nixon's real trip. Murphy (or Sapir) never said in the interview why publishing suddenly wanted longer lead times -- only that they did, and that (iirc) this killed some of the series' M.O. and made it less fun to write and read. Similarly, I think of writers like Earl Stanley Gardner, who published 2 or 3 Perry Mason novels each year for 30 years. Anyway, this isn't really a question, unless the question is -- if someone ever had an idea for a series that was very responsive to current events, would publishing be able to get on it and shorten the two-year window to, say, a four-month window? I don't mean for Important Tomes, I mean for zippy mass market paperbacks of 250 pages or so. You know -- bus books.
I'm afraid publishing is much changed from when those kinds of bus books were popular, mainly because publishers are putting out many times more books every year. To "crash" (what we call putting out a book quickly) severely taxes everyone involved and can only be done when absolutely necessary and when it looks like the book will sell many, many copies. Timely books like you're describing don't have a long enough shelf life, so to speak, to make enough money to justify the costs. It can be done with ebooks, especially self published ones, but not commonly for print books.
Love this! It's a story about patience and understanding how many people it takes to get a book out there (and how many other books those people are working on at the same time).
I read an interview with either Warren Murphy or Richard Sapir, the cowriters of the old Remo Williams action novels of the 1960s and 70s, and he noted that one reason they stopped writing the series was that publishing them started to take longer. This was a problem because the series was (to some extent) a satirical take on events of the day. So, for example, Murphy or Sapir would read an article about Nixon preparing to go to China, and then crank out a thriller where their fictional president goes to China and needs saving by Remo Williams. They could write it fast and it would come out just 3 or 4 months after they conceived of it, landing on the rotating wire racks in bus stations all across this great land to coincide with Nixon's real trip. Murphy (or Sapir) never said in the interview why publishing suddenly wanted longer lead times -- only that they did, and that (iirc) this killed some of the series' M.O. and made it less fun to write and read. Similarly, I think of writers like Earl Stanley Gardner, who published 2 or 3 Perry Mason novels each year for 30 years. Anyway, this isn't really a question, unless the question is -- if someone ever had an idea for a series that was very responsive to current events, would publishing be able to get on it and shorten the two-year window to, say, a four-month window? I don't mean for Important Tomes, I mean for zippy mass market paperbacks of 250 pages or so. You know -- bus books.
I'm afraid publishing is much changed from when those kinds of bus books were popular, mainly because publishers are putting out many times more books every year. To "crash" (what we call putting out a book quickly) severely taxes everyone involved and can only be done when absolutely necessary and when it looks like the book will sell many, many copies. Timely books like you're describing don't have a long enough shelf life, so to speak, to make enough money to justify the costs. It can be done with ebooks, especially self published ones, but not commonly for print books.