[corrral]

> (but they wrote like, six books in a year. You need to churn them out quick to make that much money, usually in series of books, not one-offs).

It helps that romance novels tend to be way on the short side. Self-published can be even shorter than the traditionally published stuff—a lot of those authors seem to get away with charging $4+ for maybe 70 pages, for each entry in their tens-of-books-long series. Much clearer path to some reasonable return than writing 350+ page thrillers or big ol' fantasy doorstops.

[cableshaft]

Well, my wife's first book is 90k words, so, right around the size of those thrillers (it almost was going to be 120k+ words, but it started getting too tight to the time she had booked for an editor for her liking).

But you're still not wrong, in general (although 70 pages might be a bit on the low side, on average). At least her next project is going to be a novella for an anthology at around 30k words. But her next novel will probably be similar to her first. She's going to try to release 3-4 her first year, and a couple novellas, while working a full time job. Of course because of that she's not doing too much besides work, write, market, stress, and sleep right now.

[corrral]

Right—sorry, I guess I should have mentioned that of course there are larger entries in that genre. It's more that what's considered a salable, stand-alone work has a distribution that skews far lower than in a lot of other genres, which you can see by looking at the shelves in used book stores (and self-publishing seems to have pushed that range even lower). Didn't intend it as a judgement of the genre, to be clear, and I hope it didn't come across that way, just an observation—in fact, as noted, I think that's part of why it's practically the only genre someone can enter with a hope of maybe making some real money, these days, beyond the lottery-odds of the other genres. Even sci-fi and fantasy, which are doing much better than lit-fic and others, aren't nearly as favorable to new authors who want to make anything resembling a living at it.