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Elise (they/them)🇦🇺

@eliseswritings.bsky.social

6.8K followers 1.3K following 9.9K posts

I'm an Epic Fantasy author & Aussie on Wurundjeri country. Living my best ADHD, autistic, chronically ill, enby, aro-ace life! (Blog & Discords in 📌 post 🧵) 📚's Direct: https://payhip.com/EliseCarlsonFantasyAuthor All🔗's: https://elisecarlson.com/

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Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · Aug 17

There's no such thing as #1 Pinned Post🧵 to rule them all, but I shall post it nonetheless. It'll be gay, neurodiverse & beyond the binary.

For those who wander but are not lost & ponder "what if"?

It'll contain my books of the above, Final Fantasy +Narnia inspired, &invite All Writers to Discord👇

Left: Walking the Knife's Edges cover. Rarkin stands in foreground, wearing leather jacket and jeans, holding a stun gun raised to shoot to the left.

Miona stands on the right, smiling and with boxing gloved fists raised, ready to fight.

They both stand on a grassy slope, a patchwork of Farm Zone paddocks, fields and tree lined streams behind them, to a cloud covered horizon through which the yellow glow of the sun shines.

Text below cover: Make or break. Friends or fail. Monster containment.

Right: Ruarnon Trilogy Graphic with map background and a box of key points for each book.

Book 1, Manipulator's War: red glyph archway frames a smoky night sky, with fire arrows raining down on battlements on which a few torches burn. Ruarnon leans on a spear (left foreground), wearing fitted bronze armour and holding a bronze helmet.

Book 1 Text: Mystery, aro-arces, autism & ADHD, friendship.

Book 2, Secrets of the Sorcery War: blue glyph arch frames two extremely tall cliffs, through which a sailing ship sails across bright blue waters into sunlight.

Book 2 Text: monsters, forgotten weapons, adventure.

Book 3, War in Sorcery's Shadow: purple glyph arch frames a black cloudy sky, down from which a bolt of lightening strikes a shield around brown, crystaline towers of a castle. Castle sits atop barren plains of dead trees, a skull lying in foreground.

Book 3 text: resistance, secret organisations, save a mind & the world.

Text below: Direct from author & non-Amazon stores.

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Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 19m

Honestly, that's a big red flag for quality for me. Ok, they write fast & clean & edit fast. But plotting 6 novels in one year? Developing actual individual characters for 6 novels -yes even if they're a series- in one year? I wouldn't believe they were worth reading until reading one convinced me.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 26m

Sums it up.

Adam Mallinger @bitterscriptreader.bsky.social · 3h

Every A.I. CEO is like “We invented a robot that can fuck your wife so you have more free time to mow the lawn!”

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 28m

Having drafts well ahead of what you're publishing is also a lot less stressful.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 32m

Its good to know your realistic limits and that they include balance.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 33m

Note: short stories, novellas (20-40k words) and children's fiction under 50k may occur alongside novels, or more frequently for authors who don't publish YA-Adult novels.

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Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 37m

At that speed I can see even your readers and followers crying "Stop! Too much, too fast! Stop!"

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 40m

So Far In This Thread;
Most authors who publish 3+ novels one year published zero novels in the 1-3 years before that.
One 80k word novel a year seems the average.
It seems only human romance authors publish 4 or more books multiple years in a row. 📚💙

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1d

Authors, in the interest of helping readers spot gen ai 'authored' books, how many novels do you publish a year?

I publish one 80-100k+ word (epic fantasy) novel, and I can only do that because I drafted 8 novels before I started publishing any. 📚💙

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Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 52m

Your co-author has one crazy schedule!

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Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 53m

I suspected 😀

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 54m

That seems a lot, and yet, I suspect being broken up into 40k intervals would be easier cognitively than say 3 80k novels.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 57m

6 a year but you're about do run out? I'm surprised to be in the minority in rationing myself to publishing one a year, so I don't run out. Though I get that if you're chasing rankings, multiple a year does that much better.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 59m

Note that I said 'publish' not 'write' 😉. I wrote 8 novels before publishing any, and have been doing the final edits and releasing one a year. It seems most people on this thread who publish maybe one, and mostly more than that a year wrote them in prior years, with the only exception being romance

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

Seems to be a goal for a few of us.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

There's definitely a frequency of publishing at which I lose interest in reading the books, even if a human did write them.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

Ah, it came across very differently. That wasn't my take away at all.
I'm ND too and I get that context in a short space is a challenge. My advice here is to avoid absolute langue, period. If you said, 'easier,' your sentence would have meant something completely different & it would have been fine.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

That's reasonable, and seems to be the average I'm seeing (if we don't go into decimals).

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Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

Between AuDHD, chronic illness and refusing to force myself to write, my 'work ethic' is all over the shop. I do set annual publishing as a goal, but that's with a fully drafted and partially edited backlog of novels.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

Interesting to note you're full time and 2-3. I have had higher from full time authors, though I suspect 5 and over is exclusively romance authors.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

I find both tend to get in the way. Having many wips fully drafted before publishing any is how I manage one 80k+ novel a year.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

Holy hell. I work part time, no kids, a chronic illness and AuDHD, and I won't push myself beyond 100k, one book a year, even with 4 unpublished, fully drafted novels in reserve.

But yep, that last makes a big difference.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

The main exception I'm seeing to no more than 3 books a year or romance indie authors, is 1-20 years of not publishing, prior to publishing 3-5 books in one year. So the prolific human authors of Bsky don't seem to publish prolifically every year.

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Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

Romance is definitely in its own category for this. I once read a book by a fantasy author who was maybe 50, and had published 50 books. The book had no plot, no tension, no character development and was mostly characters walking around and talking for no particular reason. Worst novel I ever read.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

That's very fast writing and I'm glad you're taking the time to edit the novels.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 1h

They do, and I suspect most of them are on Facebook, not Bsky, which complicates answering this question here. But in the case of your friend and a few others who replied the same, 4-5 novels one year and zero for 1-3 years prior to that still signals a human author.

Elise (they/them)🇦🇺 @eliseswritings.bsky.social · 2h

I do the former, but I've staggered releases to one a year. I have to admit, multiple for one year and none for the next couple of years didn't occur to me, though you're not the only one who's said they do that.