The Treadmill

Publishing Fast, and What It Costs the Person Doing It

Rapid release became orthodoxy on a handful of authors at one moment. It carries a price the orthodoxy won't discuss.

The Treadmill is a book in the Indie Author Guide Line: short, source-checked guides for independent authors who have finished writing and now have to be found. Rapid release has been repeated for years as though it were a property of the machine rather than a strategy with a price. This book prices it.

This is not an argument for writing slowly. It is an argument that speed is a purchase, and you're entitled to see the price before agreeing to it.

What's inside:

• What rapid-release cadence does to visibility, and how long that effect actually lasts
• Which categories reward speed, and which are indifferent to it
• What rapid release costs in editing and cover budget
• What it costs in the quality of the finished book
• The cost to the author personally — the part the orthodoxy is least willing to discuss
• How to decide, honestly, whether the price of speed is one you want to pay

This is not an anti-speed argument. What it will do is show you the full, real cost of a rapid-release schedule, so the choice to run it — or not — is actually yours.

From the Indie Author Guide Line, from Novel Concepts Publishing.