Being an author isn’t just about writing anymore. Authors — both independently and traditionally published — have to wear a lot of hats: writer, marketer, administrator, content creator, personnel manager, and operations manager, among others. With so many roles to juggle, how do they balance the time it takes to actually write books with the business of reaching readers? What do writers do on a daily and weekly basis?
We surveyed more than 500 authors in the BookBub audience to ask about how they actually spend their time — see what they had to say.
What are authors spending time on?
To start, we asked authors roughly how much time they spend on writing, marketing, and administrative or operational tasks in a given week.
Most authors typically spend somewhere between six and 30 hours per week writing, with just over 10% spending less time than that and just under 20% spending more. Despite the variance in the number of hours reported here, writing was far and away the area that most authors spend the most time — over 50% of authors reported spending fewer than five hours a week each on marketing, administrative or operational work, and other tasks, and just 15% of authors said the same about writing.
Of course, there are many factors that can shift these buckets. We asked survey respondents about a number of these: whether they work full-time outside of their writing careers and whether they’ve hired help for their author business, as well as how many books they’ve published and what their monthly gross revenue typically looks like. For all of these, the general trend of the data remained the same: Writing takes up the most time, with marketing coming in a distant second, and administrative work third.
Many authors noted that their careers are cyclical — what they spend time on can shift dramatically based on where they are in a release cycle or what’s happening in their lives outside of writing.
At this point in my life, every week is different. It’s hard to answer for a typical week because some weeks I get in two hours of writing total; others I spend 14 to 20. Consistency is tricky when I’m caring for children and their schedules change. And switching from querying and attempting traditional publishing, to deciding to self-publish various projects, impacts where and what I’m spending time on as well.
There is an ebb and flow to the workload, depending on whether a book is launching or whether it’s time for my monthly newsletter, or it’s the end of the month so I’m tracking royalties and other financial information.
As reflected in the data, a few authors noted that time spent writing is what they love, and what provides sources of future revenue — but that finding the balance between writing and everything else they need to do for their business can be a challenge.
Most of my time is spent writing and editing. I then split my non-writing time between posting to websites like Patreon, answering emails, making graphics in Canva, and sending out newsletters.
I am working to shift time from administrative and marketing to-dos to writing time, but it’s a difficult balance to find. I need the income from current marketing and admin, but I need those new books for future income. And, honestly, I started this for the storytelling, not the business owner aspect.
What marketing tasks are authors completing regularly?
Though writing is the core of being an author — and the bulk of where most authors’ time goes — most still acknowledge the importance of marketing for developing their business. When it comes to the time authors spend marketing, there were a few notable differences to call out between groups:
- Authors who work full-time outside of their author businesses tend to spend less time on marketing. 72% of these authors reported spending five or fewer hours per week on marketing. On the flip side, 62% of full-time authors reported spending six or more hours on marketing.
- Higher-earning authors typically spend more time on marketing. More than 70% of authors who gross $10k or more in monthly revenue from their author business spend six or more hours per week on marketing (and 34% spend more than 10 hours). Of authors earning less than $10k, only about 40% spend that much time on marketing.
- Authors who have outsourced some of their work are more likely to spend some time on marketing. Those who haven’t outsourced were more likely to report spending fewer than five hours a week on marketing.
But what are authors actually doing with the time they allocate to marketing?
Fewer than 20% of authors reported spending time weekly on ARC and review outreach, live or virtual events, or PR and media outreach. However, it’s important to note that all of these are activities that may be more concentrated in certain points of an author’s publishing cycle, such as during a release period, so it’s not necessarily representative of how valuable authors believe those activities are.
A few commenters also mentioned that tasks like managing paid promotions are things they do regularly, but on a roughly monthly cadence rather than weekly.
Unsurprisingly, authors who spend more time marketing overall are more likely to engage in all of the marketing tasks we asked about. However, certain tasks grew more significantly in popularity than others for authors who spend more than six hours a week marketing: content creation, email marketing, and social media management were all reported 20 percentage points higher by the group that spends more time on marketing.
Let’s take a look at how marketing tasks shift based on the factors we explored earlier.
Gross revenue
Authors grossing $10k or more per month were twice as likely to report conducting marketing analyses weekly as those grossing less, and nearly twice as likely to report running display ads. (One factor to consider here is that we asked about gross revenue, which does not take marketing expenditures into account: Although display ads may be a meaningful lever for many authors in driving revenue, the amount authors spend on those ads is not captured here.)
Higher-grossing authors were also more likely to report spending time managing paid promotions and email marketing.
Books published
The percentage of authors who reported spending time on display advertising, content creation, managing paid promotions, social media marketing, cross-promotion, and marketing analysis all increased alongside the number of books published. Notably, authors with 50 or more books were far more likely than other cohorts to run display ads, with almost 60% of respondents reporting that it’s a task they do regularly.
One task whose prevalence was relatively equal across cohorts was participating in virtual or live events — although not something that most authors do regularly, those who do are not exclusively those with deep backlists.
One author noted that the way their time is divvied up has shifted as they’ve published more books:
Earlier in my career, I spent more hours writing and less on admin and marketing, but now that my brand is more established, I do less writing and require more admin/marketing time (I’ve published 55 books). This is partly because I don’t need to publish as frequently as before, and also so I have more family time.
Outsourcing work
More authors who have hired help reported spending time on each of the marketing tasks we asked about. However, the differences were particularly notable in a few categories. Among authors who have outsourced work, email marketing, managing paid promotions, display advertising, and marketing analysis were all tasks these authors reported taking on at rates 10 percentage points or higher than their solo counterparts.
Even after hiring someone to assist with their business, most authors do still spend some of their own time on promoting their books. This is particularly notable because, of those authors who haven’t yet hired someone for their business but indicated they may do so in the future, 90% reported that they would want someone to help them with marketing — more than any other category.
The business side of being an author
For most authors in our survey, writing makes up the bulk of the time they spend on their business, with marketing being a distant second. But beyond writing and promoting their books, there are still a few additional tasks authors take on as part of their publishing careers. 65% of respondents reported spending between one and five hours per week on administrative or operational tasks.
More than half of authors reported spending time on project management, accounting, and business correspondence each week.
One task of note was website and tech management. Nearly half of all authors reported spending time on this every week, and its prevalence was consistent across a number of factors, such as outsourcing work or working full-time as an author vs. elsewhere. Regardless of these factors, a significant portion of authors are spending time on technology management on a regular basis.
How else are authors spending their time?
While we attempted to be as thorough as possible in this survey, authors’ careers vary widely — and so do the things they spend their time on! Two-thirds of the authors in our survey told us they spend at least some of their time on areas that we didn’t capture in our questions:
- Learning and development. Authors spend time being coached by mentors or sharing knowledge with other authors, attending craft- and industry-focused conferences and workshops, and reading blogs and articles or listening to podcasts focused on author and writing development.
- Community building. Many authors spoke about spending time building relationships: networking with other authors, participating in or managing online reader groups, responding to readers’ messages, and developing relationships with local businesses (like bookstores).
- Research. Dozens of authors specifically called out research as a separate area of work they do — whether it’s research for their upcoming books, for comp authors to use in marketing, for industry and genre trends, or for vendors or new technology.
- Team management. For those authors who have hired someone to help with their business, they need to spend time managing that help — whether it’s assistants, cover designers, narrators, translators, or anyone else who supports them.
- Filling the creative well. Reading, daydreaming, brainstorming, ideating, and consuming stories in all their forms help authors keep the creative juices flowing!
And despite the challenges that come with being an author, if you love it, it’s worth it:
Happy! I am absolutely happy and grateful to be able to be doing this!
Being able to write full-time is a dream come true. It’s a lot of work, but so fulfilling. When a reader shares how much they love a book, it makes all the late nights worth it!
We hope this survey inspired you to think about how you balance your own business vs. creative work, and what areas to prioritize to be successful. As you can see, there’s no such thing as a “normal” writing life — struggles with time and balance are common! What matters most is finding a rhythm that works for you. Try tracking how you actually spend your time for a week and sketch out an ideal day based on what inspired you here. What’s one small change you can make to get closer to your ideal writing day?
Who took the survey?
566 authors responded to our survey.
The vast majority self-publish their books:
- 63% are self-published
- 9% are traditionally published
- 28% are hybrid published (have both traditionally and self-published books)
Most authors have been publishing since before 2020:
- 5% published their first book before 2000
- 12% published their first book between 2000 and 2010
- 25% published their first book between 2010 and 2015
- 26% published their first book between 2015 and 2020
- 26% published their first book between 2020 and 2024
- 6% published their first book within the last year
The majority of these authors write in genre fiction (and many write in multiple genres):
- 52% write Romance or Rom-Com
- 33% write Fantasy
- 22% write Mysteries
- 20% write Thrillers or Crime Fiction
- 19% write Historical Fiction
- 19% write Science Fiction
- 17% write Women’s Fiction
- 13% write Nonfiction
- 12% write Teen & Young Adult
- 9% write Literary Fiction
- 8% write Horror
- 8% write Middle Grade or Children’s
- 7% write Christian Fiction
- 5% write Other
- 4% write Religion and Spirituality
Most authors reported spending at least some time on work outside of their author careers:
- 35% identified as full-time authors
- 17% reported spending 1–10 hours per week on work unrelated to their author business
- 15% reported spending 11–20 hours per week on work unrelated to their author business
- 7% reported spending 21–30 hours per week on work unrelated to their author business
- 26% reported spending more than 30 hours per week on work unrelated to their author business
Authors were split almost exactly evenly on whether they had outsourced work for their author business:
- 50.5% reported that they have hired someone to help with their business
- 49.5% reported that they have not hired someone to help with their business
Our question about gross monthly revenue was optional, and some authors chose not to respond. For those who did, the majority reported earning $1,000 or less in gross revenue per month:
- 27% reported less than $100 per month
- 29% reported between $101 and $1,000 per month
- 16% reported between $1,001 and $5,000 per month
- 9% reported between $5,001 and $10,000 per month
- 5% reported between $10,001 and $20,000 per month
- 7% reported over $20,001 per month
