It's hard to imagine a single author churning out a full-length novel every nine weeks, but that's exactly what writer Jennifer Lepp told the Verge she does constantly. To keep up with demand and make a decent living, indie novelists are cranking out books more quickly than ever before. Lepp, whose pen name is Leanne Leeds, told the pub that she's even started using an artificial intelligence program to assist with her writing, and that it's made her faster. Now, she can fine tune sections of copy or find inspiration for a passage instead of relying on a precise spreadsheet with daily word counts goals in order to meet her impossible deadlines. "It's just words," Lepp told the Verge.

On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule. The color-coded, 11-column spreadsheet she keeps open on a second monitor as she writes told her just how far behind: she had three days to write 9,278 words if she was to get the book edited, formatted, promoted, uploaded to Amazon's Kindle platform, and in the hands of eager readers who expected a new novel every nine weeks. Lepp became an author six years ago, after deciding she could no longer stomach having to spout "corporate doublespeak" to employees as companies downsized. She had spent the prior two decades working in management at a series of web hosting companies, where she developed disciplined project management skills that have translated surprisingly well to writing fiction for Amazon's Kindle platform. Like many independent authors, she found in Amazon's self-service publishing arm, Kindle Direct Publishing, an unexpected avenue into a literary career she had once dreamed of and abandoned.