You're going to end up doing the work now, or later, or maybe never

When you're an unpublished writer, the incentives involved in writing a novel on spec (i.e. writing it and then trying to sell it) are simple. You write the best novel you can, you work on it as much as you can, and then you send it out to agents and subsequently to publishers, and it gets rejected. You repeat this ad nauseum until something sells.

But w…