I work better under some self-imposed pressure, so usually have a writing schedule to keep me on track. I was stuck on some research for a while, and the school year started up again, so had to put Logan 2 on the back burner for a couple of months.
Once I got the arson investigator interview completed, I took a look at the calendar and did the math in order to have the book off to the editor by late Spring/early Summer. A typical mystery novel is ~70,000 to 90,000 words, so that left me with a 2,000 words a week target…not gonna happen! I revised it to a more realistic 1,000 words during a work week (~700 on the weekend, 300 fit in here and there when I have a chunk of time one or two evenings M-F), with some 3,000 words a week during spring break and early summer.
No matter how good it looks on paper, setting an overly ambitious goal will actually slow you down. My advice:
A self-admitted book addict, Valerie was the kid with the flashlight under her pillow. A life of travel with exposure to many different cultures led to a pervasive interest in people, with degrees & teaching credentials in Cultural Anthropology & English.
I have applied your tips and got awesome results. Thanks a lot.
I want to add one thing for the reader. I recently read an article by James Cruz about content republish.People are saying their site’s organic traffic increases by 300% after using the content republish strategy.The official post is here :- http://roundes.com/organic-traffic-content . Do you have any idea about this?
Anyway,Thanks for the awesome post.
Hi Aron, Yes, I agree that if a writer wants to be a professional author, it makes sense to find ways to maximize their creative output. Write once…publish twice (or more)! Quality, not quantity, is what we’re after. Authors always have to struggle to find time to write, and too much blogging, marketing, etc, can drain the hours away.
I picked up a tip at a writers conference a few years ago about using smaller sections or related themes from your book to write articles for blogs and magazines. Then, when your article is published, your book shows up at the bottom and you’ll pick up some new readers interested in a larger work.
Guest blogging new content is also a great idea. I just started doing this for OC Writers. It’s new, original content, but within a month I can repost it to my own author site and share it with additional readers.
Thanks again for sharing the link – interesting data!