Working the Numbers

Was just posting on my author page "given my druthers I'd have at least two novels and three novellas out every year" and started to do the math. That's about 250,000 words or for me ~750 hours of the heads down writing/editing stuff. If I take two weeks of vacation, that's 15 hours a week. Definitely a part-time job on top of my full-time one. (And please note that I'm a fast writer. Don't assume this rate holds true for others. Although some writers put me in the dust, too!)

Now, if I add all the additional marketing stuff, including the conferences I should attend, then we are well into 20+ hours a week territory.

If I didn't have a full-time plus type of job, plus extra responsibilities at home, I wouldn't worry so much. But... I worry.

So, how many words have I written so far this year? About 100,000. Not great, but not too shabby either. Most of that was in novellas, which are... kinda for fun? The truth is that three novellas don't equal one novel in reader satisfaction or total sales. If I'd known how the year was going to go I wouldn't have committed to three novellas. But once you tell other authors that you'll have a story ready for an anthology, well, then you have to deliver like the Pony Express.

If I keep the same productivity level for the last quarter of the year, then I may have another 30,000-35,000 words left in me. Maybe. I've already used most of my vacation time (leave is almost exclusively used for writing projects now), but there are quite a few holidays coming up.

What commitments do I have? At this point the only hard commitment outside the main Haberdashers series is the next novella in the Mad Clan series. Most of my author friends are already planning out their release schedules for 2017, but I'm quite gun shy. Taming Chiron got a pre-order link because it was already so past due that I wanted everyone to know that it was REALLY finally coming out. The rest of the series I will probably drop like Beyonce if, ya know, Beyonce was a small-time author and very few people were tuned in to when she was releasing books.

Thanks for letting me ramble.