I’ll be back soon. Another chapter from Indie Author Confidential Vol. 10. Get it here: https://www.authorlevelup.com/confidentialvol10
I've been thinking a lot about the impact that adopting voice recorder transcription is going to have on my productivity. In short, it is going to have a seismic impact. Honestly, I haven't truly comprehended just how seismic it is going to be.
As I was writing this book, I had a dictation session where I walked around my basement for an hour, dictating chapters from this book. I dictated 3,000 words. This is the number I dictated after applying my dictation macro. As a reminder, these words were all clean and required only minimal editing. It took less than ten minutes to edit the text and mark it as final.
That means I can dictate 3,000 words an hour on average. When I first discovered this, I thought it wasn't that much. Then I did the math and it blew me away.
To put the 3,000 words per hour in perspective, if it takes one hour to dictate 3,000 words and 10 minutes to clean up those 3,000 words, that’s 70 minutes to create CLEAN, first-draft-final text.
If you do the math on an entire day’s productivity, it gets really interesting.
Say you start dictating at 7 a.m. On the hour every hour, you take a 15-minute break, followed by a 15-minute clean-up session. Assuming a full workday(ish), you would dictate a total of 6 hours, which would net you 18,000 words in one day. All clean.
In a 5-day week, that would net you 90,000 words If your novels are 50,000 words, 1.8 novels.
In a month, that would net you 360,000 words, or 7.2 novels.
In a year, that would net you 4.3 million words, or 86.4 novels. I’m willing to bet you that there is a rarefied, upper echelon of writers out there doing even better than this. I write between 500,000 and 700,000 per year and am considered extremely prolific.
Now, the math looks nice, but in practice, your actual results would be far below that 4.3 million because you have a 4.3 million other things to do in your writing life, like marketing, taxes, and business.
But what if you could write even just a third of that (1.4 million words) per year? That’s insane.
That’s what this voice recorder and transcription have allowed me to do—get to the next levels of productivity. Or, put another way, they have helped me “level up.”
Such a revelation reminds me of the importance of a few things:
1. The true question is how my editing results are. Am I accruing more errors from my editor, or is the level of editing required roughly the same? I'll know after I've produced a few books exclusively with this method.
2. I need even more refined ways of being productive. To the extent I can optimize my dictation macro, I should do so. Everything is going to depend on how quickly and cleanly I can speak the words, lightly edit them, and move on. If my goal is to be a first-draft-final writer, then I need to scale my operations accordingly.
3. I need to start doing my own covers, yesterday. You saw the math. There is no way even the most affluent author can afford to pay for professional book covers for so many books.
As I become faster and more productive, I am starting to see the upper echelons of author productivity. These are echelons I have never seen before.
The pulp writers wrote millions of words per year… on a typewriter. Today's authors have the benefit of technology, and they are still mostly typing. Those who are using dictation and transcription are probably not doing it the way I am doing it, which means they are doing it sloppily. Or, they’re spending a fortune on human transcriptionists.
Few authors can type 3,000 words an hour for 6 hours. That’s just asking for carpal tunnel syndrome. Speaking that much is easier; the only friction is your imagination. I’ve found that my imagination does a pretty good job of keeping up with my pace.
Therefore, I think the fastest authors writing today are using voice recorders to achieve their speed, and they’re probably writing somewhere between five and six million words (sloppy). I don't think annual word counts over 6 million are possible unless you’re a cyborg, but I could be wrong.
What would it mean to suddenly write several million words per year, when I am only writing around half a million at the time of this writing? That's profound.
When discussing my voice recorder adventures on my YouTube channel, I encountered another author who mastered this method and gave me some advice after expressing some hesitation with achieving such high word counts. He said, “You’re right to question the power, but it’s worth it.”
That’s a great way to think about it. Onward I go, and harness the power, I will.
