Great day today.
For reading, I continued Vol. 7 of IDW’s TMNT.
For data analysis, I sketched out some more potential improvements for my dictation macro. These are minor, but compared with all the other enhancements, they should help.
For marketing, I got an idea for another way to sell my books after browsing Bandcamp for some music. Bandcamp allows you to buy entire discographies of artists at a big discount. I’ve done this a few times but never thought about doing it for my books. There are some logistical issues, but it’s something I’m thinking about.
For production, I am sitting at 4,000 words today and will likely be closer to 5,000. Last night I did an extra 500-700 words.
I did roughly 1000 words toward my secret project and the rest toward Indie Author Confidential Vol. 10. Sometime around tomorrow, I’ll be around the 1/3 mark. So far, the book is already about 15,000 words.
I did have a nice win today. I dictated for an hour long, and that resulted in 3,000 words. Not quite as fast as my man Chris Fox, but all the words were clean. After I ran my dictation macro, I only spent about 10 minutes reviewing the text and cleaning up issues that were mostly Dragon quirks.
Maybe I’m just accustomed to higher word counts, but 3,000 words in an hour feels slow to me. But it’s not…at all.
To put this into perspective, if it takes 1 hour to dictate 3,000 words + 10 minutes to clean up 3,000 words, that’s 1 hour and 10 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 7AM. 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. Or, if your novels are 50k, 1.8 novels. In one week.
In a month, that would net you 360,000 words, or 7.2 novels. In one month.
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, super thin upper echelon of writers out there doing even better than this. I write between 600-800k per year and am considered extremely prolific. Hard to wrap your head around word counts this high, but it’s possible.
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 and 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, it has helped me “level up.” And these new levels of productivity and skill are a lot of fun to explore because the halls are less populated, which means the people you meet start to get a lot more interesting. And that’s a fun place to be, especially in Beast Mode.
Have a great night.
Words Written This Year: 350,000 / 850,000 Goal
