Volumes Of Work

A multi-part question from a fellow writer:

“Was hoping to pick your brain. Would you credit your success to (besides writing great books – that’s a given) to volume of work like your productivity? Do you have a big newsletter list? I admire how well you do especially since you’ve gone wide with your books and I’m still feeling like I do best in KU. But I also haven’t upped my productivity to be anywhere close to yours. You’re a machine!”

Thanks! I’ll split my answer into three parts – newsletter, productivity, and Kindle Unlimited.

1.) NEWSLETTER

I do have a good-sized newsletter list, but it did take a while to build up – about seven years or so. One writer (I think it was Michael Sullivan but I’m not sure) said that building an audience was like building a beach one grain of sand at a time. I include a link to my newsletter at the end of every book and feature it prominently on my website, so I try to build up subscribers organically. There’s a lot of advice about newsletters out there saying you need to email your list every week or share personal details, but I don’t bother with that. I usually publish a book once a month, so I use the list then, and I always try to make sure I add value to the newsletter by giving something away for free when I send one out. Fortunately, I’ve written a lot of short stories, so I can rotate through them, and I can of course always write more.

2.) PRODUCTIVITY

As for productivity, I would say that I’m pretty good at putting my head down and plodding along. I wouldn’t say I’m particularly smart or talented, but I am persistent, and that is often more valuable. The best advice I can give is to not let the possible be the enemy of the perfect. That’s a common error in many areas of life – people say they can’t run an 8 minute mile, so they don’t try running at all, overlooking the fact that some exercise is always better than zero exercise. (In fact, that is a formal logical fallacy called the Nirvana Fallacy.)

Like, I’ll use myself as an example. When I’m working on a new book, I try to write 6,000 words a day. Except right now it’s the middle of blizzard, flu, and tax season, and none of those things are conducive to getting productive work done.  I’ve been working on SEVENFOLD SWORD: GUARDIAN for 9 days, but I’ve only written 6,000 words on one of those days.

But! I have written every single one of those 9 days, even when I had to spend most of the day doing other stuff and it was difficult to squeeze in writing time. Remember not letting the perfect be the enemy of the possible? Some writing is better than no writing, and it adds up over time, and I’ve written 38,000 words of GUARDIAN in those 9 days. That’s not the “perfect” goal of 54,000 in nine days, but it is still a LOT better than zero!

2A.) PRODUCTIVITY & FOCUS

It’s also important to keep focus on writing new books, and not let writing-adjacent tasks choke out that time. By “writing-adjacent”, I mean additional work that the books generate. Like, taxes, keeping business records, working with a cover designer (or making your own covers), making paperback editions, social media, updating the website, answering reader emails, maintaining the newsletter, audiobook production, and so forth.

Basically, the Business of Writing, as opposed to Actual Writing.

All that stuff is important (especially taxes!) and needs to get done, but it can take away time from writing new material. It’s a bit like a farmer who gets so preoccupied with organizing his tractors or upgrading his silo that he starts to neglect the wheat harvest, which is the main point. I admit this is something I’ve struggled with – I wrote 100,000 fewer words in 2018 than I did in 2017 because I spent so much time on writing-adjacent tasks (especially taxes!), but they had to get done.

2B.) PRODUCTIVITY & CRITICISM

In my opinion, it is also extremely important to learn to ignore criticism. This doesn’t come naturally to people, and in some areas of life, it isn’t at all healthy. But in writing fiction, it’s really necessary to ignore criticism because otherwise you get tangled up in your own head and can’t get anything done.

It was a gradual process for me. When I started writing, I cared what my family and friends thought of my work. Then I realized that this didn’t matter, because (with all respect to them) my family and friends were not the ones who could buy my work and get it published. Then I cared what editors, agents, and publishers thought, but towards the end of the 2010s, I realized that (almost) all of them were inept at best and incompetent and corrupt at worst and I stopped caring what they thought. (And some of them are actually crooks.) Since they were the gatekeepers, in 2010 I decided to stop writing novels and focus on blogging about Linux, but then the Kindle came along and made gatekeepers obsolete.

Now with self-publishing, the only ones whose opinion really matters are the readers. And there are a lot of readers, and everyone is entitled to their opinion. So if I someone doesn’t like my book, that’s unfortunate, but there are always more readers out there. The bald face is that it’s impossible to write a book that everyone likes, but so what? There are something like 1.5 billion English speakers on Earth, and even if only 0.005% of them like your book, that’s still 750,000 people (which, to put in perspective, is about the current population of North Dakota), and a book that sells 750,000 copies is called a bestseller. Thanks to the Internet and self-publishing, you have the ability to reach those 1.5 billion English speakers, and at least some of them will like your book.

3.) KINDLE UNLIMITED

I’ve done some stuff in Kindle Unlimited, and my SILENT ORDER series is in KU right now, but KU is never going to be my main focus. The problem with KU is that it’s difficult to turn a profit since you have to advertise constantly. To make a book work in KU at present, it seems to take a focused combination of AMS ads, Bookbub ads, and Facebook ads, and you have to be tweaking them constantly. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it does take a lot of effort and you have to watch the ads carefully to make sure you aren’t spending too much or that they stop working. I usually prefer to make the first book in a series free on all platforms and then advertise it occasionally.

So, the TLDR version – keep writing, and don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the possible!

Also, a blog post I wrote last year, The Indie Author Skill Stack, might have some insights on the topic.

-JM