Created by Randy Ingermanson - "the Snowflake Guy"
America's Mad Professor of Fiction Writing

Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Yes, But Is That Task Actionable?

by 1 Comment

in Organizing

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. This will be a very short blog post, but it shows you how to master one small aspect of one of the most powerful skills any writer can have—the art of getting stuff done. Most writers have far too many things on their plate. A lot of stuff doesn’t get done, and it keeps us from writing as much as we want. But there’s a way to change that…. 

Nothing Happens Unless You Take Action

Years ago, I came across a marketing guru who often used the phrase, “Nothing happens unless you take action.” This guy got an incredible amount of stuff done. 

Getting stuff done is hard when you’re neurodivergent. I’ve struggled with this all my life. My neurodivergence is my superpower, but it’s also my anchor—both at the same time. 

So I watched how this guru worked for a while, and I got better at taking action. I started getting more stuff done. 

Getting stuff done requires you to break every project down into Tasks. I capitalize the word Task because I’m using it as a technical term. What is a Task?

A Task is some action you can take in a single sitting. Like editing a scene. Writing a blog post. Fixing a broken page on your website. Calling your agent. Reading a contract. And on and on. Tasks are small chunks of a large project. 

Most of the things on your To-Do List are Tasks. If they’re not a Task, then they should probably be broken up into Tasks, because each Task is a step on the road towards getting stuff done. “Stuff” is amorphous. A Task is a discrete chunk of work. 

But there’s a problem, and it’s the reason some Tasks sit on your To-Do List for ten years without getting done…

The Two Kinds of Tasks

There are really two kinds of Tasks we take on. One kind gets done in an afternoon. The other kind may never get done.

An Actionable Task is a Task that you have the skills and the know-how to do. This is the kind you do quickly. You would like for all your Tasks to be Actionable Tasks. 

A Hard Task is a Task that you don’t have the skills or the know-how to do. This kind will sit festering on your To-Do List for years. Because you literally can’t do it. 

If all your Tasks were Actionable Tasks, you would get all kinds of stuff done. But if your project has even one Hard Task on it, your project is going to stall. Possibly forever. 

The only solution is to somehow convert a Hard Task into an Actionable Task. And how do you do that?

Let’s say you’ve got a Hard Task on your plate and you desperately need to get it done. Now. What are your options? You only have a few:

Converting Hard Tasks to Actionable Tasks

  • Do some research to learn how to do the Task. Google is your friend here. Also YouTube. Sometimes Wikipedia has the answer. 
  • Ask a few friends if they know how to do the Task and can teach you. 
  • Find somebody who does this kind of Task for a living and hire them to do it. There is no shame in hiring out Hard Tasks that you just don’t have the time to learn how to do. We all have things we’ll never be able to do, even if we had infinite time to learn. 

Please note that all of these are Actionable Tasks. You know how to do research online, so “researching a Hard Task” is an Actionable Task. You know how to talk to friends, so “asking friends for help on a Hard Task” is an Actionable Task. You know how to hire somebody to do a task, so “hiring somebody to do a Hard Task” is an Actionable Task. (It may be beyond your budget to hire them, and if that’s the case, this option is off the table.)

The key point is that you can convert any Hard Task into an Actionable Task—one that you have the skill and the know-how to do. It may be an Actionable Task that you can’t afford. If you can’t afford it, then you can’t afford it, and that may mean it’s the end of the line. There is freedom in knowing that something just can’t be done. When you know that, you can delete it from your To-Do List. 

This Doesn’t Fully Solve the Procrastination Problem

Converting Hard Tasks into Actionable Tasks is a powerful skill that will change your life, once you master it. But it won’t completely eliminate procrastination from your life, because there are many reasons we procrastinate. 

Having a Hard Task is only one of those reasons. It’s the one I’m focusing on today, because it’s been a big thing in my own life and it’s a big thing in a lot of writers’ lives. 

So now let’s make this practical…

Homework:

  • If you keep a To-Do List, take a look at it right now. Are there any Hard Tasks on it?
  • Rewrite each Hard Task to be an Actionable Task—either a research Task or an “ask a friend” Task or a “hire somebody” Task. 
  • Never again put a Hard Task on your To-Do List. If you have a Hard Task that needs doing, always reframe it as an Actionable Task. 

3 Strategies for the Theme of Your Novel

by Leave a Comment

in Craft

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Specifically, we’ll be talking about the theme of your novel. How do you find your theme? Do you even need a theme? This is not a huge topic, so this blog post will be shorter than usual. 

Three Strategies for Dealing With Theme

First, let’s define what we mean by “theme.” When I talk about theme, I mean the deep meaning of your story. It’s the message behind all the shooting and kissing and car-chasing and wand-waving and shouting and whatever else is happening in your story. So when I use the word “theme,” I don’t mean merely some controversial subject. I mean the actual stance that you take on that controversial subject. 

I can think of three strategies that authors use with their themes. There might be more, but these are the ones that jump out at me:

  • You come up with the theme first, and then you create a story that sends that message. 
  • You come up with a story first, and then a deep theme emerges from the story. 
  • Your story doesn’t have a theme. There’s no message. 

Authors have used all three of these strategies effectively. There’s nothing intrinsically right or wrong with using any of these strategies. You get to decide what kind of novel you’re writing. But it’s a good idea to know what your decision is, and why you came to that decision. 

So let’s talk about each strategy and give some examples. 

Strategy 1: The Theme Drives the Story

Some authors have a theme in mind, and they create a story to illustrate that theme. The hazard here is that your theme can come across as heavy-handed. The upside is that reader who already agree with the theme of your story will love your novel and may help promote it, and that may turn out to be very good for sales. 

A classic example of a theme-driven book is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was the best-selling novel in the US in the entire 19th century. The theme was that slavery is evil. This is not controversial today, but it was in the 1850s. Some people loved this theme. Others hated it. The story was created solely as a vehicle for the theme. The book had a lot of flaws that make it much less popular today. It had a sentimental style that is long out of date. And it glorified the servility of the main character, Uncle Tom. It’s now an insult to call someone an Uncle Tom. And yet, for all its problems, the book had a huge impact. 

A modern example of a theme-driven story is The Shack, by William Paul Young. The theme was that God is good, even though he allows evil in our world. This is highly controversial. The question of the goodness of God is hotly debated, and the problem of evil is one of the two strongest arguments used by those who don’t believe in the existence of God. Some people loved the book. Others called it stupid or heretical. The book sat at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and has more than 10 million copies in print.

If this is your strategy, then own it. You have a theme. Send your message. Make it clear. Be ready to take some heat for it. Be hopeful that bad publicity will lead to good sales. Sometimes it does. 

Strategy 2: The Story Drives the Theme

Some authors just set out to write an interesting story, and a theme emerges. The upside here is that the theme naturally fits the story, because it grows out of it. But you may find that once you’ve found the theme of your story, you may need to rewrite it extensively so that the theme is fully woven into your novel. 

So far as I can tell, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fits this model. The book follows on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a light-hearted book about a boy growing up in the South. It took Mark Twain about seven years to write the Huck Finn book, and things evolved as he worked on it. A strong anti-racist theme eventually emerged organically from the story. But the theme is not perfectly developed. The book is a 19th century novel, and it contains 19th century stereotypes and racial slurs that don’t sit well in the 21st century. 

In my own novels, I’ve never started with a theme in mind. I usually just try to write a story and see what comes out of it. In my City of God series, a theme has emerged organically from the hard questions one of my characters, Ari, asks about the problem of evil. Ari rather reluctantly believes in God, but he’s not at all happy with the common explanations for why God should allow evil in the world. I am three books into the series, and the theme as it now stands is that the problem of evil is not solved. 

If this is your strategy, then own it. Watch what your characters find disturbing—that’s your clue for the theme that may emerge. Once you identify the theme, take care to keep it consistent through the story. This may take a lot of rework. Do the work. If you don’t feel the need to hammer the theme hard, then don’t hammer it. A message can be subtle, if that’s more your style. Or it can be bold, if that’s what you want. 

Strategy 3: There is no Theme

Some authors set out to write an interesting story, and no theme ever emerges. There is nothing wrong with this. A novel isn’t required to have a message. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a story is just a story. 

I’ve read most of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child, and I don’t think any of them had a theme. Reacher travels around with nothing but a wallet and a toothbrush and the clothes on his back. He gets in fights. He catches the bad guys. He moves on. There’s no “moral of the story.” Fans of Reacher don’t seem to mind, and it’s certainly never bothered me.

If this is your strategy, then own it. You don’t owe your reader a message. You owe your reader a story. Your novel doesn’t have to carry some deep meaning. 

Homework:

  • Pick five of your favorite novels. What is the theme of each? For each one, do you think the theme was designed in from the start, or did it emerge organically? 
  • Did you start out with a theme in mind for the novel you’re working on right now? If so, what’s the theme, and do you hope that it’s controversial enough to drive big sales?
  • Has a theme emerged organically from the novel you’re working on? If so, are you willing to put in the extra work needed to make sure the theme is consistent within your novel?
  • Does your current novel have no theme at all? Are you good with that, or do you feel that it needs one?

How to Launch Your Novel Without Stressing Out

by Leave a Comment

in Book Promotion

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. The question for today is how do you launch your novel without having a panic attack? Even if you are years away from launching a book, there are things you can do now to prepare for that happy day. 

Why Most Authors Feel Massive Anxiety in a Book Launch

We authors put a lot of pressure on ourselves. It’s easy to think launching a novel is a huge, gigantic task that’s going to be expensive and risky and force us to act salesy. And it’s easy to believe that if we don’t run a good launch, then our book is going to die. That’s just not reality. 

You can massively lower your anxiety level in a book launch by remembering one thing. In a book launch, you are not trying to sell your book to the whole world. You are not even trying to sell your book to your entire Target Audience. The ONLY people you are trying to sell it to are the people who meet all three of these criteria:

  1. They already know you exist. 
  2. They already know they like your fiction. 
  3. They already have given you permission to let them know when your book is available.

That may be a very small set of people. It might include only your family and your close friends. 

But your circle of influence is probably broader than that. If you have followers on social media who know you’re writing a novel, then some of those people may be in that set. If you have an email newsletter about your fiction, that’s ideal. 

If you remember my recent blog post  on The Three Pillars of Marketing, you are launching your book ONLY to people you have already Attracted and Engaged. Attraction and Engagement are the first two pillars of marketing. In your book launch, you’ll execute the third pillar—Conversion. This simply means that you’re going to give them a good reason to buy your book RIGHT NOW.

And this step is stress-free. If people already know you and know they like your fiction, then they’ll be happy to buy your book. So the task of launching your book is just a matter of contacting them with an incentive to buy it right away. And how do you do that? That depends on what road you chose for publishing your novel. So let’s review those roads…

The Two Roads to Publishing a Novel

There are two methods authors commonly use to publish their novel:

  • Traditional publishing—you sell the rights to your book to a publishing company that manages the editing and production of the book and pays you an advance and then later pays you royalties.
  • Self-publishing (also called indie authoring)—you manage the editing and production of the book yourself. You don’t get an advance, and you have to pay the up-front expenses, but then you get all the the money the book earns.

Both of these are valid routes to publishing a novel. Both of them can be extremely successful, and both can be extremely frustrating. Neither of these is “the right way” for all authors. Some authors like working with a publisher that handles all the production and editing hassle, so they can focus on writing. Some authors like doing it all themselves because they feel like they can do a better job. 

I’ve published both fiction and nonfiction books by both of these routes. I started out my writing career working with traditional publishers. I later transitioned to indie authoring, and that’s worked out better for me. (Translation—I have earned more money as an indie author than I did as a traditionally published author. And being indie has caused me a lot less stress.) 

Choose the method that works best for you. I can’t go into all the ins and outs of how you make that decision in this blog post. That’s a topic for another day. The reason I mention these two options is that your approach to launching your book will depend somewhat on which route you take. So let’s look at how you run a book launch for each case.  

Launching a Traditionally Published Novel

When you work with a traditional publisher, they will set the publication date far in advance. They’ll work with you on the editing. They’ll hire a cover designer and proofreaders. They’ll ask you to keep to a schedule that they set, and if you fail, they have legal recourse, because you signed a binding contract. 

Your publisher will expect you to help out a lot with the launch. They may give you a long list of tasks they think you should do. Most of these will be impossible to do in the window of time you have available. So don’t feel obligated to do everything they ask. But you should definitely do something. Let them know what you’re doing, because they may be able to help you a bit, and they’ll be grateful that you did anything at all. 

There are two main things you can do:

  1. Send free copies of your book to “influencers”—people who read widely in your category and who have some sort of platform for promoting books.
  2. Email all the people you have Attracted and Engaged and give them a reason to buy the book now. 

Let’s talk about those two tasks.

Free Copies For Influencers

Publishers will often give you free copies of the paper edition of your book to send to influencers. Maybe these influencers have a blog. Maybe they moderate a Facebook group or a Goodreads group. Maybe they have a large following on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. Publishers know that this can be very cost-effective, because paper copies probably cost them around a dollar apiece. 

When I launched my book Writing Fiction For Dummies, I was part of a large online group of novelists. I offered a free autographed copy of the book to anyone in the group who wanted it. 60 authors sent me their mailing addresses. Almost all of them were friends of mine, and I knew that most of them taught at writing conferences and would be good influencers for years to come. My publisher sent me three cases of books, and I did all the work—signing the books, packaging them, adding mailing labels, and taking them to the post office. The publisher offered to pay the postage, so my only cost was a few hours of boring labor. This worked out massively well. 

Emailing Your Followers

In the launch week for your book, it’s way too late to try to put together an email list. Building an email list is one of your lifelong projects as a writer. You will never stop building your list and cultivating it. And the sooner you start, the better. List-building is a giant project, and I can’t cover it here. I’ve blogged about it in the past. If you want to know how it fits into your overall marketing strategy, I can recommend my post A Virtuous Cycle for Marketing Your Books. For the nuts and bolts of how to build a list, I can recommend the book Newsletter Ninja, by Tammi Labrecque. 

Assuming you have an email list, when you launch your book, you will probably send out a series of emails beginning a few weeks in advance to let your people know that your next book is coming. You can do a cover reveal when your cover is designed. You can send an email weekly in which you talk about your story. If you want to include any part of your novel in your emails, you’ll need to get permission from your publisher, because you sold them the publishing rights. Usually, they’re happy to give you permission, so ask. Then on Launch Day, send your fans an email announcing the book. Add links to the usual online retailers. Add any incentives you can think of to buy the book right now. 

What do I mean by “incentives?” There are a couple of types of incentives. You might be able to convince your publisher to lower the price during the first week of sales, especially for the e-book version. But don’t count on it. Few publishers will do this. I have seen it happen, and once it had absolutely spectacular results. But one cost of working with a publisher is that they set the price of your book, and you don’t. 

There’s a second kind of incentive, and you have complete control over this. You can offer your true fans in your email list some sort of free electronic download if they buy your book during Launch Week. I did this with my book Writing Fiction For Dummies. I asked my publisher to put me in contact with similar authors who might provide electronic freebies. We put together a list of 8 free goodies that I put on my website for anyone who bought my book during Launch Week. And I added a 50% coupon code for all the products that I had on my website. I didn’t ask for any proof that they bought my book. That would have been a nightmare to check. I trusted people to be honest. When you treat people as trustworthy, they live up to your trust. The launch went extremely well, and I had a nice sales bump on my website from the coupon code. 

But what if you’re self-published? In that case, you have more control…

Launching a Self-Published Novel

When you self-publish your novel, you control everything. You set the deadline, and if you miss it, nobody will take you to court. You will know your publication date at least a month in advance. Which means you can start actively promoting your book to your email list weeks before the book is available. And you have the same general methods of promoting your book. But there are some differences from the traditional-publishing case.

Free Copies to Influencers

You can still send copies to influencers, but now you have to pay for them yourself—you don’t have a publisher to give them to you for free. If you use Amazon’s Print-on-Demand for your paper copies, you can make individual orders for the book at a reduced cost and send them directly to each influencer. You won’t get any royalties on these copies, but it’s nice to let Amazon deal with the shipping. 

Emailing Your Followers

You can also promote your book in advance to your email list, and now you have a bit more latitude as a self-publisher. Here are some of the advantages you have that your traditionally published author lacks.

  • You can email your followers for weeks in advance with any amount of excerpts from the forthcoming book, and you don’t have to ask your publisher for permission. Because you’re the publisher. 
  • You can set up preorders on Amazon up to a year before publication and notify your followers so they can buy it in advance. 
  • You have complete control of the price and you can change it at any time, and use this to create an incentive to “buy now”. As an example, suppose you want the regular price of your e-book to be $4.99. You can tell your followers that during Launch Week, the price will be set to $2.99. And you might even offer a low-ball price for preorders of $1.99 or even $0.99. At that price, any of your followers who cares about your book will order. It’s a no-brainer. Note that you can’t go that low with the print version of your book, because paper costs money. 

The Common Thread—Your Email List

A major part of your book launch is your email newsletter. If you don’t have an email list when you launch your book, you can still use social media, but don’t expect great results. Successful authors know that social media converts a lot worse than email. Please note that it can take years to build a good list, so it’s way too late to think about building your email list when your book is weeks away from launch. If your launch is coming up and you have no email list, then focus on the things you can do and keep your expectations low. 

Your book launch should not be stressful. Stress comes from trying to sell to people who never heard of you and don’t know anything about your fiction. There are ways to reach these people, but Launch Week is not the time to try. Launch Week is for your true fans. And there’s no anxiety when promoting your work to your true fans. They want you to let them know when your book is coming out. They’d be angry with you if you didn’t tell them.

Homework:

  • When is the approximate date of your next book launch? This might be more than a year out, and if that’s the case, you don’t really have a date, you have a range of dates. This might be years away, and that’s OK, because it gives you time to build an email list. 
  • Do you have influencers in mind for your book? It’s OK if you don’t, but it’s nice if you do.
  • Do you have an email list for your true fans? If not, then now is a good time to start thinking about building one. It’s never too soon.  

How Long Does it Take to Write a Novel?

by Leave a Comment

in Production

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. We’ll talk about the amount of clock time it takes to write a novel versus the calendar time. 

Clock Time and Calendar Time 

If you were a machine who never got tired or bored or had to eat or deal with a family, then you could just work straight through on your novel. If it takes you 500 hours to write a novel, then you could divide that number by the 24 hours in a day to get the calendar time—a bit less than 21 days. 

But you’re not a machine. You can’t work 24 hours every day. So the actual number of hours you log “on the clock” to write your novel are going to be different than the required number of calendar days. 

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to estimate both the clock time and the calendar time for your novel. We’ll assume that you have already learned the craft of fiction writing, which means you know how to do all the stages of writing a novel, so it’s just a matter of executing each stage. Let’s talk about those stages first… 

The 7 Stages of Writing a Novel 

Nobody just writes a first draft of a novel and then publishes it. Well, nobody who writes well. There are other stages in the process. Not everybody needs all of those stages, but most writers put some time into each. 

Here are some typical stages that professional novelists go through:

  1. Research and worldbuilding. This is optional. Some kinds of fiction don’t require you to do any research. Others don’t require you to do any worldbuilding. Fantasy typically requires a lot of worldbuilding. Science fiction and historical fiction often take huge amounts of both research and worldbuilding. Your mileage may vary. 
  2. Story planning. This is also optional. If you’re a Seat-of-the-Pants novelist, you don’t plan your story—you just start writing. If you use my Snowflake Method, you spend a fair amount of time planning your story. If you’re an Outliner, you spend even more time planning. Your brain is wired to be somewhere on this spectrum, and I don’t think you can change it. So work with your brain, however you’re wired. 
  3. Writing the first draft. This is not optional. Everyone writes a first draft. There are different ways to do this. You might write every scene in sequence. You might write scenes as they come to your mind and then piece them together later. You might write part of the draft, then replan the story, then write more of the draft, and so on until you finish. You might write a page and then polish it many times before moving on (this is called Edit-As-You-Go). All of these are valid ways to write. It’s on you to find the process that works best for you. 
  4. Editing your manuscript. Most writers put their novel through several revisions. Edit-As-You-Go writers may possibly produce a publishable manuscript in their first draft, because their process combines editing with first-drafting. Again, it’s your job to decide how many revisions you need to make your manuscript its best. 
  5. Working with editors and proofreaders. If you work with a traditional royalty-paying publisher, they’ll assign an editor to read your manuscript and send you a “revision letter.” This will tell you what you did well and what you need to improve. Revision letters typically run several pages, but they can go to many pages if there are a lot of problems. Professional novelists who self-publish their work often hire somebody to review their work, or they may ask a friend to do it, or they may hand it off to alpha readers or beta readers. Once you’ve got feedback, it’s up to you to make new revisions in light of what your editors or readers say. The final stage of editing is called proofreading, and it’s often done by a professional and returned to you for review. Strictly speaking, this entire stage is optional, but successful novelists rarely skip it. 
  6. Producing your book. When the book is finally declared done, it still needs to be produced. If you’re publishing a paper edition, the book needs to be typeset, printed, bound, and shipped. If you’re publishing an e-book edition, it usually will be typeset and exported in ePub format. (The one exception is that some self-publishers who only publish e-books will simply upload their Word document directly to Amazon. But even in this case, the Word document has to be formatted the way you want the e-book to look.) In either case, a cover needs to be designed, and it’s different for the paper edition and the e-book edition. So this stage is not really optional. If you’re working with a publisher, they do this work. If you’re self-publishing, then you do it yourself or hire someone to do it. 
  7. Launching your book. Once you’ve got your book produced, you usually want to spend some time letting the world know it’s available for sale. A few authors do nothing to launch their book, but most successful authors spend some time on it. 

So how long do each of these stages take? That depends on a lot of things. Which stages are you executing? How long is your book? How fast do you write? How many hours do you have each week to work on your novel? Are you working with a publisher or doing it all yourself? 

A typical novel runs 60k to 120k words. You can write shorter, and you can write longer. In what follows, I’ll assume a round 100k words and make estimates based on that. Then you can scale my estimates up or down, depending on whether your novel is shorter or longer than 100k.

Estimates for Research and Worldbuilding

If you don’t need to do any research or worldbuilding, then lucky you—this stage will take zero time. Or if you’re writing a series, then every book after the first one can use all the research and worldbuilding you invested into that first one. 

A reasonable amount of clock time to put into your research is 50 to 100 hours. Some novelists put in much more. (I plead guilty to this. That’s just the way my brain is wired. Research is part of the fun, and ditto worldbuilding.)

How much calendar time does this convert to? That depends on how many hours you spend per week. If you have 10 hours every week, then that 50 to 100 hours is going to cost you 5 to 10 weeks. 

Estimates for Story Planning

If you don’t do any story planning, then this stage will also cost you zero time. It’s tempting to skip this stage and just “get to the good stuff,” but if your brain is wired to need story planning, then you need to do it. You’ll end up writing your first draft quicker, and you’ll save a ton of time on editing and probably on working with editors. 

For those who plan their story, it’s again reasonable to budget a clock time of 50 to 100 hours. Snowflakers will take less time than Outliners. Neither is right or wrong for everyone. Both are right for some people and wrong for others. Part of your career management problem is figuring out how your brain is wired so that you can collaborate with it to be as productive as possible. 

To estimate the corresponding calendar time in weeks, again just divide your estimated clock time by the number of hours you have in a week. 

Estimates for Writing the First Draft

Everybody has to write a first draft. Some writers are faster than others. I have known writers who produce 100 to 200 words per hour. I have known others who write 2000 words per hour. Writers who dictate their first draft claim speeds up to 5000 words per hour. I have my doubts on that. 

I typically write about 1000 words per hour if I’m in the zone, and about 500 when not in the zone. I can’t control being in the zone. Some days just click. 

If you are an Edit-As-You-Go writer, you may write just a few hundred words and then go back and edit it many times. This reduces your speed at writing first-draft copy, but the payoff is that you may spend very little time in the next stage, editing your manuscript. Don’t make this decision based on speed. Make it based on how your brain works best. If you need to Edit-As-You-Go, then do so and be happy. If you don’t need to, then don’t and be happy. You are who you are and you can’t change that. 

The clock time to write your first draft is just your total word count divided by your hourly speed. So if you are writing 100k words and you write 1000 words per hour, then your clock time estimate is 100 hours. 

The calendar time again depends on how many hours you write per week. You know the drill, so I won’t repeat it. 

Estimates for Editing Your Manuscript

If you skip editing, then this stage will cost you nothing. Edit-As-You-Go writers may be able to skip this stage. I know a fair number of professional novelists who’ve written many novels and feel comfortable skipping this stage. I am not one of them. I usually put my manuscripts through 5 to 10 rounds of editing. The early rounds are slow. The later rounds are fast. 

Most writers can edit their work quite a bit faster than they can write first-draft copy. But if you rushed the first draft, you may find yourself spending more time on the second draft, and probably also the third. 

The clock time to do each round of editing is again easy to calculate by dividing your word count by your speed. If you have 100k words and you can edit 2000 words per hour, then a round of editing will cost you 50 hours. 

And again, the calendar time just depends on your clock time and the number of hours you have per week.   

Estimates for Working With Editors

This stage is different because now you’re working with somebody else. Your editor can’t send you a revision letter instantly. I’ve had an editor who once got a revision letter back to me in 3 days. That’s practically a miracle. But most of them will take weeks or even months to respond. When I worked with traditional publishers, it usually took them 1 to 3 months to return a revision letter. I’ve heard stories of much longer wait times. Yes, really. 

While you’re waiting on your editor, you are spending zero clock time of your own. But the calendar continues to turn. This can be frustrating. It’s probably a good idea to have another project to work on while you wait. 

Once you get your revision letter, you then need to edit your manuscript again, based on your editor’s comments. (The editor doesn’t make the changes; you do. Their job is to guide you in what needs reworking.) When you work with a publisher, they may well hand you a revision letter and ask for revisions within a few days or weeks. Yes, they really can give you only days to make revisions. If you complain, they’ll point out that you signed a binding legal contract and they invested a lot of money in your book, and now it’s time to buckle down. This can get very uncomfortable. 

After you do revisions, a traditional publisher will always send the manuscript to a proofreader, who will catch all the last little Punctuation, Usage, Grammar, and Spelling (PUGS) issues. Most publishers will send the final proofs back to you for a final read-through. They will often give you a short fuse (“Can you get it back to us tomorrow? Thanks! You’re a prince!”) Again, this can be not-fun, especially if the proofreader decided to change your wording. I’ve heard horror stories of proofreaders making drastic changes that wrecked the dialogue or the author’s voice. I’ve not experienced this myself. Self-published authors have a lot less pressure here. They can always just throw out what the proofreader did. But trad-pubbed authors may have to grin and bear it. 

It’s very hard to make estimates here, but when I was traditionally published, I figured about 40 hours to do edits based on the revision letter, and another 10 hours to review the final proofs to catch the errors the proofreader missed. I tend to put more time on the edits now that I am self-publishing, but that’s probably because I have no deadline and I’m a perfectionist. So for me, 100 hours is about right. 

Estimates for Producing Your Book

If you are traditionally published, your publisher will handle all the production. So this stage costs you almost zero clock time. (The only time you take will be an hour or two to complain about the awful cover your publisher created for you. This will get you nowhere, usually. Also, you will be asked to approve the terrible back-cover copy that a marketing intern wrote, which will cost you another hour to rewrite.) 

A traditional publisher may take a few months to over a year to work through production. The wheels of traditional publishing grind slow. You should have other projects to work on while you wait.

If you are self-publishing your work, then production is your job. You have two tasks:

  • Typeset the novel. You can do this yourself in an hour or two using Vellum (a Mac-only piece of software that is fantastic) or Atticus (runs on Mac OS and Linux and Windows and Chromebook, and I’ve never used it, but I hear it’s very good). The calendar time here is typically one day.
  • Get a cover designed. If you have excellent graphic design skills and excellent marketing skills, you can do this yourself in a few hours. Otherwise, you should hire a freelance cover designer. This will take an hour or two of your time to create a cover design brief that tells the designer what you think you want. Then you’ll spend a few hours telling your designer what they got wrong. This can take weeks to months of calendar time to get right, so it’s a project you should launch long before you’re ready to publish. 

Estimates for Launching Your Book

Whether you are traditionally published or self-published, you will probably spend some time on your launch. The main thing here is letting people in your Target Audience know that your book is available and giving them incentive to buy it right now. The list of possible tasks you could do in your book launch is gigantic. Pick a few that mesh with your personality and do those well. Don’t let your publisher steamroll you. I had a publisher once give me a list of 25 things to do. I had a talk with my editor and the head of marketing and the head of publicity and told them the 3 things I was actually going to do. One of my tasks was not on their list—they didn’t know you could do that. We had a terrific launch. 

It’s reasonable to spend anywhere from 1 to 50 hours on your launch. The calendar time is usually compressed. Most authors commit no more than a week or two to a book launch. 

Hard Numbers

For reference, here are a few hard numbers from my own life, which show how much variance there is in the real world:

  • The fastest I ever wrote a traditionally published book was about 300 hours, which took only 9 months from signing the contract to seeing books in the store.
  • The slowest I ever wrote a traditionally published book was about 500 hours over 12 to 15 months (I don’t have good records on either of these numbers, so they’re estimates). 
  • The fastest I’ve written a self-published book was about 150 hours in 3 months. 
  • The slowest I’ve written a self-published book was more than 1000 hours over more than 5 years. 

A lot depends on where you are in life. If you have a demanding day job and young children, you may not have much time and energy to put into writing. As you get older, your energy level may drop, but you may also find yourself with more time for writing after you retire. 

Homework:

  • What is the expected word count for the novel you’re currently working on? 
  • Which of the 7 stages do you need to do? 
  • What is a reasonable estimate for the clock time for each of these stages? 
  • What is a reasonable estimate for the calendar time for each? 
  • Multiply all estimates by 2 and add them all up. That is a pretty decent estimate of the amount of time you will actually spend on your novel.  

Privacy Policy Cookie Policy
Terms and Conditions
>