Making a Living With Novels…
A Brutal Class…
We decided to offer it as a regular workshop in May. It is always a classic workshop anyone can go through at any time. But as a regular workshop, even though this is a time of great forgetting, a few people are actually doing the assignments.
The first three assignments are designed to cut away all excuses about not writing by forcing each person to do the math of how much time they spend writing on average every day.
So say you did 200,000 words last year in fiction. And you average about 800 words an hour finished draft.
Do the math… That is 250 hours of writing in a year. Divide by 365 days is about .69 of an hour per day average. In other words, you average about 45 minutes a day writing and you say you want to be a full-time fiction writer.
That awareness is just brutal for many people who have a desire to make a living with novels.
Discoverability is also brutal at that pace. 200,000 words a year is about three novels a year and at that pace it will take you over 7 years of writing to even start to touch discoverability equations. But that is another workshop these days we don’t really have on the schedule.
So how did I manage 1.3 million words per year for 31 years? (That was an average over those years. Some I wrote more, some not so much.)
Math again. I average about 1,000 words per hour finished. (I spend zero time looking at my own writing after I am finished. Zero not counting doing covers and Vellum files for the book or story or collection these days.)
So 1.3 million words divided by 1,000 words per hour is 1,300 hours. Divide that by 365 days is 3.5 hours per day average.
Not even half of a full-time day job, and I don’t have to commute.
The writers you know like Nora and Koontz and many others often did eight hour days. Over the years I did many 10-15 hour days writing under deadlines. Loved it.
The class is actually pretty short on a bunch of details. It talks little about any of the modern things needed to build audiences and discoverability. It is designed mostly to show writers what it takes in time and drive. The answer is not a great deal, honestly. You got to work at it like the writing is a half-time job and you don’t really take days off. (Again, it is a classic workshop once again. May is almost over and we will not offer this again as a regular workshop.)
It’s like Heinlein said about his rules. They are simple, but so difficult to follow and that it is the reason there are so few professional writers and so many aspirants. Spending the time writing if you love to write is so simple, but so difficult and believing you can become a professional fiction writer while working less than an hour a day is why there are so many aspirants and so few professional writers.
As I said, math can be brutal.
4 Comments
Jen Greyson
Appreciate this, Dean. I’m struggling to decide what to do with all the series I started and abandoned after 2 or 3 books. It’s tempting to pick them all back up but I’m sitting with the hard math of 21 books PER SERIES. I need to pick one and commit.
dwsmith
Yup, focus down on one story, forget the total books. Just too much of an elephant to eat. Just one scene, one chapter at a time.
Cheers
Dean
Martin L. Shoemaker
I had a stroke in September 2024. I was naturally worried about my writing. Even while I was in the hospital, I started testing my ability to write stories. I dictated passages, and I shared them with friends. I was pretty convinced I could still write.
But in October 2025, I realized I hadn’t FINISHED anything since the stroke. I started a lot. I also published five projects that had been waiting for my attention, and I taught 26 weekly writing classes. But I just couldn’t finish even a short story before I lost momentum. Was it the stroke? My neurologist said maybe, maybe not.
But I wasn’t going to tolerate that. I finished ONE story. A friend asked for an anthology submission, and I finished that, too. Then I went to my favorite sculpture park for inspiration, and I finished two more.
Then I went back to Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, and I saw Marshall Fredericks’s Lovesick Clown, a clown with an arrow in his chest. My immediate question was “Who killed that clown?” On the drive home, I dictated 4,000 words of Bobo Buttons, Private Eye. I finished and published a short mystery novel in three weeks, barely in time for Christmas. Before that was done, I realized this isn’t a book, it’s a series. Route Book 2 came out in January, Route Book 3 in March. Route Book 4 came out last week, and I’m 10,000 words into Route Book 5. I have a cover and a back cover blurb for each of the first 13 books, with a goal of releasing one every two months. I’m not getting rich (128 copies across 4 books, plus 171 free downloads of book 1), but I’m betting on consistency.
So my math has ups and downs: zero for the stroke year, probably 250,000 in the six months since. And climbing!
dwsmith
Martin,
Wonderful to have you back writing and fantastic story on how when you really want this, you can push to get it. Fantastic!!