That’s what my current goal is: 200 words a day.
The Time Crunch continues, with activities sapping my energy and leaving me feeling very uncreative by the end of the day. The lack of sales in November (0 sales, despite doing some Facebook promos) doesn’t exactly encourage me to write more. Over Thanksgiving I mentioned the lack of sales to my family, and my daughter said, “Promote, promote, promote.” In my head I know that’s true. But free promotion seems to do no good, and I’m not ready to pay for advertisements.
Everyone who has tried it says an e-mail newsletter is an effective marketing tool. But those take time to put together, and assembling an e-mailing list is a huge task, a task I can’t commit to at this time. So that’s something in the future, if the future ever presents time for it.
Consequently, I’m not writing—or almost not writing. As I mentioned in my last post, I got to work on a new short story today. Typical for me, the story I received inspiration for is in my least popular area. The Sharon Williams Fonseca short stories just don’t sell. Spy stories must be out of favor now. Or I don’t know how to write them. Or my titles and/or covers aren’t engaging enough. I can understand the titles not working until maybe I have 5 to 10 of these published.
But given that this is where the inspiration came, I’ll run with it. But I’ll do so very slowly. Perhaps I should say I’ll walk with it, or stroll with it, or limp along with it. I worked on it two days last week, and had it up to about 150 words. I worked on it this morning before starting my workday, and now have it up to 428 words. It looks as if I can produce this type of story at about 200 words a day for a first draft. Since I hope this short story, and others in the series, will average about 6,000 words each, that means it will take a month to complete each first draft.
Throw in some editing time, e-book creation time, cover creation time, and it looks as if I’ll have my 5 to 10 book goal done in a year. That’s not great production, but I guess I’ll have to live with it.