With Just Slightly More Than 3000 Words A Day To Six Books In Half A Year

A warning right at the beginning: this approach is only for experienced writers. If you're just starting to write your first or second novel, you won't be able to do this workload. This approach requires experience and skill.

The requirements

1. I assume that you write novels in the fields of thriller, crime, romance, or other popular genres. In these genres, readers will accept books to the extent that I assume here.

2. regarding the length of the books: I calculate an average of 54,000 words per novel. This value is based on my own experience because my last thirty books from the thriller genre have all been about this length and have sold many thousands of copies per title.

As a paperback, this makes a length of about 380-400 pages. In this area, we can speak with a good conscience of original novels.

3. the books all belong to a series. It is also possible to write six independent books in six months, but then three hours of work a day will not be enough. The advantage of a series is that you don't have to come up with all the characters each time you want to write a novel.

4. you are an experienced writer and know precisely what you are doing. If you don't know how to create suspense or are incapable of limiting the story to the essential and avoiding info dumps, you should take much more time.

The simple math

Let's assume that you only want to write from Monday to Friday. Let's continue to consider an average of 21 working days per month. Under these conditions, a novel of 54,000 words will take you a total of eighteen days to write.

Of course, writing is not enough. To make such rapid progress, you need a plot that you can write along. Nothing slows you down more when writing than having to think about what you want to write about. This must be determined before the writing process begins.

I scheduled five working days for plotting. I can get by with that, and so any other writer who knows his craft should get by with it. I'm nothing special, and I'm sure many of you are much more talented than I am. So don't worry - you can do a plot in five days.

So if we calculate five days for the plot and eighteen for writing, the book will be ready within twenty-three working days. That's only two more working days than we have in an average month.

The plotting

There are countless possibilities to develop the plot for a novel. A plot can range from short and crisp to completely overflowing in any shape or form.

As you can imagine, we need a short and crisp plot to be able to finish it within five days.

I recommend working with the same structure in each of your books. I, for example, work with an overall three-act structure consisting of beginning, middle, and end. I divide these three sections into five chapters with seven scenes each.

The beginning and end are each one chapter (seven scenes) long, and the middle section has three chapters or twenty-one scenes.

Within the chapters, the scenes again form a three-act structure with beginning, middle, and end. Every scene within the chapters, I also try to build up according to this scheme.

This structure guarantees right from the start that the story is continuously progressing and that there are always new arcs of suspense. This structure prevents me from drifting into unimportant subplots.

I develop the story itself within this structure in the form of so-called story beats. These are the smallest elements of a story and structure a scene. Within a scene, beats mark the essential events.

I always try to limit myself to the beats when plotting. But often, I dive a bit deeper and add already complete dialogues or more in-depth descriptions.

Already at this stage, it quickly becomes clear at which points research is necessary. I recommend to do the research as early as possible in the working process and to add the results immediately to the beats in the form of references or notes.

If you plot according to this pattern, you need to plot seven scenes per day to plot all thirty-five scenes of your novel within five days.

The Writing

We now have a three-act structure with five chapters of seven scenes each. For each scene, we have the story beats, and all research is complete. All that remains now is the writing.

We now fill the scenes with life. The story comes into being and develops along with the given structure as if by itself.

In this way, it is possible to write at a speed of more than 1000 words per hour without any problems.

I always take a ten to fifteen-minute break after a thousand words and still manage to have my three thousand words ready after three hours.

I start at eight in the morning and finish at eleven. That leaves the rest of the day for other projects.

In this way, a book is finished after one month and two working days the following month.

So six books are finished after six months and twelve working days of the following month. I know I promised six books in six months. And I will keep my promise.

At precisely three thousand words a day, we cannot do the six books in six books, but we need to do very little more to reach the goal.

If we write 3286 words instead of 3000 words every working day for the six months we write, we will reach our goal.

What are 286 words? When you are in flow, that is nothing. If we have our beats and we type at an average speed, we can get those 3286 words in the three hours of writing a day. Anyway, I do it regularly, and even though I only type with two fingers.

The point of it all

To make a living from writing as a self-publisher, today, you have to publish a new novel every two months. Only a few authors with enormously large numbers of followers can afford to publish less frequently.

To remain creative and healthy, we need methods to reliably produce this output without burning out.

With my method, I have found a way to continually bring out new books that are successful with my regular readers. At the same time, it gives me the freedom to work on other projects as well.

At the moment, one of these projects is my work here at Medium. Next, I want to get into the topic of music production to be able to record and mix my own songs professionally.

Without a tight writing process that works reliably, I couldn't even think about additional projects. But as a freelance writer, I always have to develop myself and try new ways. My method helps me to do this. Maybe it can help you too.