Ooof, that's a heck of a deadline.
I have until about August to get my third book done and sent to my publisher if I want to be sure of it coming out next year. I have at least another 50,000 words to go, so at some point I'll need to step things up.
Well my original goal was to write this little Fantasy novel (1st draft only) of Falon Half Blood to broaden my reader base, and do it between the time it took my brother to finish editing book 3 and the edit and launched book 4. So about a month in total. That's really not that fast since I'd only need to do about 3k a day to smash it out in that kind of time frame. (trying to keep this one 90k instead my usual 130-150k books)
I was doing an average of 8k words a day with forays up to as high as 13k and no lower than 5k a day, every single day without fail when I was writing the final 4/5ths of what eventually became Admiral's Tribulation and Admiral's Trial. Or about 200k words. So I know a month is doable if you stay dedicated.
I figure if I do no better than my last book money wise and only make $8k per every book I release then all I need to do is put out 4 books a year or rather one every quarter. Cost of living over here is pretty cheap, although I've got to pay for school for the wife.
I can write a book in a month and with my brother's help edit it in one more. So I figure without paying anyone to edit them for me I could crank out six books a year if that's what I needed to do.
Don't know what I'd do without his help though and he's almost half way completed with a 5-6 book arc he wants to have fully written before releasing on Amazon in some kind of ad/release blitz. So I'll have to figure that out at some point. Or start stacking the electronic books against the wall when the editing production line starts to bottleneck.
If only I had a 20 book back list like a bunch of these yahoos I see online. 2 books a day x 20 books is like 40 sales per day baseline! at 2.99 you get 70% before taxes and so that's 2 bucks per book. 40/day x 30 day-month x 2bucks = $2400.00 base line monthly revenue. Plus you get that 6-8k surge upon the release of a successful book (although I've seen guys do much better than I have with initial release sales). From looking at their amazon ranking that's about what you can count on (at least for the back list) so long as you keep pumping out a new book to keep your back list fresh.
Oh well I'm going on for far too long. Maybe in a couple years if I stay dedicated I'll be in the same league as those other guys with the big lists of books in their arsenal.
The Deposed King
