Reader Question Day #81 – Word Count & Aleister Crowley

I had a bunch of questions about the nuts & bolts of writing on Facebook this week, so I thought I would answer them all here.

PDR asks concerning GHOST IN THE SURGE:

How often are you able to produce such a story?

Diligence, mostly.

When I’m writing something new, I try to hit between 3,000 to 4,000 new words a day. I don’t always make it – I have a lot of very random responsibilities that sometimes creep up unexpectedly, and often life just happens. But some days everything goes right and I do more. It tends to balance out, in the end.

I do most of it over my lunch hour at my day job and at night. It helps that I don’t watch a lot of television – I’ve noticed that compared to many of my contemporaries, I do not watch a great deal of TV (the downside of this is that a lot of social small talk goes right over my head, since I don’t usually know who got into bed with whom on GLEE last night or whatever). Additionally, I pay no attention to sports, and someone once pointed out to me that the amount of time I spend writing is roughly equivalent to the amount of time most American men of my age and background put into watching professional sports and managing their fantasy football teams.

(Not that I have anything against professional sports, but I just don’t pay attention to them.)

So it’s like anything else – effort over time gradually adds up to results. It does help to train yourself to write in small bursts when you can grab the time (I have actually written sections in Evernote on my phone and copied and pasted them into the document later), rather than demanding uninterrupted two or three hour blocks for your writing sessions.

TSM asks:

Would you prefer to have your books traditionally published?

No. Which is funny, because I spent a lot of time trying to get traditionally published. I had wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but by 2010, I was pretty disillusioned with publishing in general, and had decided to stop writing novels after CHILD OF THE GHOSTS. Why did I make this decision? I am pleased to report that I have nothing else in common with Aleister Crowley, but his experience when he decided not to become a competitive chess player was similar to mine with traditional publishing:

“I had been to St. Petersburg to learn Russian for the Diplomatic Service in the long vacation of 1897, and on my way back broke the journey in Berlin to attend the Chess Congress. But I had hardly entered the room where the masters were playing when I was seized with what may justly be described as a mystical experience. I seemed to be looking on at the tournament from outside myself. I saw the masters — one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy suit; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. “There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley,” I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess.”

(There are many traditionally published writers I respect, but I wouldn’t want to be them.)

So in 2010, I thought CHILD OF THE GHOSTS was the last novel I would write. Then ebooks came along and changed things.

Could my mind be changed about traditional publishing? Yes, by a very large sum of money. But that’s not going to happen, because the dynamics of book publishing have changed.

Print books are not going away by any means, but ebooks are replacing mass market paperbacks as the format of choice for regular readers. So most new books will be ebooks. And when it comes to the publication of ebooks, there is literally nothing – nothing – that a publisher can do for an ebook than I cannot do myself more cheaply, efficiently, and effectively.

I think a lot of writers crave traditional publication because they crave approval, crave a Gold Star from Teacher, and I have no interest in that. (Life, as many straight-A students are disappointed to learn, is nothing like school.) Or to put it another way – a stranger buying one of my books for $2.99 or $3.99 is a vastly superior kind of approval than an editor or an agent asking for a complete manuscript.

TSM also asks:

Do you consider other self-published authors to be competition or rivals?

Neither. The fact is a truly voracious reader can consume far, far more books than I or any other writer can produce in a year. Books are not a form of vendor lock-in, where because someone buys a Ford means they won’t buy a Toyota. Books are not a zero-sum game, and just because someone read my book doesn’t mean they won’t go and read a book written by someone else. The proof of this is the Also Purchased bar on a book’s Amazon page – a casual look at the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section on GHOST IN THE SURGE revealed fifteen different writers before I stopped counting.

And who knows? Someone scrolling through my “Also Boughts” might take a chance on a new writer and discover they liked his book – and the same thing might happen to one of my books on someone else’s “Also Bought” page.

-JM