As a prepublished author, have you considered what will be expected of you production-wise once you get published? Since January 1st, I've written 125,000 words.
I'm targeting Silhouette Desire. 50,000 words or thereabouts per book. If I wrote 3 per year, I'd be looking at about 150,000 words written (forget about editing, that's a whole different animal.)
Generally when I'm cranking out a story, I write 7 days a week. I average between 1000 and 1500 words per day. Now, I don't do this every month. I pretty much took March and April off. But I intend to continue with this level of output until National.
A lot of single title (and category) authors write one, maybe two books a year. Nora Roberts is at the other end of the spectrum, writing a gazillion books a year (does the woman sleep?) and I'd like to be somewhere in between.
Currently I work 40 hours per week. The drive to and from eats away another 2 hours. Add in my daughter's after school activities and a tiny bit of social life and my writing time starts to dry up.
If I wrote full time and wrote 1000 words per day, I could write 365,000 words in a year. That would translate to a couple single titles and 3 category books per year. That's my production goal. And 1000 words/day leaves me lots of time for editing, promotion, etc.
How about you? What do you see your production rates being? And can you achieve them?
