366,317 words for 2016 + Covenant First Draft Finished! Plus, musings on my first full year as an indy author.

Yesterday, I finished Chapter 34 of my Covenant first draft, bringing my total word count for the year to 366,317, plus whatever the word count of this blog post turns out to be. I wish I could say that all 366,317 words were first draft, but I started out the year with a rewrite of the fourth Dragon Apocalypse book Cinder, which got counted in ever decreasing percentages I went through multiple drafts. There's also some bonus points in there for bring Dragon Apocalypse: the Complete Collection to market. This collection has far exceeded my expectations, selling out twice at conventions, first at the Fayetteville Comiccon, then at the NC Comiccon. I don't know why I should be surprised by this. It's got a great cover and the physical book is probably my best designed yet. When I first started publishing my own work, I had the basic skills needed to get a book into print, but now that I've handled a dozen titles, I'm actually putting out books that I think are probably formatted at or above the level of quality of things I've had put out by actual publishers.

The one downside of being my own publisher is that it's time consuming. It subtracts from the hours I should be writing or at least daydreaming about new books and keeps my attention on stuff I've already written. I felt it this fall especially while I was writing the Covenant first draft, since I was also designing marketing material for the Dragon Apocalypse to use at conventions, as well as experimenting with Facebook ads. The time for business and marketing side of being a publisher has to come from somewhere, and in my case it came from the daydreaming and creative side of being a writer.

I'm not complaining about his, by the way. I knew when I made the decision a few years back to fully transition into indy publishing that it was going to eat up a lot of time and force me to learn new skills. A lot of these new skills bring creative satisfaction. For the person who's never designed a book cover, you might look at the Dragon Apocalypse cover and think, what's the big deal? It's seven words stuck over art done by someone else. But the reality is that this is the end product of easily twenty hours or more of labor. First, I went through a lot of initial sketches of a layout before deciding what I wanted from the artist. Then she and I had multiple drafts to consider, and feedback on increasingly small details as the cover developed. Then, once I had the art, the text work I'd planned to use just didn't seem to look right on the cover. So, I had to go through at least a dozen different font variations, and once I found the fonts that looked balanced, I spent hours tweaking the blend of red to yellow in the letters to give it the right fiery glow. It's a lot of work spent on seven words, but the end result is creative satisfaction.

Still, I wasn't just a publisher this last year. I did write two complete novel first drafts, Big Ape and Covenant. Writing two novels in a year isn't shabby. I go into 2017 with three unpublished novels in the pipeline, the raw material I'll need for a great year of publishing.

Looking back, I'm no longer sure that my infatuation with using word count to track my writing career is the best measure. When I was only an author and other people were dedicated to publishing and promoting my books, word count was a decent tools. Now, since I'm partially a publisher, I'm concerned with other metrics, like how many books I'm selling and how much money is coming in. I'm please to report that these metrics also provide me with a good deal of satisfaction. I haven't added up the totals yet, but 2016 was probably the most money I've earned from writing in the last seven or eight years. I did have a better year all the way back when I got advances for Dragonforge and Dragonseed in the same year, plus sold foreign rights to these books as well, resulting in a pretty nice influx of cash. But the problem with getting a lot of money from an advance is the advance part of it: You're literally taking money out of your future income. So, with traditional publishing, I'd have years with a lot of money, including money for books not yet written, followed by years with greatly reduced income, since I'd already been paid for the books I was turning in. Once a book was in print it might take years to earn out its advance.

Indy publishing has flipped this formula. Now, I work unpaid up front. I shell out money for covers and ads. Whenever a book comes out, I'm starting in a hole as far as income goes. But, the nice thing is that most of the places I publish ebooks pay me monthly. Once I get past my initial expenses, the books turn into a monthly flow of revenue that is easy to track, easy to budget, and paid like clockwork.

For 2017, in addition to bringing more superhero novels into print, I'm planning to try out even more marketing venues. Goodread ads seem like they'd be worth a shot, and I will probably be bringing out the Butterfly Cage books as Kindle Select at first, which will open up direct advertising on Amazon. BookBub also has a paid advertising program for non-discounted books I want to check out.

Looking past 2017, right now I'm 70% certain I'll return to the Bitterwood universe to write another novel or two sometime in 2018. Whenever I go back and look over my Bitterwood stuff, I realize how much I miss some of the characters. It's still my most fully realized fictional world, and there are still plenty of stories that could be told there.

Okay. At some point in that last paragraph, I hit 1000 words for this post. So, I close out 2016 with 367,317 words written.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take a nap.