I have a confession right out of the gate. I started writing my artificial intelligence novel before I started this blog. In fact, here are a few facts about my initial novel progress to date:
- I have about 17,000 words of a rough draft.
- With my current formatting – I have no idea if it is close to book format – is about 40 pages.
- I’ve kept track of time spent so far: about 36 hours of writing.
- I also spent about 4 hours on this blog so far, most of that in setting up the website, configuring WordPress, etc.
I will continue to track time spent both on the book and here on the blog. Since I’m a numbers guy, it helps to see how much I’ve put in, and how that translates to progress. When I don’t track some sort of data, I tend to just start puttering around.
I did a small bit of research on how long a novel should be, and of course found a wide range of answers. First thing I found out is that your work is not tracked by pages, since they are so dependent on the format. Instead, you count words. Fortunately, since I’m using OpenOffice Writer (part of the free OpenOffice suite) I can use the word count feature.
It seems that the type of book (e.g. fiction or nonfiction), final format (printed or ebook), and pricing have a lot to do with the expected number of words. Non-fiction books and ebooks seem to be shorter – as low as 15,000 to 50,000 or more. Novels seem to be in the 80,000 – 120,000 range, unless you’re Stephen King, and then its just under a billion. It seems that ebooks can more readily be marketed and sold as short books and novellas, hence the smaller range. Additionally, they can be priced to match the smaller size, down to $1 for a shorter novella-length book. Some authors trying to break into writing will do a series of books with a common theme/characters. That way, they can offer the first installment or two for free or a very low price, to get readers interested in the story.
As always, if anyone has better or more detailed information, please feel free to comment. I would love comments! It really is one of the main reasons I’m doing this blog – more on that in a coming blog entry.
Here are a couple of resources I used to get an introduction to how to get a book written, published / self-published, and marketed. Again, I am amazed at how many people are willing to take the time and energy to develop websites that help people, with all sorts of projects. I hope to follow in their giving path.
http://nicholaserik.com/writing-career-blueprint/
http://nicholaserik.com/write-to-market-failure-lessons/
https://www.janefriedman.com/self-publish-your-book/
