I have written quite a few posts recently on pricing your indie books, all of which are stepping stones on the path of me learning it while watching the turbulent changes in the publishing industry and going through bankruptcy and running out of my ghostwriting money and being a novice to indie publishing. The only experience I can rely on is running my startup for 5 years, and the basics that I learned from reading books and articles on how to stay profitable and how to acquire customers and how to do basic accounting and more of the same.

Ryan, this post is for you because in the comment on my last pricing post you asked me to expand on this. I'll dump here what I remember as some basic principles (and which I still use as guidelines) and you tell me if it was helpful, okay?

Many of you have asked me recently how long it takes me to write my books, from start to finish, from the first word of the first draft to the last word of the last draft, before it goes to my editor. I have never actually sat down and calculated the entire process point by point. I've blogged about writing a first draft in 6 weeks (that was like 2 years ago, but it's still true) and haven't touched the topic since. But it seems like a curious math to calculate and write out the stages I'm going through and compare. Well then, shall we do a little math?

1st drafts take me 6 weeks to write (about 120K words total).

Okay, so I went through all my drafts and timelines, and it does seem that typically every 1st draft takes me about 6 weeks (max 7 weeks) to write, and when I write them, I write them fast, and I write a lot, about 3,500 words every day (in about 4 hours), 5 days a week. I take a break for the weekend, for family stuff, and, you know, to wash socks and feed my pet trolls. Some days I can write up to 5,000 words. My goal is to dump shit out of my brain, so I know how the story ends. I don't plan anything, don't plot, I only have a starting picture in mind, a scene, an image, and I go from there.

Let's continue our conversation about book pricing

How long does it take to write a book?