SNM018: Write Fast and Make Money
There is no skill more valuable to the modern author, blogger or reviewer than the ability to write fast.
Time is your most valuable resource.
When You Write Fast, You Take Control of Your Destiny
Perfectionism becomes a trap that keeps us from crossing the finish line. We wait until every element is perfect and spend years or decades waiting for the perfection. This turns into a fear that traps us in a state of inaction. We lose time. Projects take far too long.
Perfectionists die in poverty.
Authors that Write Fast Make More Money
The average self-published book on Amazon is $2.99. The author gets a commission of around $2 for each sale. Would you rather be perfect or prolific?
A perfectionist who releases a novel every two years sells a thousand copies of his book a month. He’s a great writer and is making $2000 in pure profit from his amazing book.
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An average author, who writes fast, releases an average book every month. In two years, he has released twenty-four books in a series. They are formulaic and will never win any awards. He only sells 100 copies of his first book every month. That’s $200. But all 100 of those people get hooked on the series and buy the rest. He makes $4800 a month from his books. He also made money for the entire two years that the perfectionist author was struggling to finish his perfect work.
Over time, the average author will grow faster and faster. His wealth will separate and surpass our perfectionist author. In ten years, the perfect author has released five books and makes $10,000 a month. That’s a nice living. Until you look at the “mediocre” author who now makes $24,000 a month.
James Patterson Can Write Fast
I slightly overexaggerated in the audio. He doesn’t write 100 novels a year. However, he HAS written 147 novels since 1976 with 67 books that became New York Times #1 Bestsellers. That comes out to a written, edited, published and launched book every 100 days!
You might call him a “guilty pleasure” and not consider him a serious author. But he sells more books than Grisham, King and Brown COMBINED every single year.
Isaac Asimov was another author who knew how to write fast. He lived for only 72 years and wrote over five hundred books. Even if you’ve never heard of him before this moment, I guarantee he touched your life; he created the word “robotics.”
Quantity has a quality all on its own.
Write Fast with Your Voice
If you are slow with your hands, there are plenty of amazing tools that will record your voice and turn it into text. This tools have been on the market for nearly twenty years now and are much better than they were in the 1990s. You can use your smartphone to record blog posts in the car.
To see exactly how good Dragon Dictate is, take a peek at the transcript for this episode. I drop the mp3 of this episode into the software and copy it into the show transcript without any touches myself. Yes, there are some mistakes and no punctuation, but it’s very fast, and you can quickly fix these mistakes.
Tools I Use to Write Fast
I only add software to my workflow if it increases my speed, the quality of my product or makes life easier. I very rarely add new tools to my personal writing formula. When you make a living from writing, any tools that can save you time has a massive effect.
Write Like Hemingway
The great American author turned boring, complex writing into a message that the masses could understand. This tool analyzes your sentences to see if they are too long and too boring.
What is the reading level of your audience?
Deep Research Before You Write Fast
Research on the flow forces your brain to switch between receiving and expressing information. Going back and forth slows down the writing process.
Key Points:
- Perfectionism Can Crush You
- Research and Outline First
- Use the Right Tools
Resources Mentioned:
Baby Sleep Baby Happy (rewritten and edited from 8k to 11k words in on day)
James Patterson Writes on Yellow Legal Paper
IRS Rules on Foreign Tax Exclusions
Send in your questions to podcast [at] servenomaster [dot] com
Tools I Use:
Best Voice to Text App (iPhone)
Free Voice to Text App (Android)
Sponsor:
[spp-transcript]
Ready to leave the job you hate and find the fastest path to online wealth? Learn the best asset you have right now to leverage income and build financial run way in my bestseller "Fire Your Boss." Click here to download the book for free.
My problem with planning “quickie” books is they end up having more and more time-consuming parts than I planned. I started a mechanics/process of writing guide as something to keep me productive when I needed a break from my “big” (i.e. a traditional 150-200 page) book, figuring it’d be 20-25k words and a few months. Now it’s almost a year old and looking like it’s going to end up being a “big” book.
And when I finally get done, my “final” draft ends up getting pulled back 3-6 times for typos I missed in the proofreading pass, things I realized I forgot to say, and minor screw-ups in the layout. The fixing of which cuts into my time to be writing my next book (usually about a week).
This can happen and it’s a form of mission creep. Sometimes you have to accept that you can’t put all your ideas into a book. I have books on similar topics because I always have more to say. People prefer to consume books of a certain length and prefer multiple books of that size to one massive monster.