I want to be a writer

This morning I was listening to podcasts about being a writer while walking the dog. There was a podcast on self publishing, writing and marketing books by Simon Whistler called The Rocking Self Publishing Podcast. He was interviewing an author called Mark Wayne McGinnis who wrote books called Scrapyard Ship (Scrapyard Ship Series Book 1)
. Yesterday I had a look to see if I would buy one of the books to have a listen or read and it didn’t get many good reviews. Most of the reviews of the books were saying that the stories were not very good. Yet it seems that this guy is selling books and making some money. He writes for three or four hours per day and the aim is to have 1500 or 2000 words every day. I feel sure that if I set my mind to it I could write decent books, if not great books and hopefully make some money doing it.

Going undercover with Kindle Spy

In the podcast he mentioned some software called Kindle Spy and I had a look at it and decided to buy it myself. I have just been using it for a little while and it seems to be quite interesting and useful. There is not much point in having books on the Kindle where there is no money because nobody is buying books in a category or type. It is quite easy to drill down into the data and find topics to write about and hopefully some of that will match up with topics that I know something about so that I could create a good book. I started by looking at books about graphic design for the Mac and in particular books about using Pixelmator and I was bit disappointed to see that there’s probably not much money in that. That is a shame because I would like to write a book about Pixelmator for iPad. If you go a little bit more general into graphic design then there is more money in that so maybe I could get the book into a more general topic but do it using Mac and iPad software.

Show me the money!

I’m not sure that my book about writing and using technology to get ideas generated and out of the head and onto the page would be a good moneyspinner. But who cares, I have the book written already and it is close to being put out there into the wide world of publishing. It seems to me that there is very little money in blogging and so I should minimise the number of words I write for blogs and start writing for books instead. I still need to have the blogs, but I should keep the articles to between 300 and 400 words rather than my articles of over 1000 words that I tend to do. As for the videos that I make I think those are a useful added value to my books and are worth having as part of my portfolio. Maybe I will make more money from those when I have some books also selling.

Make a plan David and do it today

It wouldn’t be difficult for me to have a plan to write 3000 to 4000 words per day and have set dates for when books had to be let loose into the world. I already have a little bit of a organisation set up in OmniFocus for my blogging and I think I should change that. Maybe if I have one day per week when I am blogging and one day per week when I am making a video and the rest of the time to be writing for books. I have got to go where the money is! I need an income and need to be able to get out of the summer job and I need to do it soon. I am pretty sure that I spent too much time farting about and being unproductive.

At the moment I don’t really count how many words I write each day because some days I don’t write any words and other days I write more than 2000 or 3000. So perhaps what I should do is to have a daily document in which I paste all of the words that I write for that day. I would have to be quite disciplined about this, but I think I could do it. The question is where I put these words for keeping a count? I could use Scrivener as it is the application that I should have open every day anyway, for doing my writing or I could use a plain text file that I keep in Dropbox or iCloud that I access through Byword. Or I could do both with a bit of automation.

A set time per day for reading

Every author that talks about writing says that it is absolutely vital to be a reader. I do read a lot, but it tends not to be books. I did buy a book yesterday to put on my Kindle application on the iPad. I also have a paperback book that I have started but I’m struggling to get back into reading. I particularly enjoyed the first two books in the series of this paperback book, it is just that I prefer to read on my electronic device. I am thinking that a particular good time for reading would be late at night. I should have an hour after Victoria has gone to bed, maybe two hours. It would be a good way to finish the day.