Author Goals In Words Per Month

Many authors of novels and literary works have words per day, per week, or per month goals. Especially writers of novels, as once they get a brand name and following they must pump out the books to keep up with demand. Think of authors like Tom Clancy, Steven King, Isaac Asimov and Ann Rice or how about the “Alphabet Writer” Sue Grafton? These writers can finish off a novel in thirty days and we are talking larger novels not the ‘Chick-Lit’ genre romance novels. These are some of my heroes and some of these authors have helpers too.
Recently my writing mentor; Dina Giolitto, a professional content creator, copywriter, and brand consultant ask me some questions about my writing. Which really made me stop and think about authors in general and output goals. She asked;
“You’ve always submitted articles in categorical groups (I like to call this “firing them off in rounds”)… but now you’ve added a thematic element. Your “Read this Article If” series made a fairly big splash and earned you the spotlight on the EzineArticles.com Blog. How has this proved to be a valid article-marketing tactic? Have your traffic numbers gone up accordingly?”
Indeed they had, as without realizing it I had approached my writing in the same way Isaac Asimov had, sheer volume and like Sue Gafton, across categories and following a sequence. Currently I am writing 285,000 words approximately per month, for instance in October I rolled out 570 articles of approximately 500 words or so. Of course over nine months I have written over 3000 articles and this accounts for the acceleration as well as the more refined, short, and tighter articles. Is this volume of writing unheard of? Well it certainly is to online writing, but not necessarily a novelist under deadlines for a 1-3 month period.
There is a National Novel Writers Month or “NaNoWriMo” contest each year, which is a sprint to the finish 50,000-word novel from scratch each November. Of course 285,000 words clearly blows the 50,000-word novelist out the door. But they say novel writing is much harder. Even the events organizers say that word counts matter in this race and those words can be crap. Chris Baty is the founder of the event and although he says that most of the novels are not very good, several of the authors have received book deals and that is common each year. Now there are 42,000 participants and about 6,000 actually complete their works with the 50,000 words. Many of the top writers of the contest write up to 2,000 words per day which is a lot at 60,000 words per month. Currently I am averaging some 285,000 words per month or 4.75 times that number.
My “Read This Article if…” series seems to be quite successful and of course I knew it would work when I thought of it, but even so was shocked at how well it worked. (Up to 150 of those now and plan to do many more.) Additionally since my goal is to make people think, I decided to create a “What if…” series which has also done quite well surprisingly enough, but not nearly as well as the success of the “Read This Article if…” articles. I am now testing the waters for another series of articles which will be the; “I want…” series. Titles such as “I want to be Rich,” “I want to be a Millionaire,” and “I want a Perfect Body” and I will of course be helping people by offering pointers, observations, and experience of how to get there. I started by testing the waters by writing an article; “I want Love” which is a natural human desire and it was well received but did not perform as well the other two series or as well as I had hoped. I do believe that people searching often type into the Search Engines; “I want a New Sports Car” or “I want A Better Job” and they also type in; “I need…” which could be another series. Why to people type this into the computer search engines? Well it probably goes back to childhood as the kids in the shopping cart begin to learn to talk; “I want…” and later start demanding things like “I want Tony the Tiger,” “I want Chocolate Pop Tarts,” or “I want Fruit Loops.” See my point. It is human nature for all of us to want.
My advice to authors is to set some goals of the number of words you wish to write each day and do it, no matter if you are an article writer or novelist. And if you are not up to the level of novelist yet, well there are always lots of articles you can write. Get creative with your writing and your strategy of how you will accomplish your word counts on your way to becoming a successful writer. Think on this.