Something that I imagine a lot of writers have trouble with is a lack of competition. In fact, most self-employed people will have to deal with this at one stage or another.
When you write a book, there’s no real external pressure to get it done. Unless you’re about to have the lights switched off for lack of payment, there isn’t really any reason to get a book written, or a website created to any particular schedule.
This leads to books sat in the top drawer. It leads to half-finished sales pages or businesses un-started.
The answer I’ve found is to compete with myself. This article is just a few of the ways in which you could do this that I’ve found helpful.
Build A Chain
This post is part of my daily writing topic series. I’m in competition with the lazy part of my schedule, because I publicly fail if I don’t keep the chain up.
Public Accountability
Some writers use little counters on their site. Others just say they are going to do something and then do it. Others tell their mum or something. You’re forcing competition on yourself if you force yourself into the public eye.
(For counters, I bought Scrivener because it has a counter within the document so I can see my own progress.)
Neither of those are competing per Se., but they’re good practices.
Here are some actual competition things.
Competing Pen Names
Say you write an e-book for a particular market – How to install solar panels for toy train enthusiasts.
I haven’t done any research on this, but I’d imagine with that sort of niche, you could easily be a market leader. It’s easy if you’re the only person to write a book on a subject.
That said, inevitably when you write a book, you could probably do it better. There’ll be new stuff in a few months and you’ll learn more anyway.
Why not create a feud between book one and two? Try something completely different – a new writing style, writing the same book in ebonics, marketing it completely differently?
Compete with word count
If you get started like I did, writing $5 articles for sites like oDesk, then not wasting you whole day for $20 is one of your major concerns. When you only get paid $0.01 a word, you don’t want to spend five minutes on that word.
You can compete directly against the clock here. Time is money. If it takes you fifteen minutes to write a 500 word article, try and shave time off.
You’ll find that in the beginning, you’ll go from fifteen to twelve minutes just by concentrating. By typing in a quick plan and streamlining, you’ll probably get it down to ten minutes or less. Then the real fun begins. Just as sprinters will work for months to get their times down by a fraction of a second, you can do the same with your writing.
It makes writing boring articles more challenging. It’s also useful in the long run, because when you move on to other things you’ll have a writing speed that outstrips nearly everyone.
Compete with yourself: Drafts
Many writers spend years polishing their work. They could do with working a little competitive game into their system: compete to see how few drafts you can write.
If you normally write five drafts, then get it down to four. The ultimate goal is to write something as a first draft and have it polished enough that it’s either publishable, or it can go to a copy editor/proofreader for the last stubborn mistakes you’re never going to see.
Most rewriting is done out of fear. Trust me, in a world of one star reviews, people will let you know if you need to do something differently. There’s no use worrying until you get those reviews though.
Compete with yourself… money.
Money is the root of all evil. It causes no end to worry, a cloud over our heads… so on and so forth. A lot of writers and other artists seem to take pride in their eschewing of money, saying, “I’m doing it for the art,” or, “You have to sacrifice money and value other things.”
Regardless of how you feel about that sort of attitude, the fact is it’s missing a great opportunity for some internal competition.
I recently stumbled upon BookReport. It’s a great tool that shows you how much you’ve earned on Amazon’s KDP system (the publishing platform for Amazon.)
In real-time, it gives you a breakdown of how much you’ve earned today, which of your books are doing well and all manner of other statistics.
Each one of those stats is a metric you can improve upon and compete with.
I hadn’t released any books in a long time at the end of 2015. But I put BookReport on and left it on as I worked. The constant “You have earned $2.01 today” or ” you have earned £0.00 today” were there for me to look at whenever I decided to watch a TV show or slack off.
That led to my super-hectic 2016 publishing schedule.
Closing Thoughts
These are just some of the ways in which you can use internal competition to achieve more and keep yourself on track.
If you can think of any others, drop them in the comments!
P.S. BookReport is awesome. It’s free until you earn $1000 a month, and then it costs $10 which you’ll be happy to pay. Everyone who publishes to Amazon should get it.
P.P.S Let me know what you think of these daily topics.