Twenty Books In Twenty Weeks (Blog Edition)
My Next Public Challenge
Historically, I’ve always done better when I made challenges public. Let me bullet point a few reasons why:
- It’s in public – shame, defeat, and guilt sit on one shoulder, while glory, respect and victory sit on the other
- The serial nature of writing in public means I have to start and stick to things – there’s no room for “I did nothing on the goal today” when the clock ticks and you have to come up with something
- The act of writing about something is the act of teaching it and the act of learning it forming an Ouroboros kind-of sourdough culture which pushes me on
These are all stuff I’ve written about before, and part of the problem I think I’m having with the blog is that it’s all old news. We need to inject some metaphorical steroids directly into the muscles that power this little project.
So, let’s talk about that.
What’s The Plan, Writer Man?
Months back, I wrote a three-part series on a popular online author concept called 20 Books to 50k. I wrote about what it is, how one might go about doing it, and what I’d hypothetically do.
I looked today and there are twenty weeks until January 1st, 2025.
Recently, I’ve at once been feeling sick and thus deflated, but have also set my sights on a couple of big financial goals that I can’t achieve unless I do some correspondingly big moves.
Putting two and two together, I’ve decided I’m going to try and prove something to myself and to you guys and I’m going to try and get the 20 Books Challenge done in 20 weeks.
Under my own name.
Starting from mostly-scratch.
Breaking Down The Goal
Because it’s very easy to say, “I’ll release twenty books” and then shift the goalposts, I’m going to make it clear to everyone what I plan to do.
- No “a short story is a book”
- No “Non-fiction collections of my blog posts count!”
- And No “Gumroad Guru 16-page PDF for $27” releases either
This challenge will follow along the lines of those 20 Books to 50k posts; it’ll be fiction books, full-length, and published as though I were a fiction author* making a living** as a fiction author.
What I’m Going To Do
I summarised it in a sentence above, so I won’t go into a huge amount of detail here. I will write a full-length fiction book every week until the end of 2024, for a total of twenty books.
While I’m going to aim to make those twenty novels, that’s an absurd amount of work. I will probably have to release a combination of serials, shorts, novellas and novels to make the count.
I will release them under my own name. (No using my pulp pen names and saying, “Take my word on this. Trust me I did it!”)
* I will act like a professional fiction author, because that’s the goal.
The Figures Involved
** Let’s start with the figure you’re interested in: My goal, as stated above, is to “make a living” with this project to prove or disprove whether the original 20 Books to 50k idea is valid.
The idea is that as a fiction author, you’ll earn around $50k a year – a living – when you hit the threshold of twenty books. I think that I ran the numbers in the previous posts on the subject, so I won’t do it again.
I’m defining “a living” as the average UK wage, because that’s what’s relevant to the majority of the blog readers. So, the figure is £2,990 a month, or £35880 a year. Or, you can take the $50,000 a year figure from the original challenge, which works out to $4166 a month, or, in British money, £3,245 a month.
Pretty much the same.
Now, some will disagree with what constitutes “a living.” All I’ll say on this is the following: The nature of selling books is international and the figures I’ll report on will be as well. So, if you live in a lower cost of living country, congratulations, you don’t get penalised by Amazon if you sell a book for £4.99 and you live in Cambodia. If, on the other hand, you live in Elon Musk’s Cryogenic Space Pod in the middle of Silicon Valley and your living costs are $25000 a month and you’re on Reddit telling all the personal finance people that earning sub-$500k a year is poverty-tier, go and cry somewhere else.
Let’s talk about the real figures though – outside of money.
A full length book is arbitrarily defined by me right now as 60,000 words plus.
That means in the next 140 days, I will have to write 1.2 million words of fiction. That’s 8,500 words a day. Then I’ll have to publish it. That’s in addition to the blog, Vault (I know – it might seem like a bad joke but it is coming imminently,) and that’s without taking a day off, which I’ll inevitably have to do.
Let’s move on, noting only two things:
There’s some trickery I could employ to decrease that number, but I’m writing everything from scratch. So while I might have a serial that also releases as a complete book later, it’s mostly going to be me vs. an 8500 word daily target.
I don’t want to talk myself out of this on day one, and I’m dangerously close to doing that.
The “Actual” Goal
It’s very easy to talk numbers and gas yourself up about the project and how rich you’re going to be.
However… money is a result of process. And that’s what I’m trying to accomplish with this challenge.
To write probably close to 11-12000 words a day – this project plus my other commitments – I will need to rearrange my life, brain and business around it. This will provide heaps of good things.
Secondly, it’ll take me from semi-pro low-stakes pulp writer to “real” writer with some skill and strategy behind my approach.
Thirdly, it gives me some authority to talk about things based on real world, observable measurements. Writing, writing fiction, publishing, attractive dozens of attractive women as groupies, and so on. It’s one thing to be a copywriter-blogger making claims, it’s another to be verifiable.
Fourthly, I’m really hoping, as alluded to in the intro, that I can use this frankly ridiculous challenge to break out of my current stupor and back into the cyborg writing machine you all know and I suspect I can once again be.
What You’ll See On This Blog
Updates
For those of you who’ve been around for the long haul and remember the Niche Site Challenge, I plan to do something similar this time. Once a week, I’ll write an update on the challenge, thoughts for the challenge and other bits and pieces.
Outside of that, I’m hoping that this somewhat extreme challenge will lead to knowledge seep into other business and life lessons, and thus will start a renaissance of the blog project.
Speaking of which…
Difficulties and Upgrades to the System
As written above, I will have to write at a speed equivalent to my most productive periods consistently for four months, in an area I’m not as well-versed with (copywriting vs. fiction writing) and not taking into account I’m no longer a workaholic twenty-something who can burn the candle at both ends and keep going.
With that said, I’m not confident at all that I can do this, but I am confident that doing it is possible. It will, however, require me building new systems and achieving efficiency in ways that are currently unknown to me.
In short, it’s a big challenge and at the very least, I expect to dramatically change in these short four (and a half) months.
Final Thoughts
So that’s it for the challenge as of now. It has been stated, it shall be done, or I’ll be judged, hanged, drawn, quartered and my remains toasted over an open-fire with thousands of people jeering at my failure to do what I said I would.
(Just kidding – it’s been a long time since thousands of people read this blog.)
As I’ve committed to updating once a week and it’s twenty weeks exactly until New Year, I guess Wednesdays are as good a day as any to have the weekly updates. So stay tuned for Update 1 next Wednesday.
For other bits – Vault, business stuff, daily blogging – normal service will resume (and hopefully continue, unabated and uninterrupted) tomorrow.
I’m excited about this.