Do you spend half an hour on social media before writing? That’s ten bucks. Not every writer has the cash on hand to spend on time-saving tools or hired help, but assigning value to your time can help in other ways. Everything, from a round of developmental editing to cover design, is fair game as a way to buy back more of your time. If tools like Grammarly or ProWritingAid speed up your editing even by a few hours per book, you’re looking at significant savings.Īlmost every aspect of being an indie author can be hired out-for a price. How many books are you planning on formatting? That price tag starts looking reasonable pretty fast. If you can go from four hours with free tools to one hour using Vellum, then you’ve saved sixty bucks. Tools like Vellum or Atticus cost money but make formatting books significantly faster. Once you have a hypothetical hourly wage, making decisions on how to spend your time becomes much simpler. Same thing when you learn to write faster or edit more efficiently. As you earn more per book, your hours become more valuable. These numbers will change throughout your writing career. How long did it take to write and publish? How much money did it make? If the resulting wage looks too low-many novels don’t earn enough to pay a minimum wage-then fall back on the previous method. If you already have a book out that’s earned some money, then use that actual number to estimate the value of your time. Not a fortune, but it’s above minimum wage, and it gives us a baseline number to work with. Divide that by our estimated two hundred hours, and we’re looking at $20 an hour. Using the SFWA pro rate for short stories of $.08 per word, we get $4,000 for our 50,000-word book. How long does it take to write a book? Let’s estimate that we can write a fifty-thousand-word novel in one hundred hours, then edit and publish it in another hundred. In the spirit of valuing our time, let’s keep this simple. How can we assign a dollar value to work that isn’t directly earning a wage? The trickiest part, once we start to value our time, is figuring out exactly what it’s worth. So, how do we know what our time is worth? If something needs to be done, we’re the ones who do it, and if we aren’t careful, all that valuable time disappears fast. After all, we’re responsible for the entire product, from outline to the complete marketing plan. Your minutes have worth, and how you spend them is as important as how you spend your money.Īs indie authors, we tend to have a strong do-it-yourself attitude. If you’re looking to save a few minutes, you can skip the rest of this article and just keep that one thought in mind. THE INDIE FILES: Balancing the Indie Workload SFWA Middle Grade and Young Adult Writers.Operating Policies and Procedures (OPPM).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |