I’d like to announce a new challenge that I have already started and is designed to help me get back on the writing horse and stay there a little longer.
I’m a fan of Dean Wesley Smith’s writing advice. For those unaware of who this is, Dean is an author with hundreds of short stories and novels to his name having written everything from original fiction to Star Trek novelizations. His strategy for making a living writing is to produce as much fiction as he wants in any genre he wants, self publish the vast majority of it through his own publishing company WMG Publishing, and live off the earnings all those stories bring in every year on dozens of platforms. To be clear he’s an award-winning author with a boatload of sales to his name, the point is that he doesn’t need to be a best-selling author or even a household name to make a living.
One post of his that has lived rent-free in my mind for over 10 years now is Making a Living With Short Fiction. It’s one he updates every few years and the claim can seem fairly radical. The idea is that a person dedicating themselves to only writing short fiction every day, submitting those stories to publishers, and later self-publishing those stories in as many forms in as many places as possible will enable someone to make a living in roughly five to six years. It takes producing 180 short stories a year and a living is defined as $48,000 a year.
I’ve decided to take on this challenge.
The current context for my situation is that I have no time for writing. Between working as a financial analyst, being a father to a 3-month-old daughter, owner of two crazy dogs, and husband to an incredible wife my time is severely limited. As a result, I have put no time or effort into producing any fiction for some time now and that has been gnawing at me.
So this challenge is my way of getting back into the habit of writing and getting it to stick.
The original version of the challenge can be found on Dean’s site I will be making a few tweaks to the challenge to suit my personal needs and goals.
From Monday to Friday, I will put my butt in the chair and write for at least one hour. It’s a magical hour that exists after my daughter has had her morning feeding, the dogs have been taken outside, and before work starts at 8 am. No one is awake, I’m not mentally exhausted from working or other responsibilities, and there are few if any distractions.
With that hour I can get roughly 1,000 words of fiction completed. Five days of this and I should have a shiny new short story of 5,000 words waiting for a new home.
The weekends are dedicated to making up any missed writing time, getting that new story sent out to a magazine/anthology/contest of some kind, and ideally getting additional writing done. If it’s accepted I will wait out the period of time the rights revert to me and then I’ll do the following:
- Create a cover.
- Record the audiobook
- Self publish it in ebook, print, and audio form in as many places as possible.
- Combine it with other short stories into anthologies to be sold in ebook, print, and audio in as many places as possible.
If the story is rejected I simply turn around and send it off somewhere else. I will continue to do this until they story has found a home or run out of potential homes in which case I self publish.
If life gets in the way (which it will) then I have the following priority tier:
- Write new fiction
- Send it to market
- Self publish the ebook version
- Self publish the print version
- Anthology ebook and print.
- Self publish the audiobook.
This ensures that at minimum I am constantly producing new stories and getting them published either through magazines or on my own in ebook form.
The main purpose of this challenge is to get me in the habit of writing daily, finishing what I write, and publishing it in some form. Along the way I learn to become a better writer, find my own voice, and build the foundations of a lifelong career. The secondary goal is to bring in some money so that I can dedicate more time to writing, invest that money into improving the quality of what I produce, and start writing novels.
Along the way I will post here what my accomplishments have been, what I’m learning, and how things are progressing. I make no promises as to the consistency of updates, but weekly is the goal. This is to help me keep track, have some form of accountability, and hopefully lead to a fun moment in the future where I look back and think “this is where it all started”.
I know there isn’t another living soul other than me who will see this post any time soon. But for those who come across this later I hope this inspires you to get some writing done of your own. Feel free to share how it’s going. Starting out as a writer can get a little lonely at times and it’s nice to have someone to bounce ideas or accomplishments off of now and then.