Yeah, I just did the math for the earnings per word for my Kindle Vella story and although I knew it was bad, I hadn’t realized just how bad.
As of this moment, my Vella story has earned me $0.01833520 per word. Not per month, but for all time. I’ll bring this up again in a few months and see if things still look as pitiful.
Admittedly, I’m doing no advertising or other promotion of the story, because I have other priorities, and I always intended this just to be a way to get me writing regularly again, but the sad fact is, I have a lot of projects that I want to do, that will also earn me significantly more (I can’t even stress how much more) money than this project has been earning me.
I wanted to finish this in a reasonable time frame, but I just don’t think it makes sense in any world to do more than the bare minimum for this until I’m ready to actually sit down and finish it wholesale because I’m ready to publish it as a book.
Which, thank goodness I fully plan to sell this as a book later. Otherwise, I would feel like it was a lost cause and put it so far onto the back burner that I might never get around to picking it up again. I have a series I’ve let that happen to. I’m not happy about it, because I like writing the books, but I don’t like writing the books more than I like writing the other books in my other series and they make me a lot more money, so I’ve kept putting off that next book. It’s been about five years at this point.
I really need to spend more time writing.
And that’s another thing. This year, I’ve decided (as of this moment, to be honest) to stop saying I need to write faster. Because yes, on some level I do need to write faster and I wish I was better at that, but the true, underlying, number one reason I don’t write “faster” is because I don’t spend enough time writing.
So it’s time to own up to that and start talking about it in a way that is honest with myself.
Yes, there are days where I spend plenty of time writing and maybe I don’t write as much on some of those days as I wished because I’m not a 1,000 words per hour writer. But. And it’s a big but. Those days don’t happen as often as the days where I just do not spend enough time writing and end up with a word count commensurate with that effort.
Ah. Honesty is hard to swallow sometimes. And this post is a bit of an accountability post for me.
All that said, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my 2022 goals even as late as it is into the new year (quarter one is done, for goodness’ sake). I’ll be back with a post about it when I’m ready.