In order to meet my goal of writing two books this year, I’ve decided to write those two books back to back. Even though I have the outline ready for a brand new project, I’ve decided to table that for now and flesh out one of my established series. That way I’ll have content for a rapid release self-publishing schedule.

My old mantra of “why write a sequel to a book no one will ever read?” isn’t sounding so good anymore. If I want to self-publish, and do so in a seriously and productive manner, I realize that’s just going to have to happen these days. So the next two books I’m going to write will be the sequels to Altered Egos and round out a trilogy. They won’t be the only books in that series, but I figure having the initial trilogy completed so I can release them all together will be helpful. It also has two additional benefits: it increases my backlist and I think they’ll be easier to write.

To that end, rather than write one book at a time, I’m going to treat it like the second Pirates of the Caribbean movies and write them more or less at the same time. Let’s just hope the books are better than those movies. I mean, I thought the third one was entertaining I guess, but the second one … woof.

Anyway, I’m being a lot more diligent and strategic with my time here. I’m shooting for 80K a book and will make my outlines accordingly as if I’m writing one, big 160K word book instead which is something I know I can do, because that’s what Land of Sky and Blood turned out to be.

Here’s the genius part. I’d love to take credit for this, but I heard it on the Six Figure Author Podcast. I figured it took me around 4-5 months to write a book, but I’ve never really been deliberate about that. I know it takes me around 45 minutes to write 800 words. To that end, in order to complete 160K words, that means I need to have 200 sessions of at least 45 minutes long a piece.

In order to stay on track then, let’s say I want to complete 10 sessions a week. Whether that’s two per day Monday-Friday or scattered about, that’ll be up to the week’s schedule, I suppose. The important thing is that if I set the goal of 10 writing sessions a week, well now I don’t have to guess, but know that I’ll be finished both books in 20 weeks or about 5 months. And here I always thought math was the enemy.

Writing two books back to back sounds daunting, but setting the goal of writing ten times a week sounds much more doable. And if I keep at it for five months, well by the end I’ll have two books out of the deal. Not a bad deal at all!