If you’re reading this part of the blog, I’m going to assume that, like me, your goal is to one day make a living as an author of fiction. If that’s the case, let’s start by going over some sobering statistics.
The 2014 Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest Author Survey gathered information from 9,210 writers about their income. When the results were tallied, they found that 54% of traditionally published authors and almost 80% of self-published authors were making less than $1,000 a year from their work. About 70% of the surveyed writers earned less than $10,000 a year, and only the top 2% of authors made a good living from writing alone.
These facts are daunting, but they make sense. The average person reads at most a few books a year, and even an avid reader who gets through a book a week only consumes fifty-two. The supply of books vastly outstrips the demand, so readers quite naturally choose to invest their limited time in only the very best.
Does this mean we should give up on our dream of becoming career authors? Absolutely not. But it does mean we need to commit to writing like aspiring Olympians, and aim from the very start at being one of the best in the world.
That realization is what got me started on the Practice Write Project. For the last fifteen years I’ve tried the standard approach for up-and-coming authors, and to put it bluntly, it hasn’t worked. I can put together a tolerable story, and maybe could eventually convince someone to publish it, but it’s not good enough to land in that 2% where I could earn a decent living.
After I recognized this problem I struggled with it for several months, and eventually came to the following conclusion: this failure is entirely my fault. My problem is not lack of talent. It’s not bad luck. It’s not because I haven’t networked enough or kissed the right behinds. My problem is that writing is a skill, and I haven’t invested enough time in the right kinds of practice to master it.
So instead of continuing to do the standard approach over and over and hoping for a different result, I’m going to try to find a new path based on the most recent findings from the psychological study of human expertise. The best approach yet discovered is called deliberate practice, and if you’re sick of just writing and writing and hoping to someday get a break, it’ll hit you like a blast of fresh air.
If you write purely for the joy of it, this project is probably not for you. Deliberate practice is often difficult, boring, frustrating, time-consuming, and overall not very fun. But so far it’s led to improvement in every field where it’s been applied, and I believe that writing will be no different. In this blog I’ll record what works, cut what doesn’t, and try to leave a few footprints for other writers to follow. I hope you enjoy.
Welcome to the Practice Write Project. Let’s sit down, and get started.