Reflections on One Million Words, Money and Effort

A million words seems a lot of words to write at the beginning of any journey and most writers cannot imagine getting to that point where the work they have done and the effort they put into rewrites and editing and the time that you spent writing, and over time you do become better at writing and at marketing and the things that a writer needs to build their work with.

It is not easy but a million words are possibly, it is said that after a writer writes a million words, they can be considered an expert. Writers, if anything can be experts, but it does take time to become that expert. About the same length of time, it takes to make a lot of money. It is not every day that talent comes and makes a big splash in the literary world.

If it is the online world then there is a case for saying after about a million words or closer to ten thousand blog posts, the writer of said blog will be considered an expert in their field or niche. This is really planning for long term. In terms of money, it is probably slow to begin with, and the effort that a writer puts in is at the highest it could be.

Still, it is fun to break that idea down, how long does it take to get to a million words? Assume that on average, you write 500 words a day, and then in about 5 years you will have written just over a million words. Then think about it in business terms, if you continue with your effort, the money and stability for any business is at about the 5-year mark.

So what would happen if as writers we challenged ourselves, looking to work better, meaning smarter and pushing our writing to the next level. If the next level were a published book, what would it take to publish it sooner than 5 years?

Not just with editing and publishing it but with writing it, getting the words right and simply showing it to literary agents and other who would be interesting in our writing?

We all have talent, but talent as the million-word mark does take time to get to that goal. How much money do you want to make and how much effort you are willing to put in dictates your goal.