Word Count, Vol. 3: 89259 (Pretty sure I miscalculated and didn’t count a chapter; there’s forty chapters, and I enter each chapter’s word count by calculator every week since every time I edit I usually add or chop a bit, and last week’s word count was 88k something. My gross input is always 4900 words or above every week.) Thanks to All Who Bought Echo! And BIG THANKS to Melissa, Barbara, Ian, Lorna, [anonymous], Lisa, Meg, Matt, Bobby, F.T., Alice Smith, Leslie Coop, Richard, Shauna, Sydney, Pam, Jessica and now Angela for posting AMAZING reviews on Amazon!!! Ashley too for the 5 star on Nook!
News: Finally, FINALLY, am I getting to the part where the world is coming down around Atriya. I’ll finish this part up, write the epilogue, then do a solid 2 months of nothing but editing to smooth everything over. I’m excited! If you all early buyers of Echo remember, the original synopsis referred to Atriya as “crippled.” Well I removed that from the synopsis ‘cos it doesn’t really happen in vol.1. Anyways, No Spoilers! If you are a writer, I wish you inspired drafting and insightful editing!!!
Dirty Sci-Fi Buddha 
I am intrigued now–will have to check Echo out!
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Thank You! It’s not a comedy, though, haha! It’s pretty dark, sorry if the ad was misleading.
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You enter wordcounts by hand??? I use a dedicated software product called StoryBox that’s like a project manager/wordprocessor rolled into one. It keeps track of session, daily and total wordcounts automatically. It also lets me export the finished MS to .rft, .mobi or epub formats. I love it, and I promise I get no kickbacks for telling people. If you’re interested, look for storyboxsoftware.com. Or perhaps give Scrivener a try. I’m told it’s very similar to StoryBox.
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Well I edit daily so the word count is always changing…it’s pretty easy for me to track how much I add on a day-to-day basis but I don’t like retallying every chapter I just edited so I open ’em all at the end of the week and add em up. (I know, still pretty barbaric, haha!)
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Speaking of editing, so am I right to assume you do your own editing or have you ever hired or considered hiring a professional? Do you do your own book covers too?
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I do my own editing. During this learning process I’ve come to feel that editing is actually 70% or more of the actual process. The book covers I get on fiverr, I come up with the concept and composition of images and I send some images off the web to the artist emilianohc and drive him insane until he gets something close to what I’ve imagined, haha!
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Ahh ok! So far you’re the 2nd self-publisher I’ve come across that does their own editing. But you’re right, I must have rewritten my first novel 3-4 times before getting it just right. It’s more work than actually writing!
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Yep! The whole thing about self publishing and writing is the control, right? I lean towards not wanting editors taking control of my tone and characters.
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-grin- no comment? Seriously, if you’re comfortable doing things manually I’ll just slink away quietly. 😀
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Yep, I’m an eIdiot, haha! I really don’t like SM, but realized that if I wanted to do self-publishing I’d have to get a little tech know-how in there. But maybe I’ll do the auto word-count eventually. But I really am just looking for approximations that I tally up once a week…something close to 80-100k should be good for a novel, IMHO.
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lol – yes, I believe 90 – 100K was/is the accepted wordcount for sci-fi. Romance is shorter, I think, and lit. is…who knows? Then fantasy could stretch to 300K…. -rolls eyes-
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Tolkein screwed the genre, hahaha!
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