A Back-on-Track August

Goodbye summer; welcome fall!
 
I’m already wearing my sweater more, both mornings and night.
 
Yep, the weather’s changing, the kids are back in school, and here we are once again with the monthly report…the 52nd on this site.
 
4 years I’ve been putting these up. They’re all pretty similar – just me telling you what I did, how much I made, and what’s next.
 
So let’s get started.
 

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​For August I managed to write over 31,000 words, put up 15 blog posts, and sell 194 books.
 
That’s 1 fewer book sale than last month, and my 4th-highest selling month of the year.
 
When you look at my income for the month, you’ll see that it came from 10 sources.
 
Here’s how that breaks down.
 

I made about $11 more than last month, meaning this was my best month of the year…so far.
 
A lot of people think $1,500 a month is living in poverty. A lot of people think you’re doing really well if you’re making that much.
 
Hey, we know that 78% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck. That comes out to 98 million of our 125 million full-time workers.
 
We know that most Americans can’t come up with $500 in the case of an emergency.
 
And we know that 47% of Americans don’t own any stocks so can’t participate in the largest bubble we’ve yet seen.
 
I am one of those people.
 

 
I’m just not making that much money from my writing anymore, so I have to supplement it with part-time jobs.
 
I sure have made a lot of money from my writing when you add it all up over the years, though.
 
You might have heard me mention that I’ve sold over 11,000 books now.
 
What I don’t think I’ve mentioned are the earnings.
 
I like to look at it like this: I graduated college with $31,000 in student loan debt.
 
With the end of this month, I’ll have made over $28,000 in book royalties.
 
So just $3,000 more to go and my writing would have, in effect, paid for my schooling.
 
That’s a pretty good feeling!
 
Another good feeling was getting back into the swing of it.
 
Yep, I’m writing again…at least more than just the usual political dross.
 
I was quite surprised to see that 3 months went by without me working on my latest Mountain Main Series novel.
 
The last time I added anything to it was May 15. Then out of the blue, on August 15, I opened the document up and started working on it again.
 
The idea was to just open it up and look at it, scroll through the 90 pages and 17,000 words that I had typed up.
 
Instead I added a bit of prose to one section and, still feeling like I had something to say, went ahead and added in two new chapters as well.
 
2,000 words in under an hour. It felt good, like riding a bike. I was worried I’d forgotten how to do it. Turns out I’d forgotten nothing.
 
Now, if you’re in the camp that says I’m a terrible writer and that my books suck, then I’d never learned anything to begin with.
 
I’ll just take a moment to mention those $28,000 in sales once again…ahem.
 
Anyways…I think I ran into the same problem I did when writing the last book – I got bored and didn’t know what to do.
 
Thankfully, nearly all of my novels have alternating point of view chapters.
 
This means that you can follow one group of characters, then go and follow another group somewhere else that are doing something completely different.
 
Currently I still have these major alternating POV’s in their own sections, with the main group taking up the first two parts of the book, the second group taking up the third, and then the idea that they’ll both come together at some point.
 
It might just be better to take those two POV sets and throw them together, breaking up the two groups better and enabling more cliffhanger-style chapter endings.
 
That keeps people reading and that’s probably what I’ll do.
 
Hell, I’m even in the process of getting a cover done for this book so you know it’ll be done soon.
 
Since starting again on the 15th I’ve more than doubled the book, getting up past 34,000 words and about 160 pages.
 
Feels good to be working on my novels again.