I figure about 40 hours per book for publishing tasks. I can double that to 80 if I want to include every last thing I do like studying book cover design and process tweaks like creating new Word style sheets and so on.
I wrote 220,071 words.
My speed range is 250–1200 words per hour, with the vast majority coming in between 400–600. My all time average back when I was tracking that was 541 wph.
That’s 407 hours for the writing.
I wrote 3 novels and 2 novelettes last year. I’m going with 80 hours each because I don’t want to undersell the effort I put in.
That’s 400 hours on publishing.
That’s 807 hours total.
That’s 15.52 hours a week for 52 weeks, or 16.14 hours a week for 50 weeks.
So 16 hours a week.
Holy crap. I’m barely working a part time job.
The numbers make me feel pretty good about the money, but it shouldn’t. I mean, no matter how much I earned per hour, I still only worked about 16 hours a week. My gross income is nowhere near where I want it.
Then there’s this: There are so many books I want to write, and I’m not getting them written at my current level of effort.
Next year, I’m going to revisit this calculation.
This year I’m going to be trying to level up. :)
We’ll see how it goes without timers, schedules, or goals to direct that effort. Honestly, I haven’t done all that well in years past using them, so I’m not that worried it’s going to hurt anything. I expect it will help (in the long run).