So we’re finally at the point where I know my exact numbers for 2021, after all of the books have been written and all of them have been edited, at least through the beta-stage and I have a good handle on what I actually accomplished last year.

Let’s go over it and I’ll let you in on a couple of things that are going on for 2022, for anyone who is interested.

First, we’ll recap the things that we already know. I wrote 8 books. That included the last two books in a trilogy, a stand-alone novel, two more books in an ongoing series and then, an entire trilogy to wrap it all up at the end. That is the first time in my life that I’ve had that many completed projects within a single year.

Granted, it’s hard to track that accurately because I didn’t really keep track of it like I do now before 2018. Prior to 2021, I’d been writing 5-6 books a year pretty consistently and I was satisfied with that count. 2021 was just a perfect storm of circumstance and hard work that got me past the hump into writing as much as I did.

These weren’t short books either. Every single one was over 100k words and most were around 125k. The only exception was the last series of books that I wrote, where one was around 105k and the second was just over 115k. That, in fact, is largely what kept me from hitting my soft goal of a million words for the year.

Instead, I came in at 967,451 words. I don’t really care about that because I think focusing on that kind of word count is dangerous. A story is as long as the story is and having artificial constraints how how long you want to make it, that introduces a lot of filler and filler isn’t a good thing. I just knew that if I averaged 125k per book, a million words was within my grasp. I’m absolutely satisfied with where I wound up.

That said, I think I burned myself out. While the first book of 2022 is done, at least the first draft, I struggled the whole time. It took longer than I wanted it to and it never flowed the way that most of my books last year did. I had to fight my way all the way through it and that made the entire experience grueling. I came out with a product that I’m generally happy with but I wasn’t excited to jump into the next book.

Sometime in late-September/early-October of last year, when it became clear that I was going to exceed my plan by a significant margin, I asked the people on my mailing list what they thought. If I could do 8 in 2021, I shouldn’t have a problem hitting 9 in 2022 and perhaps 10 the year after. Would that be fine with them?

Surprisingly, some of them said no. While they would certainly buy my books, it was a pretty big ask to have people focused on one author so much of the time. People read lots of different authors and as much as they do like my work, they don’t want to be beholden to it all of the time.

Therefore, I turned to my critique group, mostly prolific published authors and I knew that at least some of them put out a lot of material every year. I got confirmation of my fears. You can burn your audience out. That depends on the audience, of course, some of them are more resilient than others, but mostly, there’s only so much that they’ll take before they start to fall away.

If I was writing genre romance, for instance, it wouldn’t be a problem. Genre romance tends to be pretty short anyhow and the readers are fanatical and buy up as much as they can get. It will just sit there until they get around to it and most have a massive stack of books to-be-read regardless. I don’t happen to write genre romance though and that meant I had to be careful.

I knew that there were some that produced a ton of work though, but I was told that they spread it around. Some was aimed at one genre, some was aimed at another. Some was for readers, some was for gamers, some was for authors, none of them ever got overloaded. That made sense to me and I thought about it for a while and then decided that I didn’t want to split my time from what I enjoyed writing. I was just  going to slow down.

Then I realized that I had to, based on how hard it was to get through that first book. I’d trained myself to work like a machine throughout 2021. I got 30 days and that was it and by the end, I was shaving days off to make myself even more efficient. I had to plan fast. I had to edit fast. I had to get back to writing.

It drove me crazy. I just can’t keep doing that over the long haul. I know that I’m capable but I know that I wind up a wreck if I do it for too long. Therefore, I’m rolling back to 6 books this year, maybe 7 if it happens that way. I’m going to take more time between projects, spent mostly on planning, so that I can have a better idea of exactly where I’m going, rather than the quick outlines and tons of ideas rolling around in my head. It won’t be much more time but it will be more than the couple of days that my previous schedule allowed.

That doesn’t mean I might not come  back to that if my priorities change, but maybe taking a couple of months at a slower pace might get my mind back into the game. Once that flow state starts showing up automatically again, I might try to quicken my output. Or not. I don’t know yet. We’ll just have to see.