20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money

by Jonathan Green

  People see my current level of success, and they want to credit anything other than hard work. They want to say that I was very lucky, that I had every opportunity going my way, and that I've always been very successful. They completely ignore the year and a half I spent living in my parents' basement when I lost my job teaching at a university, or that after I finally escaped that basement, I spent eighteen months living on the couch of a studio apartment learning to build a business online. I sacrificed for three years to build my business, yet people see only the success. People meet me now and assume that I was born a fast and talented writer.

  I didn't write anything professionally until I was twenty-nine.

  A talent is something you're born with, and we're all born with a different mix of talents. We're strong and weak in different areas, but writing is not a talent; writing is a skill. It is something you can learn to develop and improve.

  The more you understand that writing fast is a skill, the easier this process will be. This idea that some people are born good at writing or faster at writing is just a false limitation. It's an unnecessary belief that will do nothing other than slow you down.

  Everything in this book is about growing and developing and building this particular skill, helping you to improve at something very specific. Everything we do here works, but the more you believe in the 20K System, the more it will work for you.

  I'm a fast writer, but if you believe that it's just luck or I was just born that way, then you will only give a little bit of effort to the exercises, the drills, and the techniques in this book. Your belief that my success is not my own will affect your own ability to achieve success. When we see someone else and blame luck or any other external third party, when we don’t give credit to their hard work, we don’t hurt them; we hurt ourselves.

  It's justification for your inaction. If you say that I'm a fast writer or that I'm a good writer simply because I was born that way; or you say that I’m just lucky, the cards were dealt that way; or maybe you want to say that where I went to college gave me an advantage that you could never have—whatever you want to blame, as long as you blame something other than my hard work, that means it's something you can't replicate. If I, Jonathan, am just lucky, then you can just blame that for my success and your lack of it.

  And if you say those things, your lack of belief or lack of respect for my hard effort insults me, but that's fine; I can take it. The real damage is that it keeps you from succeeding. If you don't believe that hard work created my success, then you won't believe hard work can give success to you, and that limitation will destroy you.

  Writing is a skill, and together we can help you develop and grow that skill, and soon you'll easily be writing twenty thousand words a day.

  101

  Put Your Sneakers On

  To write fast you must train. If you want to run a marathon, you run. If you want to lift heavy weights, you go to the gym. Anything you want to learn begins with practice and training.

  Sprinting is one of the best ways to start strengthening your speed-writing muscles. Train yourself to write for a certain block of time while you push yourself as hard as you can. As you push yourself through these drills, you will discover that you can only maintain your focus for a certain amount of time. Everyone has a different amount of focus.

  In television programs, they change the camera angle every twelve seconds.

  If the scene has a single camera lasting more than twelve seconds, we notice that something weird is happening. It's unnatural to us. Our attention spans have been shrinking for a very long time, and we're used to watching television in three-minute blocks. My podcast episodes are twenty-four minutes long because that's how much content there is in your average half-hour television program. I limit my episode length to match what my audience can handle.

  We don't know your available focus yet. We need to assess your current level. You now have a plan. You have a writing location. You know how to remove all of the distractions. The preparation is complete, so now it is time to write.

  102

  The First Sprint

  Get to your primary writing location. Whatever your setup is, whether it's in a coffee shop or at your house, whether you are using special headphones to let people know to leave you alone, set that up. It’s time to start training yourself to maintain focus for longer. I want you to do a sprint-writing assessment.

  Start with an outline for something you want to write. Hopefully, it's loaded up in Scrivener or whichever word processor you prefer. I use Scrivener because it makes this very easy. Turn off the Internet and all other distractions. Start a timer and write for as long as you can, as fast as you can.

  It doesn't matter how long you last. Everyone will be different. That's why this is an assessment. Some people break after three minutes. Your mind will wander, and you'll notice that you're falling apart or you feel distracted. That's fine. Other people can do seventeen minutes, twenty-three minutes or even an hour. Whatever your initial block of time is, keep a record. This is our initial diagnostic to get a feel for your skill level.

  Your sprint results today are a baseline that we can improve. And believe me, we are going to blow that first number right out of the water!

  103

  Writing Blocks

  We want to train you to the point where you can do sprints of twenty or twenty-five minutes and then turn those into Pomodoro blocks. We can then build out sprint blocks throughout your day, and eventually you will develop the skill of marathon writing, which is where you can write for two- or three-hour blocks.

  For some people, the only way to write for three hours is twenty-five minutes of writing followed by a five-minute break. Or forty minutes of writing with a twenty-minute break. That's OK.

  When we finish the drills and exercises in this book, we will find the best strategy for you. Whether it's writing for a long time with a longer break or writing for a shorter time and having a short break, all of these techniques are fine. Our goal is only to hit our word count at the end of the day.

  For every person, we're going to find a different mixture works. I don't swear by Pomodoro because I don't use that technique. I prefer to use a longer writing block. My dictation sessions tend to last about one hour, but I prefer two- to three-hour sessions when I’m writing by hand. Long sessions and long breaks just work for me. If I try to write in smaller blocks, I lose my train of thought. But that is just how my brain operates.

  104

  Life is Full of Surprises

  We're going to find the perfect pattern for you. For your first sprint, eliminate all distractions and try to replicate your natural writing conditions as much as possible. Use the location where you will do the majority of your writing. Measure how many words you write and how long your focus lasts. Make a note of anything else that affects your sprint. What was your first distraction? Did your phone ring or did your mind just start to wander? Did you start to get an itch in your back? For now, just make a note of what causes your focus to break.

  If there is a particular thought that keeps popping into your mind, write that down as well. Sometimes we feel this immense pressure to complete a writing project, and that becomes the distraction. If there is a thought that you can’t control, keep track of how often if affects your work. Self-assessment is about finding the most common distractions. Once we isolate them, we can deal with them.

  During my writing session earlier today, right when I started writing about distractions, the staff in the restaurant went crazy. They began banging every table, and they were dragging chairs all over the place. The sound of wood scraping on wood nearly turned me into the Incredible Hulk. Then they were playing with the pool balls on the pool table, and it was so loud.

  I was the only customer in the entire restaurant. All that noise broke my concentration and shattered my rhythm. I had to leave. I finally had to send my wife to explain to them that destroying my work is not something that I appreciate, and they need to g
ive me space when I'm recording. Because I haven't recorded like this before, I have to train my new environment. I'm going through the same growing pains you are.

  I sent my wife to speak to them because not everyone here speaks English. I live in a foreign country. When she went to speak to one of the staff, they said, “Oh, we just thought he was crazy and talking to himself.”

  They can see that I have a microphone, they can see that I have a recorder, and yet I was wrong in assuming that people would put two and two together. Not everyone does. My earlier assumption about dictation was completely wrong. Today I learned that some people can see you speaking into a recorder and still assume that you are crazy.

  We had to explain to them that there is no reason to be loud and to bang stuff around me when I'm working.

  They reorganized that restaurant five hours ago. In the five hours since they banged everything around, there hasn’t been a single customer. People usually go up to the bar or get something to drink, and then go hang out by the pool. This is a hotel environment. All of that work, all of that distraction, was unnecessary. But I wouldn't have learned that we need to train the staff there without that experience.

  More and more of the people who work here are learning to recognize the signs that I am recording something for work. You can’t expect people to always know what you are doing. There will be some bumps in the road as you develop your writing rhythm. Most people only need to learn once, and the problem never repeats.

  105

  STOP

  Please stop reading right now and perform your first sprint. This is an interactive training, and the only way for the 20K System to work is if you put in the work. Go to your usual writing location and write as fast as you can until you get distracted. Start a timer and write for as long as you can. When you lose focus or become distracted, stop the timer. After you finish this first sprint, go to the next section to analyze your results.

  106

  Results

  Now that you've completed your first sprint, we want to do a little bit of analysis. Keep a permanent record of your sprints, starting with this one. Your focus, for now, is NOT on the quality of your words or grammar. We will deal with that separately.

  Instead, you just want to focus on writing as many words as possible. If during your sprint you caught yourself going back and re-editing words or changing grammar or fixing spelling, we have isolated our first opportunity. Those little edits are all slowing down your word count.

  The more we can handle those types of errors in the editing phase, the better. The editing phase engages the logical part of your mind, whereas the writing process is very creative. Our writing process starts out analytical, as we research and prepare our notes and outlines. We then enter the creative phase, where we write as quickly as we can. The final phase again engages your analytical and logical mind as you edit your work.

  Bringing the logical part of your brain into the writing process will only slow you down. You know how to fix a misspelling tomorrow just as much as you know how to do it today. You might feel that itch in the back of your mind that requires fixing these errors on the fly, but you need to overcome that.

  There is a moment when you're writing that is pure creativity; it's sheer artistry, and the more we can unlock your pure artistry in that moment, the better.

  Turn off all of the spell and grammar checks in your word processor. Eliminate or deactivate any other alerts or distractions you discovered during your first sprint.

  Write down your first sprint results: how long it lasted, how many words you wrote, what distracted you, what was good and what was bad. A little bit of self-analysis is a very good thing at this point.

  This will help you as you move forward because you now have a baseline, your first sprint. One of the advantages of writing in blocks or with a very specific goal in front of you is that you will begin to feel what it's like to complete projects. I love Scrivener for this reason. I write by dividing my books into tiny, manageable pieces.

  Each time you finish a little project, no matter how small, you get a feeling of accomplishment. You get a feeling of success.

  If you write one book, you get one feeling of achievement when you finish writing it. But if you write two hundred sections, you get to feel success two hundred times. Every time I finish a section, even if it's three, four, or five hundred words I feel good. Every time I finish an entire chapter, which might have ten or twenty sections in it, I feel good again. When I close that little folder and open the next folder, I get a jolt of that success feeling.

  When I hit my word count goal for the day, I get another feeling of accomplishment. The more feelings of accomplishment we can generate in the process of writing, the more likely you are to complete the process. We're trying to develop along this path a strong set of positive affirmations. Rather than feeling down every time you fail to hit a goal or fail to complete your book, we want to replace those big-picture negative emotions with small-picture positive emotions.

  The more you train yourself to feel good each time you hit a little goal, the more you will shift your habits. Positive reinforcement of these tiny steps is the key to habit change. Moving in this direction will make a huge difference in your business, and from now on writing is your business. Every little step, you want to feel that sense of accomplishment. You should be proud of yourself right now for completing your first writing sprint. You've done something good. You've done something new, and you're developing a new skill.

  During this time you don't need to worry about grammar and spelling mistakes. All of those things are irrelevant. Once you have words on the page, editing is much, much easier.

  It's easier to cut hair than it is to grow hair, and it's simpler to cut words and edit a book down into something amazing than to write words from nothingness. This is exactly what I'm doing. I'm writing this entire book by dictation, and we are on a journey together.

  I'm sharing with you all my experiences along the way, and at the end of every day when I finish everything I go back to my house. There I write notes and a blog post about my experience with each dictation and editing session. You can find everything on my 20K page at ServeNoMaster.com.

  You can see exactly how each day went and some pictures I took during my writing sessions. You get to see my new process as I attempt to speed up my writing rhythm. This is the first time I've ever written without the ability to check spelling or grammar in the moment. It's one of the reasons I'm so much faster out here. Even when I dictate into the computer, I can see any mistakes on the page. It's very distracting.

  We will see together how to refine the editing process, even when you have more errors than usual.

  I have some cool techniques in the editing process that will help you to edit very, very quickly. You don't have to worry about editing for right now. Separate the creative and logical parts of the writing process, and each individual part will be much faster.

  107

  Words Per Hour

  With your first sprint completed, we can assess how quickly you write, what your true speed is, what your true ability is. This is not a typing program, so we're not tracking words per minute. That's too small. The number we want to see is words per hour, so we have to do a little math here and figure out how many words you can write per hour. If you just wrote for three minutes, take the number of words you wrote, multiply that by twenty and that gives us your words per hour.

  If you wrote for a more difficult amount of time, we’ll need to apply more difficult math. Take the number of words you wrote, divide that by how many minutes you wrote for and then multiple this number by sixty.

  This is a rough estimate of how many words you would write in a one-hour sprint.

  Words per hour is the first metric we're going to work on improving together. It is not the final metric, and it is not the most important metric. Focusing on words per hour is very good if you're focused on writing blog posts or newspaper articles. If you're a small pro
ject writer, then it's very, very valuable, but if you're a large project writer, if you want to write books, if you want to write novels, if you want to write much larger projects, then knowing how many words you can generate per day is more important.

  Using the 20K System, we're going to track all of these different numbers. You now have your first baseline number. This is the speed at which you write, and as we perform more exercises and you stretch yourself out, you'll be able to write longer blocks, and your sprints will turn into marathons. Your words per hour will go up, and you will get to real numbers. Your words per hour won’t be an estimate anymore.

  Right now you might only be able to write a couple hundred words per hour. Maybe you could write a thousand words per hour, but you can't sprint that long. We're going to get there.

  We're going to get to the point where when you're in the zone; you're in that two to five thousand words per hour space, that cool zone where in just six hours you hit twenty thousand words every single day.

  The great thing about writing at this speed is that you can complete an entire book in a single day. Many books on Amazon are quite short these days. Amazon short reads are very popular, and many of those books are eight to twelve thousand words long. You could write a book in the morning and write another book in the afternoon. At this speed, you could write a novella in a single day.

  Writing fast is a very powerful skill, and it's very freeing. When I'm writing, all I can think about is how quickly I can get to the end of the first draft. That's all I'm thinking about right now. I want to finish this first draft shockingly fast. I wanted to write this entire book in two or three days, but life always interferes, and so many unexpected things happen. I'm only able to get one to two hours a day where I can just focus on this book because I'm working on so many other projects, but that's the beauty of being able to write at my speed.