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Writing can be rewarding and fun. It stimulates the mind and helps us express ourselves. Moreover having someone respond to a story you wrote is intoxicating. It is exciting in a way that few things are, but there is a bad reason to write a novel, and not one which is obscure or on the peripheries of writing. This is the idea of writing a novel primarily as a way to earn money.

This isn't to say that there is anything wrong with the goal of earning money with your writing. I have attempted for years to earn money with my writing and will continue to do so, but as a primary reason to write it is a bad and pointless decision with very little upside.

Let us start at the beginning. Writing a good novel takes a considerable amount of time. Assuming the length of your novel is 80,000 words, then if you wrote a thousands words a day it would take 80 days for a first draft, then assuming you edit about the same with only three more passes you are now at 320 days just to write the novel and for most writers 1000 words a day is at least a couple hours effort.

You now have to prepare a outline of your novel. This requires you to write down the entire plot of the novel from beginning to end in a very specific style, while making it interesting enough that someone might read your actual novel. Assuming you want to do a good job with this it will take a few days, probably another week, and the cover letter which to do right will take a day.

You will then need to print out the first three chapters of the novel, the outline, and the cover letter which will cost several dollars, and mail it, another couple dollars. In order to do this though you will need to find the correct publisher or agent. To do this you will need to spend some time researching, lets say 10 hours, as well as buying "The Writers Market" which is about 25$.

At this point you have spent roughly 345 hours and 30$ on your novel. If you are talented and lucky you will only be rejected 2 or 3 times before a publisher or agent decides to give your novel a chance. Assuming that you get your manuscript back in a form that it can be resubmitted in you are looking at another 10 hours research each time to truly discover the correct person to publish to as well as the 5 dollars you will spend shipping it again.

This will put you at about 360 hours and 50 dollars when you finally make your sale and the money is going to start rolling in. Your advance on average will be about 5000 dollars. This means that assuming you spent only two hours for each thousand words that you made about 13.75 cents an hour and the odds are high you will never seen anything more from this novel. What is more disturbing for the person who wishes to write a novel purely to earn money this does not typically get better with a second or even third novel, instead sometimes getting worse.

The truth is that the millionaire writer is a dream, just like the millionaire rapper and the millionaire athlete. They exist and there is nothing wrong with striving for that goal if you are planning on doing the work anyway, but if your plan is to write a simple novel and become rich because of it there are far easier ways to earn 13.75 cents an hour, and do keep in mind that the 13.75 an hour is a best case scenario where you write quickly and actually sell your book, not to mention that all of this is extremely hard work, and far harder if you're not doing it because you enjoy it.

Learn more about this author, Elton Gahr.
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