Note: If you haven’t checked out the original post, you can read it Kindle writing challenge, you can go read it now. It’s ok, I’ll wait.

Ok, read it? Cool.

We’re into day 9 of the challenge and with $1,000 on the line for meeting the target, you can look at my progress at the Google Doc I created to track my progress.

Having not written anything that was long in the past 6 months, it took some momentum to get started again, but once I got going, it became quite easy.

At the end of week 1 (ie: day 7), I’m at 3,871 words, beating my 3,500 word goal and at 19.36% of my 20,000 word goal.

What made this effort more achievable was setting a 500 word per day goal (about the length of a blog post) which makes it much easier to hit, compared to the daily word targets of 2,000 to 5,000 words per day I had set before.

At my current pace, I should be on track to hit the weekly goals, especially if I’m following the system I’ve worked out. So while I’ll still have the “I need to hit my weekly word count, else I’m paying out $1,000 each week” at the back to my head, I’ll be focusing on sharing some strategies to getting a book out and generating another source of income from it.

Some key learning points:

• Preparation is key: Even though 500 words doesn’t seem like a lot, doing it every day and chalking up 3,500 words each week requires some planning and prep work to do well. Sure you can wing it for a day or two, but if you lose sight of the bigger picture, you can get lost too. A pretty apt analogy for the game of online marketing too.
• Use downtime well: Everyone has pockets of downtime during the day, whether it’s the 5 minutes you’re waiting to get your latte, or the 30 minutes you’re waiting for a meeting to start. All that can add up to an hour or two per day. Using that well, especially to do brainstorm, note down key points, will help to increase your overall efficiency.
• Get better, stronger, faster: While the most productive activity for this project (writing) is compressed into about 30 to 45 minutes each day, that frees up time to work on other stuff to get inspiration and hone my craft. In this case, since the book I’m working on is in the Young Adult Sci-Fi genre, I’m watching Sword Art Online 2 clips and a book series I read when I was a teen, Robotech: The Macross Saga.
• Have fun: It’s easy to get caught up in something and have it turn into a grind. While some level of grinding is important at the start of a project to build up momentum, having every project involve grinding is going to burn you out eventually. This book is my “fun project”, so it helps reduce the stress from the other projects.

I’ll continue to post weekly updates as I work though the book.

One encouraging thing has been seeing a number of blog readers mailing me that they’ve also signed up for the Kindling training I mentioned and are working on their first book. If you’ve been keen to also publish books on Amazon’s Kindle platform and plan to come out with either a “How to” or fiction novel, it’s a great place to get started.