2023 By The Numbers
My day job is in the video game business, and more specifically the mobile game business. That business is obsessed with user data. How many people download your game? How many open it? Then how many churn out each minute, how many come back on the second day, the seventh, the fourteenth? How many pay you?
There's an alphabet soup of acronymns tracking all this stuff -- FTUE, ARPU, RURR, CURR. It is arguably the most important part of game development. It is certainly the most important part of games as a business. Bumping a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) by a percentage point or two can make all the difference between a game bankrupting a company or digging swimming pools for the founders.
I understand some of it. Enough of it.
Coming from that background, I suppose it’s natural that I'd gather and analyze data around my writing career (which is really more of a full-time hobby right now, but I got paid pro rates for a story this year, so it's fair to use the c-word). I've journaled my creative sessions for years, but only started tracking hours on March 12th of this year, so the numbers below just cover about nine months of work.
But they're useful. Primarily they help me understand the true cost of things -- how many hours I had to put in to arrive at a given result. They also help me directly assess my effort in becoming a writer. I put 450 (reliably measured) hours into my writing in 2023. Is that a lot? Too little? I don't know. But at least I know how many hours I worked, so I can consider the question against real data, as opposed to some vague feeling that "I'm not writing enough."
Without further ado, my 2023 writing, by the numbers:
Short Stories
25 Short story submissions
10 Short story rejections
2 Short story acceptances
Hours worked per short story
A Finger For Frodo — 7
Agua Fantasma — 13
As You See The World — 15
Errands — 8 (incomplete)
No One Will Believe You — 12
Shamus & Buster — 21
Misc. Shorts — 3
The Price of Everything — 19 (incomplete)
Thursday Affair — 4
Not listed is “Teddy's Favorite Thing,” my lone publication of 2023. It was written in early 2023, before I started tracking hours. It probably took about as long as “Agua Fantasma” -- both were 1K word flash stories.
“As You See The World” was acquired by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine earlier this month, and will hopefully see print in 2024. More on that in the months to come.
“No One Will Believe You” is listed at twelve hours, but I worked much longer on it the earlier part of this year. (MUCH longer). It was a challenging story that was re-written several times. Actual effort is likely twice what I've tracked, maybe more. I don't want to think about it!
“A Finger For Frodo” was written in late 2022. Numbers here reflect revisions this year as I re-worked the story after rejections and shaped it for different markets (generally by cutting it down).
“Errands,” “The Price of Everything,” and Misc. Shorts (stubs and starts) are unfinished. Everything else is submitted someplace and "complete" ... unless and until it comes back, and a fresh read suggests improvements. As a rule I don't look at stories or continue working on them once submitted.
Overall, I spent a bit more than 100 hours on short stories in 2023, and I regard it time well spent. The work yielded two sales and has accomplished my goals of developing as a writer and giving myself breaks during work on my novel.
Speaking of which ...
Novels
28 Novel submissions
20 Agent queries sent
17 Negative agent replies
8 Novel rejections
1 Novel interest
Hours worked per novel
B.K.P.I. 129
Crows 136
B.K.P.I. has been a long road. I started work on the book in 2017, then largely set it aside until returning to it in earnest in 2022. I considered it "done" in November 2022, and spent much of last year shopping it around. Interest from an editor led me to enter into extensive copy edits, which accounts for the hours listed here. Those edits opened the door on a more-or-less full revision, which is ongoing and will stretch into next year. So, yeah, it was "done," all right. It just needs to be done again is all.
Crows was the novel I worked on in the early part of this year -- the proverbial book you start writing after you’ve just submitted one. I set it aside in early August with the first draft of the first half of the book "complete" at 37K words. I intended to write a short story for a change of pace and then go back to complete the second half by the end of this year. That short story -- “The Price of Everything” -- is still in progress, and when an editor expressed interest in B.K.P.I., Crows went on the shelf while I revised the earlier project.
So much for best-laid plans.
But! Looking at my data (here's the value of this exercise!) I can see the 129 hours I put into unexpected B.K.P.I. revisions likely would have been enough to finish my first draft of Crows if I'd gotten back to it. It gives me some comfort to know I was on schedule with Crows (until I wasn't). As-is, Crows must wait to fly until next year, but I do wish to finish it.
Everything Else
Writing is not just writing!
Biz Dev 39
Blog & Social Media 43
Biz Dev is market research, writing and tracking queries, and networking. Not included are the several days I spent at BoucherCon. I can't decide if I spent too much time doing this, or too little.
Blog & Social Media covers all the content for The Hourglass, as well as the guest blog I did for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and much of my time posting to Instagram and Twitter. Also included are the one-time hourly costs of researching and building to get this new website on its feet.
All told, I spent almost as many hours on social media and business development as I did writing short stories this year. I don't think that's good! But it isn't as simple as reducing hours for one thing in favor of another. Much of the time I spent in this category was fallow time when I'm not enjoying success writing stories -- if I sit down and I'm shit at writing that day, I can rescue some of the session by getting ahead on the blog, or whatever. But I'd prefer this number were lower and I had another story or two to show for 2023.
Bottom Line
In the period for which I have precise records, I spent approximately 450 hours at my craft over a period of 284 days. My longest single session was a seven-hour stint doing copy edits on B.K.P.I. in mid-September. I spent just a little under seven hours completing “Shamus & Buster” for a closing short story submission window in mid-October. Anything shorter than fifteen minutes I didn't record as a session.
Overall I averaged 60-90 minutes per day at my craft, writing every day aside from about a dozen days when I was traveling or at conferences or pinned by some heavy object. Not bad, when you consider I'm doing this around a full-time job, but I feel I can do more. I expect I always will.
And in terms of take-home pay, I made about thirty-three cents an hour.
Before expenses.
Happy Holidays, everyone.