On St Patrick's Day 2012, we decided to set ourselves the challenge of writing, editing and publishing a novel within 90 days (giving a deadline of June 15th).
To put this in context, most books take two years to go from blank page to book store. Neither of us had any past experience with fiction writing. Dan was 16 at the time of writing Dead on Demand, and hope to become a chef one day while Sean is a lawyer.
In the end, it took us approximately 420 working hours to complete the challenge, with the initial draft (79,000 words) complete after 23 days and editing, proofreading and artwork completed by day 48.
In just seven weeks, two guys with no previous writing experience completed a full fiction novel that went on to become an Amazon UK bestseller. At it's 2012 peak Dead on Demand was downloaded over three hundred times an hour.
We're now working on a follow up to Dead on Demand as well as a political satire and several non-fiction texts.
We'd like to say a huge thank you to those of you that supported us during the challenge, especially our many twitter followers. We couldn't have done it without you.
I'm sort of trying to do the same thing, only it's a publicist screaming for another novel by the end of June instead of my own motivation. (Which is why I'm surfing the net instead of writing ;-)
ReplyDeleteAre you guys doing your own cover art too? I used 99Designs.com (a little expensive, but worth it in the end).
Best of luck with your 90 day novel!
We're hoping to use Carl Graves from http://www.extendedimagery.com/ for our cover design - we really like the colour blend on his covers, as they do draw the eye to the title (and, with combined sales in the millions on the JA Konrath books, he has a proven record in selling ebooks). Currently waiting to hear back from him if he can fit us in within our 90 days schedule. If not we might check out 99designs :)
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