Can you write books for a dollar a day?  If you are a Kindle Direct Publishing author like me, you’ll have to!  For the endless minutes I toiled to produce my three “books”, I am being handsomely compensated to the tune of about one dollar a day in royalties.  I know, it sounds like a lot.  Why, I could buy a candy bar or use a pay toilet every single day with that kind of money.

Sure, maybe we should consider the quality of my work — but wait, my books all have multiple five star reviews, many of which were not written by me.  Obviously, my writing is top notch!  That leaves us with only one logical line of attack in our quest to wring pennies out of the reading public: crank out more books!

Simple arithmetic tells us that by writing ten times as many books, I would make $10 a day.  OK, that might pay for the gas it takes me to get back and forth to my real job, but what if I wrote a hundred times as many books!  Yes, by cranking out THREE HUNDRED books I would finally be making $100 a day.  That’s not bad, but unfortunately my day job pays a lot more than that.  By my quick estimation I would need to write 789 books to equal my current salary.  But wait, that doesn’t include benefits like medical and dental insurance, holidays, and vacation time.  What the hell, let’s just pick a nice round number like 1000.

All I need to do to retire from my current backbreaking job of sitting around all day on a computer is write ONE THOUSAND books!  That means I only need to write 997 more books – I’m stoked!  If I write a book a day, I’ll be retired in less than three years.  Oh yeah, I have to PUBLISH a book a day, not just write one.  Most of my books take longer to format and publish than they take to write.  Then there is all the spamming that I have to do on Facebook and Twitter, which eats up a lot more time.  Realistically, I need to be able to write these books in about an hour, maybe two.

You know, this is starting to sound like a very stressful endeavor.  When would I have time to post to my blog?  What if I want to play World of Warcraft free for ten days?  Let’s reframe this differently so I don’t seem to be weaseling out it just because I’m lazy: the official reason that I will not crank out 997 more books real quick is because it wouldn’t be fair to my readers.  Yeah, that’s it – the quality might suffer!

There, now it’s time to go to the snack machine and spend today’s royalties.