A Piece about Numbers - on a Blog about Words

My son recently graduated with a degree in Drama (gaining a First!), and for his dissertation he had to write, perform, direct and produce a one-man, 40-minute play. Essentially the piece was about an angsty student being counselled by an artificial intelligence psychotherapist (my son's own, recorded, disembodied voice). In one section, he riffs about numbers and how your life is defined by numbers - some which identify you (National Insurance number, phone number); some you wish were bigger (salary, bank balance, IQ); some you might wish were smaller (age, weight).

It got me thinking. Writers deal primarily with words, of course, but we can also find ourselves rather obsessed with certain numbers.

Firstly, word count. I don't think I've met a writer yet who is not obsessed with word count. Many set themselves daily or weekly targets - eg 1000 words a day, 5000 a week - to hit their required novel length of say 90,000 to 100,000. Writers will joyfully report they've had a fabulous day and managed to put down no less than 2,786 words. Or they might moan about writer's block and be advised by friends to just try to get 100 words a day done - there, there, don't fret, it all adds up. Every journey starts with a single step; every novel starts with a single word.

Word processing software helpfully shows word count of the current document at the bottom - look, I've written 243 words so far in this piece. I've been a member of groups 'racing' each other - cheering each other on as we report weekly wordage. Oh yes. We do love tracking our word count.

And then, for published writers and especially those making a living from writing - there's another set of numbers we always want to know. I'm talking about sales figures - both units sold and royalties earned. For most writers we'll need to wait till the end of the month to receive statements showing how well our books sold two months previously, but self-published writers will be able to see more up to date figures, showing sales almost up to the minute. Every end of month I transfer sales figures and royalties earned onto a spreadsheet, which also allows me to track totals by sales period and by book, and calculate average royalty per copy sold, and other interesting, juicy numbers.

Finally there's another number which I think is probably the one published writers check most frequently. I know I do. I'm referring, of course, to our books' rankings - their chart positions on Amazon and other retailers. Especially when we have a new book out, or a book on promotion, we might check its ranking several times a day. Even though we know perfectly well that Amazon only updates rankings no more than once an hour, we'll still check more frequently than that to see if anything's changed!

So, we may be all about putting words onto a page, but we find certain numbers fascinating. We should probably spend more time on the words and less on the numbers, but they're addictive, you know? Anyway. This article is now over 550 words, which is the usual length for our blog posts, so now I can save it and go check my rankings. Again.