Why am I starting this project? Writing one book a month sounds like an enormous amount of work. And since I haven’t found many readers yet, it also seems like a lot of effort for very little pay.

Still, I have good reasons to do it.

Testing Myself

First and foremost, I want to see whether I can actually do it. This will be a massive project, taking around five hours a day—basically all of my free time. But once it’s finished, I’ll be able to look back on an entire year of productivity and creativity and feel proud of what I’ve achieved.

Memento Mori

The older I get, the more I think about death. How much time do I have left? What will remain of me once I’m gone?

Sure, some might say it’s just a book, just a story, just an idea. But when I die, I want to know that my ideas, my stories, my books are still out there. They won’t die with me. As long as people read, someone might read something I created before I kick the bucket. What a great thought to die with.

Sure, that doesn’t stop death from catching up with me—but creating something that outlives our own mortality might be the best way to spend the time we have.

Too Many Ideas

I’m an ideas guy. My swipe file is full of story ideas—some of them unique enough to claim that I’ve never seen anything like them in books or movies by others.

Writing just one book a year will never be enough. New ideas pop into my head constantly, and it would be a waste not to at least try to put the best ones out into the world. Right now, I have more than 300 story ideas saved. For several of them, I’ve even planned the basic structure of entire book series, some spanning a dozen books.

If I can release at least 100 books before I die, I’ll know I’ve put my best work out there. That’s a lifetime goal worth striving for.

A Project to Distinguish Myself from Others

2025 didn’t bring many readers my way. What I’ve tried so far hasn’t really worked, so something has to change. Being the guy who writes a book a month might be the project that makes me stand out.

• Can he do it?
• Will the quality be good enough?
• How does he manage it?

Questions like these might encourage readers to visit my blog regularly, follow me on social media, and actually check out the books. It could also be an interesting project for other authors to keep an eye on which starts a network.

The Best Marketing Tool for Books Is New Books

I once heard this sentence:

The best way to market your book is to release another book.

I don’t know if it’s always true, but it certainly sounds right. Whenever I read a book by an author I enjoy, I usually check out their entire back catalogue. I assume most readers do the same.

So expanding your catalogue might be the most important thing an author can do.

Free Stuff to Give Away

Free is always the most attractive price—especially when you want people to try something they’ve never tried before. Millions of new books are released every year, and readers who don’t know me are right to ask why they should spend their time on my work instead of Stephen King’s.

I believe I can entertain readers, but I can’t prove that until they’ve actually read my stories. So I have to make it as easy—and as tempting—as possible for new readers to give me a chance.

My short stories are free and bring in around 50 new readers per release. Full novels attract 100 – 1,000 readers with each release when I give them away for free. If I can release a free novel every month, that could mean thousands of new readers giving me a chance next year—and maybe exploring my work in general afterwards.

Living the Creative Life

Factory, laboratory, hospital, office, army—I’ve worked in many places and had many jobs. I hated all of them. I hated the bosses, the 9-to-5 grind, the hierarchies, the atmosphere. But most of all, I hated that most jobs force you to stop thinking.

I once worked in a factory where my job was to put metal plates into boxes. Eight hours straight. Six days a week. Three shifts. My brain shut down after the first fifteen minutes, and entire days passed without a single real thought in my head. At the time, I needed the job—it paid the bills. But looking back, it felt like my brain was slowly rotting away, one box of metal plates at a time.

Writing books is completely different. It’s a constant state of creativity, a constant state of thinking and dreaming. It’s beautiful. It feels like every neuron is firing at once, thoughts exploding in your mind like fireworks in the night sky.

I want to live that life—and experience that creative state every day—for as long as I possibly can.

I’m seriously considering this project for 2026.

Writing is fun—I love it. Since I mostly write pulp fiction, I believe I could easily write 40–80K words per month and thus complete a new story within 30 days. What has held me back so far isn’t the writing itself, but the stuff that happens around it: editing, translating, formatting, cover design, uploading, and marketing.

My latest release, Like a Rolling Stone, is around 80K words long. It took me three months to edit, and I’m currently translating it into English, with the goal of finishing the translation within a total time of three weeks.

Here’s how the process usually looks for me:

• Generating ideas happens naturally during everyday tasks
• Outlining can take anywhere from 1 to 7 days
• Writing 1K words per day equals one new book every two months
• Editing takes around 2–3 months
• Translating takes almost another month
• Cover design takes one day
• Formatting, uploading, and meta take another day
• Marketing is a lifelong task that I’m still trying to figure out

All in all, that adds up to about five months per book.

So far, I’ve collected more than 300 ideas in my swipe file. New ideas pop into my head constantly while I’m working on a story, so there’s already more than enough material for a book a month project.

Sometimes outlining happens naturally while I’m writing, and occasionally I create full roadmaps as a basic story structure. That shouldn’t be an issue either.

Last year, I worked on multiple books at the same time. That allowed me to release three novels and ten short stories. If I add up the word counts of those releases, I’m somewhere around 200K words. In addition, I wrote first drafts for 3-4 novels totaling at least another 200K words, plus 42 short stories amounting to roughly another 200K words.

Once again, the writing itself isn’t far away from a book a month:

• 12 × 40–80K words = 480–960K words
• In 2025 I’ve written around 600K words

With a bit more discipline, writing 12 full novels in 12 months seems achievable.

But now comes the hard part: editing, translating, formatting, and uploading. To handle this for 12 full novels in a single year, I’d need to do more than double my efforts—probably even triple them, as I don’t want to sacrifice quality, especially when it comes to editing, just to increase output. Squeezing many more editing sessions into my daily routine will therefore be the real challenge of 2026.

I plan to report on the project throughout the entire year here on the blog and on X. If I succeed, I might even continue this schedule until writing stops being something I love as much as I do now. If I fail, I’ll still end up publishing far more books than I managed in 2025.

Either way, this project is a worthwhile endeavor for me – and hopefully a fun read for you.