Writer statistics

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

— Peter Drucker (probably)

Would you like to know how many words you’ve written each day (or week, or month)? How many hours you’ve spent on your book this year? With what accuracy you’ve actually achieved your goals? You should.

Without knowing where you stand, it’s all too easy to get lost in wishful thinking, timing delusions, and procrastination — a writer’s usual enemies.

However, understandably, measuring these things, as useful as they turn out to be, is not something a writer’s creative mind is particularly bothered with.

This is why Novelitist takes care of all the tedious bits. You just need to write your book, and then look at the neat compiled data to draw your learning from it — because you will learn a lot about your inner writer.

You just write, real-time statistics follow

With a less comprehensive solution, tracking your work is a drag. You’d have to:

  • count your words across several documents (unless you write your book into one gigantic doc), using rather primitive tools

  • manually keep track of every day’s work separately, in something like a spreadsheet

  • calculate your pace (words-per-day average) by yourself

  • put it all, along with a deadline date, into some-third party calculator…

… only to get very little meaningful details in the end, like an estimate on when you’ll finish. Rinse, repeat.

Little wonder no writer does that consistently. It’s rather silly. And so writers miss on this very important tool — the ability to track progress accurately and comprehensively, and draw lessons about the writing process from it.

Novelitist accomplishes all of the above, and much more, seamlessly, in real-time as you write, day in and day out, ceaselessly, and puts it in front of you as it is. You. Just. Write.

This is the basic data that Novelitist gathers and compiles for your effortless perusal, while you simply write your book:

  1. Your book’s current total word count

  2. The total number of words you’ve written (with deleting and re-writing stuff, it may differ from the total book word count)

  3. The total number of hours you’ve spent writing your book

  4. Your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly pace (words per day/week/month/year)

  5. The daily, weekly, monthly and yearly amount of hours you’ve spent writing

  6. Your goal achievements

  7. Your circadian writing habits

Let’s look at some of these, and more, in some detail. First, here’s a synopsis of what you’ll get when you click Advanced statistics in the right-hand side toolbar:

Comprehensive writer statistics
A sample of the writer statistics that Novelitist generates for you, after you set your deadline and goals, and then simply write your book as usual.

Now let’s break this down into its components.

Your current status report

This is self-explanatory: you get a current status report of your work, easy to understand, written for humans, not robots. This is based on your book word count goal, your book deadline, and your daily pace, and it’s dynamic — changes with your habits and progress.

On track to finish your book
This is where you want to be.
You'll miss your deadline
This is where you don’t want to be.
You've missed your deadline
This is where you definitely don’t want to be.

Detailed progress chart

This is where you can track your progress in detail, on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. You can see, at a glance, how you fare towards your word count and time-spent-writing goals.

To our knowledge, this is unlike anything you’ll find in any other tools, and it requires no effort on your side, except that of actually writing your book. You won’t have to manually enter data, as you would in a spreadsheet, and then generate a chart from it. You only need to keep writing, and you want the red line to go up every day.

Detailed book writing progress chart
The detailed chart of your progress lets you know exactly how much you wrote, in a day or in a year alike.

Goal tracking

Once you’ve set any word count or time-spent-writing goals, Novelitist tracks your performance automatically and let’s you know where you stand towards these goals.

In this example, the writer has only set a daily word count goal, which she hits with reasonable consistency (80% of the time).

If you’re not hitting your goals consistently, Novelitist will give it to you straight, no sugarcoating.

Book goal tracking
The goal hitting report is ruthless. Once you set goals, you’d better stick to them, or the table above turns red.

Pace, averages, and records

These metrics are about your word count and time averages, and about your highlights: the day, week, month, or year when you wrote the most.

You may wonder why in this example the writer hasn’t clocked any writing hours. The answer is simple: copy-paste. When you do the same, i.e., copy and paste material from somewhere else into Novelitist, your word count increases (obviously), yet your time spent writing won’t. So you’ll only be able to half-fool yourself.

Book writing pace, averages, records
Your averages and records.

Circadian rhythm

Finally, there’s your circadian report. What time of day are you the most productive? When do you spend the most time writing? These are not the same.

You may be spending a lot of time writing in the evening, but end up with a lower word count then when you write in the morning, even if you spend less time writing in the morning. Because this is a matter of yield.

The circadian measurements may help correct such mismatches, guiding you towards a writing schedule that produces the maximum yield.

Circadian writing habits
What time of day are you the most productive? Can this be optimized?

Sharing your stats

The whole point of these statistics is to ultimately awaken accountability. You need to hold yourself accountable, if you’re serious about finishing your book.

If you want to extend your accountability circle towards your community, feel free to screenshot these stats and post them for others to see.

Privacy

The writer statistics are just a bunch of numbers stored on your devices, synchronized on our servers. There is nothing special about them, and they don’t contain any personal information whatsoever.

Closing thoughts

Set your goals and your deadline, keep writing, and consult your stats often, at least until you gain momentum. Your stats are calculated in real-time, and reflect your work mercilessly.

Your writer stats are designed to keep you grounded in reality, and help you reach that supreme achievement: your finished book. Dismiss or underestimate this tool at your peril.