Writing a Cozy Mystery Book in 31 Days

I’ve been writing and publishing a beach cozy mystery series for the last couple years. I write these under a pen name.

I was sidetracked with another writing project (my new crime thriller series) so I haven’t published new books in my cozy mystery series this year, which is series-killer (pun) in the eyes of the Amazon algorithms in the Kindle Marketplace.

2021 has just flown by, so I need to step it up if I’m to publish a new cozy mystery book this year. So I’m taking on an intensive writing challenge for the month of October to write the fifth book in my beach cozy mystery series in October.

For many indie writers, that’s not much of a challenge, but I’m a slow-poke, so writing a cozy mystery book in 31 days is a hefty challenge for yours truly.

I do have a few things working in my favor:

• My goal word count is 40,000 words, so I’m not working on an epic door-stopper of a novel. Whew.
• This is the fifth book in the series, so I know this world and characters pretty well.
• I have the complete 24-chapter outline complete and imported into Scrivener from Plottr, so I’m locked and loaded.

That being said, writing a novel is always a bit of a challenge, so only time will tell if I can pull this off.

Watch the Video: Prep to Writing a Cozy Mystery Book

I will record the process and uploading videos about it on my YouTube channel and posting the videos on this website, so make sure to subscribe to my YouTube Channel or to my newsletter to keep tabs.

You can watch the first video below which walks you through my prewriting prep. I’ll show you the apps I use — including the actual outline I’ll be using, which I created using the Plottr software that I use for my outlines.