As a writing coach, one of the questions I am most often asked is, “How long does it take to write a book?”
It’s a simple enough question, but answering it demands the consideration of a number of variables.
In episode #125 of The Writing Coach podcast, I cover the four key variables involved in determining exactly how long it takes to write a book.
Then we dive into every writer’s favourite topic . . . MATH!
I kid, I kid.
While there IS math in this episode, rest assured it’s fairly minimal.
Plus, it’s worth the pain of dealing with some math because, by punching some variables into a simple equation, we can successfully determine an answer to this important question.
Listen to the full episode now or read the transcript below.
The Writing Coach Episode #125 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #125 Transcript
Hello beloved listeners, and welcome back to the writing coach podcast. It is your host as always writing coach Kevin T. Johns here. The summer has begun. It is officially summer as I am recording this, I think yesterday was the longest day of the year. And what an amazing time to do writing. I love getting outside, doing some writing in, in a park or in the backyard or, or just, you know, taking that laptop with you somewhere and soaking up the vitamin D putting on the sunscreen. Of course, you don’t want to burn yourself to a crisp, but, you know, get outside. That’s where the romantic poets were inspired, you know, Wordsworth and Coleridge and, and Byron, and then Shelley and all these incredible writers. They all went out into nature and looked at the mountains and the clouds and they listened to the wind and looked at the lakes and wrote some of the greatest poetry ever.
So who knows how you might be inspired by going outside and, and checking it out now in today’s episode, I want to answer a question that I get asked all the time, which sounds like a simple question. And in some ways it is, but in other ways it’s a really complicated one to answer. And that is how long does it take to write a book? And I mean, as I said, so many factors involved if we want to kind of get a general sense of industry expectations, I think we can look at the mainstream traditional publishing industry where the big authors, you know, people like Stephen King and James Patterson and, and all these kinds of hit authors tend to put out a book a year. That seems to be a fairly regular schedule for a genre fiction, writing popular author. So, you know, if you’re not writing a book a year yet, and you’re probably not, if you’re listening to this, you know, that might be a reasonable goal to shoot for is spending about a year on a book.
And I actually think not just in comparison to the traditional publishing industry, but based on a bunch of math and factors, we’re about to talk to, I think a year is a reasonable amount of time to answer the question. How long does it take to write a book? Of course, there are people who write way faster, especially in the self-publishing world where there’s much more of a pulp fiction approach. And people are publishing books every couple of months. Absolutely a book can be written faster than a year, but you know, those tend to be advanced authors who are making a living selling books. And so, you know, they’re paying their rent, putting product out there and, and that’s not generally who my clients are and in who listen to this podcast, I’m working with a lot of first time authors or people who’ve put out a couple books already, but are looking to up their game and improve their craft.
And so for those folks, we’re going to do some, some math here. I going to warn you upfront math is like my enemy. I, am not so good at math. So if, if you follow along with this podcast and there ends up being any errors in my math, do not be surprised that said, we’re dealing with really rough estimates here anyway. And, and I think, you know, whether my math is spot on or not what we’re about to cover, I think is still going to be useful for you. So I think when we think about how long does it take to write a book there are four key variables at play, and these variables are the length of your book. How many words you write an hour, how many hours you write in any given week and how long you’re willing to spend on revisions.
All right. So let’s start doing some math based on some rough estimates. So we got to start with the length of your book. You know, for the most part, obviously, a longer book is going to take longer to write a shorter book is going to be quicker, but something I want to establish right off the bat is we do not think in terms of page count in the writer world. So many, you know, aspiring authors or first-time authors come to me and they say, oh, I want to write a book. That’s about 350 pages long. Well, the thing is a page is kind of a meaningless metric because font size changes the number of pages that a manuscript is margin size. Once you’re actually formatting a book, the trim size, all these things affect how many pages a book is. And so what we really want to be thinking about is word count. Word count doesn’t change, regardless of the size of the font that a book is being printed in.
So let’s think in terms of word count and like so many things in writing word count or ideal word count or, or expected word count is really based on genre. Certain books are anticipated to be longer certain genre books. Other genres can be shorter. So let’s pick kind of a medium. I, I think 80,000 words is kind of a reasonable number. I’d actually recommend something shorter, but most of the writers I work with seem to want to hit around the 80,000 word mark. And I think this is it’s pretty average. A sci-fi or a fantasy might be up to 120,000 words, a chicklet or, or a thriller might be as you know, down to 50 or 60,000. But in general, 80,000 is a reasonable word count for us to work from, for our estimate. So for the length of our book, variable, number one, we’re going to say 80,000 words, variable, number two, how many words do you write an hour?
And now this is going to be vastly different from one person to another. Some people write about 400 or 500 words an hour. Some people can write up to 3000 words an hour, especially people using voice, text techniques and whatnot. You are going to need to figure out how many words on average you write an hour and that will play into this math that we’re going to do for you. But let’s say in general, let’s go with a thousand words an hour, I think for a super-fast writer that would be considered fairly slow for a quite slow writer that would be considered fairly fast. I think I’m certainly, oh, in this range, a thousand words an hour might even be a little fast for me. I might be more in the seven 50 range, but let’s go with a thousand cause it makes the math easier.
And it’s a nice word count to shoot for. I think if you’re writing a thousand words an hour, you’re doing just fine in terms of productivity. So now we have some numbers to work with. We have an 80,000 word manuscript and we have a writer writing a thousand words an hour. So we now know how long it takes to write a first draft of a book about 80 hours, 80,000 words divided by a thousand words an hour works out to 80 hours. So if you are an author and you’re writing about one hour a week, a thousand words a week, that means it’s going to take you about a year and a half to write a first draft of your book. If you are a writer working on your book, eight hours a day, or a thousand words, an hour, eight hours a day, it’s going to take you two weeks.
So you can get a first draft of book written in two weeks. If you do two solid 40-hour weeks working on it, this is the thing though. Most people, at least who I work with, do not have the time available to work. Full-Time on their novels. They have families, they have full-time jobs. They have part-time jobs. Very few people have the luxury of the option of being able to work eight hours a day on their writing. The other thing is even if they do have eight hours a day available, it’s extremely difficult to write for eight hours a day, eight straight hours. Every day. People tend to see diminishing returns after two, or three hours, you’re running out of steam. You’re mentally running out of energy and you’re physically running out of energy. So arguably, could it be, could a book be written in two weeks, absolutely work on it, eight hours a day for two weeks, and you’re going to have an 80,000-word first draft done, but that’s not really reasonable.
I mean, maybe, maybe you can, maybe you, you consider it reasonable. You just want to like pound out that first draft. I know the writer is a copywriter marketer mostly, but Ben settle also has a bunch of novels. And I believe he said, that’s his approach. You know, he just bangs it out as quickly as humanly possible that first draft. And he, he does do it in a week or a month or something like that. But let’s say let’s try to come up with a little bit more reasonable estimate here. I, I would say three and a half hours a week, you know, might be reasonable, maybe three, one hour sessions, or maybe a little bit more than that in any given week. For most people who are working a full time job and have families and kids and stuff. I mean, that’s doable. it’s three and a half hours a week.
Isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s also not impossible at all if you’re committed. And if you’re taking the time, if you’re blocking it out into your schedule, I mean, you, I have a client who does most of her writing on Saturday. So she easily gets three and a half hours of work done a week. She just does it Saturday mornings because that fits her schedule best. So if we are writing a thousand words an hour at three and a half hours a week and our target is 80,000 words, then we’re looking at about six months to complete a first draft. And as you may know, I have a group coaching program called first draft that I tend to sell in six month bunches. And this is exactly why even in the sales letter, I say, you know, I want to make sure you have three to four hours a week to work on your writing.
And this is exactly why if you’re working three, four hours a week on your writing, you’re writing about a thousand words an hour within six months, you can get that first draft done, and you can get that done without having to quit your day job without your spouse hating you because they never see you. I think that’s a really reasonably-paced time that most people can fit into their existing life schedule. So how long does it take to write an 80,000-word first draft of a manuscript? I’d say about six months for most people who are, are juggling a bunch of other things while writing their book. So that brings us to how long are you willing to spend on revisions? People have this idea in their heads that someday they’re going to be revising. And then like a red light is going to go off over the computer.
It’s going to start flashing and say, whoa, whoa, your book is now done <laugh> but the reality is that never happens when you are done. Revisions end when a contractually obligated deadline <laugh> comes up, a self-imposed deadline comes up or you’re just sick of the project. You say, “I can’t work on this anymore. I have got to go out and publish this thing.” And so this, the time you spend revising might be the largest variable of all. It might change from one person to another. I am all about the revisions. I highly encourage a very quick and rough first draft and then spending most of your energy on revisions. And so my general recommendation again, if we’re just kind of averaging things out here, I would say anticipate spending double the amount of time on revisions as you spent on the first draft. So we said that at 3.5 hours a week, we would have your 80,000-word manuscript done in about 22 weeks or six months about so I would say you probably want to factor in about 44 weeks of revisions.
You know, sticking again with that kind of three to four hours a week, working on the manuscript. Now you may spend longer, you may get sick of it, spend shorter. You might spend more time on the first draft. So it’s more polished and you don’t need to spend as much time on the revisions. But again, if we’re averaging everything out, generally, I would say you might want to anticipate about 44 weeks of revisions. So we take our 44 weeks of revisions plus our 22-ish weeks of first drafting. And what we come up to is just over one year, it’s like 65 weeks, but again, we’re being pretty loosey-goosey with all these estimates. And so it returns to where we started from all of this, this question I get again and again and again, how long does it take to write a book? Well, there are a ton of variables involved.
We’ve been over them, but kind of on average, if you are writing an average length book, if you are writing words per hour is on average. If you’re able to work about three or four hours a week on your book, I would say a year is a pretty reasonable timeline to get a book written. So there you go. There’s the question I get asked time and time again. How long does it take to write a book? I’ve got an answer for you. I’m going to say about a year and it makes sense since that’s what people like Stephen King and Patterson and others are publishing. That’s the schedule they are publishing on. All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe. So you get the next episode of the podcast and I want you on my mailing list. So I can email you and contact you and let you know about programs I have coming up and share new podcasts with you and all of that. So head on over to www.kevintjohns.com and there’s a popup, or if there’s a tab at the top that says “free book,” you sign up for that and you get a free copy of my book, novel advice, inspiration, motivation, and creative writing tips for aspiring authors. It’s a book full of nice short little essays meant to get you excited about art and about writing and about your life. And we’ve got some writing tips in there as well. So get on over, pick that up and I’ll be able to stay in touch with you. You can let me know what you are working on, what challenges you’re facing, what questions you’d like answered in podcast episodes like this one. And of course, when you’re on my mailing list, you’ll never miss an episode of The Writing Coach.
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