Craft & Business Post: How Long to Write a Book?

Going to write a post about how long it takes to write a book, just because I’ve been thinking about it.

Drafting

How fast I write varies on a day-to-day basis, depending on voice, complexity of the project, type of project and the voice I write it in. For my bigger projects like A Thousand Li, I figure calling it around 500 words an hour on average is correct, though that varies so much. Some days, I churn out 1000 words in an hour, other times it’s 4 hour struggle to get 500 words down (while being bothered / distracted by other things).

For ease of math, we’ll call it 500 words for now.

Every book is 120,000 words in this example (I’ve started writing bigger, but this is a good base number).

So, we’re looking at 240 hours.

In general, I figure about 3 months to write a book, which averages to around 90 days in the period (yes, I work on weekends). So about 1500 words on average is written a day. My goal is actually 2,000 words but I’m often working on multiple projects, so ignore that number.

So. 240 hours in 3 months (90 days). That’s about 2.67 hours (round up to say 3 hours) a day of pure writing time. That feels about right, though it often is actually closer to 4 -5 hours (see the 2k a day minimum across multiple projects). Let’s set that aside for now, and just keep in mind the 240 hours / 90 days number.

Editing

Editing timeline takes longer or shorter, again, because I’m working on multiple projects at a time. Looking back, I can say confidently if I do nothing else but edit, I can edit roughly 10,000 words a day.

I don’t write on those edit days though.

So, more comfortably, I can edit around 5,000 words a day (about 2 hours of concentrated focus) and still write my minimum. Which means, a 120,000 word book takes 24 days to edit. About a month, give or take (I don’t always edit every day because I hate editing and while I can write on weekends and find it fun, editing on weekends sucks the life out of me).

I only ever do one run-through edit myself. Sometimes I’ll go back while I’m writing to edit in the work, but I don’t consider that part of the editing (even if it is).

After the initial edit by me, it goes to the professional copy and line editors.

Professional Editors

How long they take varies depending on the editor (if they work full-time or not, how fast they normally edit, etc.); but generally speaking, a copy & line editor will take between 2-3 weeks for my 120,000 word books. Let’s call it 3 weeks.

It takes me a week (a few hours a day for 5 days) to go through their edits and fix everything they send me. Sometimes a lot faster.

Note, I’m a very clean writer, especially after going through my own editing process, so this amount of time might vary for others significantly.

Figure a full month and about another 10 hours of work time here.

Proofing

Proofing takes roughly 10,000 words a day, which means in 12 days I get my book back. Two weeks. It takes a day for me to go through proofs (again, see being a clean writer).

After which point, the book is ready in terms of writing time. There’s still formatting, covers (which should have been made already but print and hardcover covers will need to be edited) and keyword research, etc. before it’s ready to publish. But for all intents and purposes, the writing side is done by now.

Total Time

For me, for a 120,000 word book, its:

Drafting: 240 hours / 3 months

Editing: 48 hours / 1 month

Fixing Edits: 10 hours / 1 week

Proof Fixes: 2 hours / 1 day

Total time from start to finish: 4.5 months, give or take depending on scheduling of proofers and editors. About 300 hours.

Redoing the Math…

If I wasn’t working full time, if I only had say, 2 hours a day to work on writing, these 300 hours would take me… 150 days or roughly 5 months of consistent work. Add in the external editor and proofers time, we’re looking at closer to 6 – 6.5 months of work. In a year, if you were lucky, you might be able to put out 2 books.

And that assumes you work every day, rain or shine or holiday or family time. And that you can keep your story in your head all the way through, without needing to spend more time remembering where you left off. Which might not be the case if you went on a holiday for a few weeks with your family, or if your 2 hours of writing time is actually 20 minutes in the car, 10 minutes on the subway and another 30 minutes for lunch kind of thing.

I put out a lot of books because it's my job, and I do it day in and day out (somewhat unhealthily too since I do work weekends but... yeah, don't copy me). And this is with a 120k book, if someone writes an epic fantasy of 250k... well, double that amount of time and be grateful you see a book a year. 

For the most part. Sometimes we can push, but that's partly from running work concurrently. At least for me. But that's antoher post.