How Long Does It Take to Write a Book?

How long does it take to write a book? I remember back to my senior seminar class in my undergrade program--Seminar in History. This class required the production of a 20- to 25-page paper, theoretically based upon primary research. I worked all semester for a paper that was, if truth be told, quite mediocre. I knew how to remember random facts at the time, but I did not really understand how to connect the dots to create a historical narrative that was backed up by primary research. Setting research questions and a solid thesis were not really in my repertoire at that point. 

I liked the idea of going to graduate school, but the thought of writing a master's thesis approximating 100 pages, not to mention a doctoral dissertation seemed a daunting task. In my DA program in history, I wrote a dissertation that was in the area of 140 pages. My recent book Big Pandemic on The Prairie is listed at 191 pages. I'm currently in the process of writing my next book, which I anticipate will come in around the 100,000-120,000 range. It's a biography of a senator from West Virginia, Jennings Randolph. I've been working at it on and off for the past six years, and I'm currently just north of 150 pages, or about 50,000 words. 

I no longer have the view that my younger self did that a book was nigh impossible. I knew that it was not impossible. After all, many people had written books, some series of books that encompassed several volumes. Popular nonfiction authors come out with books every few years (or even more frequently). I thought that this was beyond my ability. However, I should have been thinking about the idea of eating an elephant. 

The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. The way to write a book is one word at a time. My initial draft of my book on the Spanish flu took nearly three years to write. There was a delay tied to a cross-country move and setting up classes at a new institution, which took up quite a bit of my time. Otherwise, it would have been completed a bit earlier. The initial draft came in around 50,000 words or 150 pages. The final draft was 197 pages in Microsoft Word, which came to about 63,000 words. From concept to publication, The book took about 4.5 years. 

I've written about 70-80 pages since the beginning of summer on my latest project. It's been a little bit here, a little bit there. However, I was just doing some math yesterday. If I wanted to write a 300-page book over the course of a year, It would take a little more than 250 words per day. Writing an average of 250 words per day for 365 days in a year would produce around 90,000 words over the course of a year. That's a good length for a nonfiction book. Of course, there's research, which I could only undertake a day or two at a time for several years because of my distance from the archive. That takes quite a bit of time, but once you have an idea of the direction the research is going to go and the sources that will answer your research questions, the actual writing of a book of a decent length should not be as daunting as it might seem.