How Long Does it Take to Write a Novel?

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. We’ll talk about the amount of clock time it takes to write a novel versus the calendar time.

Clock Time and Calendar Time

If you were a machine who never got tired or bored or had to eat or deal with a family, then you could just work straight through on your novel. If it takes you 500 hours to write a novel, then you could divide that number by the 24 hours in a day to get the calendar time—a bit less than 21 days.

But you’re not a machine. You can’t work 24 hours every day. So the actual number of hours you log “on the clock” to write your novel are going to be different than the required number of calendar days.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to estimate both the clock time and the calendar time for your novel. We’ll assume that you have already learned the craft of fiction writing, which means you know how to do all the stages of writing a novel, so it’s just a matter of executing each stage. Let’s talk about those stages first…

The 7 Stages of Writing a Novel

Nobody just writes a first draft of a novel and then publishes it. Well, nobody who writes well. There are other stages in the process. Not everybody needs all of those stages, but most writers put some time into each.

Here are some typical stages that professional novelists go through:

Research and worldbuilding. This is optional. Some kinds of fiction don’t require you to do any research. Others don’t require you to do any worldbuilding. Fantasy typically requires a lot of worldbuilding. Science fiction and historical fiction often take huge amounts of both research and worldbuilding. Your mileage may vary.
Story planning. This is also optional. If you’re a Seat-of-the-Pants novelist, you don’t plan your story—you just start writing. If you use my Snowflake Method, you spend a fair amount of time planning your story. If you’re an Outliner, you spend even more time planning. Your brain is wired to be somewhere on this spectrum, and I don’t think you can change it. So work with your brain, however you’re wired.
Writing the first draft. This is not optional. Everyone writes a first draft. There are different ways to do this. You might write every scene in sequence. You might write scenes as they come to your mind and then piece them together later. You might write part of the draft, then replan the story, then write more of the draft, and so on until you finish. You might write a page and then polish it many times before moving on (this is called Edit-As-You-Go). All of these are valid ways to write. It’s on you to find the process that works best for you.
Editing your manuscript. Most writers put their novel through several revisions. Edit-As-You-Go writers may possibly produce a publishable manuscript in their first draft, because their process combines editing with first-drafting. Again, it’s your job to decide how many revisions you need to make your manuscript its best.
Working with editors and proofreaders. If you work with a traditional royalty-paying publisher, they’ll assign an editor to read your manuscript and send you a “revision letter.” This will tell you what you did well and what you need to improve. Revision letters typically run several pages, but they can go to many pages if there are a lot of problems. Professional novelists who self-publish their work often hire somebody to review their work, or they may ask a friend to do it, or they may hand it off to alpha readers or beta readers. Once you’ve got feedback, it’s up to you to make new revisions in light of what your editors or readers say. The final stage of editing is called proofreading, and it’s often done by a professional and returned to you for review. Strictly speaking, this entire stage is optional, but successful novelists rarely skip it.
Producing your book. When the book is finally declared done, it still needs to be produced. If you’re publishing a paper edition, the book needs to be typeset, printed, bound, and shipped. If you’re publishing an e-book edition, it usually will be typeset and exported in ePub format. (The one exception is that some self-publishers who only publish e-books will simply upload their Word document directly to Amazon. But even in this case, the Word document has to be formatted the way you want the e-book to look.) In either case, a cover needs to be designed, and it’s different for the paper edition and the e-book edition. So this stage is not really optional. If you’re working with a publisher, they do this work. If you’re self-publishing, then you do it yourself or hire someone to do it.
Launching your book. Once you’ve got your book produced, you usually want to spend some time letting the world know it’s available for sale. A few authors do nothing to launch their book, but most successful authors spend some time on it.

So how long do each of these stages take? That depends on a lot of things. Which stages are you executing? How long is your book? How fast do you write? How many hours do you have each week to work on your novel? Are you working with a publisher or doing it all yourself?

A typical novel runs 60k to 120k words. You can write shorter, and you can write longer. In what follows, I’ll assume a round 100k words and make estimates based on that. Then you can scale my estimates up or down, depending on whether your novel is shorter or longer than 100k.

Estimates for Research and Worldbuilding

If you don’t need to do any research or worldbuilding, then lucky you—this stage will take zero time. Or if you’re writing a series, then every book after the first one can use all the research and worldbuilding you invested into that first one.

A reasonable amount of clock time to put into your research is 50 to 100 hours. Some novelists put in much more. (I plead guilty to this. That’s just the way my brain is wired. Research is part of the fun, and ditto worldbuilding.)

How much calendar time does this convert to? That depends on how many hours you spend per week. If you have 10 hours every week, then that 50 to 100 hours is going to cost you 5 to 10 weeks.

Estimates for Story Planning

If you don’t do any story planning, then this stage will also cost you zero time. It’s tempting to skip this stage and just “get to the good stuff,” but if your brain is wired to need story planning, then you need to do it. You’ll end up writing your first draft quicker, and you’ll save a ton of time on editing and probably on working with editors.

For those who plan their story, it’s again reasonable to budget a clock time of 50 to 100 hours. Snowflakers will take less time than Outliners. Neither is right or wrong for everyone. Both are right for some people and wrong for others. Part of your career management problem is figuring out how your brain is wired so that you can collaborate with it to be as productive as possible.

To estimate the corresponding calendar time in weeks, again just divide your estimated clock time by the number of hours you have in a week.

Estimates for Writing the First Draft

Everybody has to write a first draft. Some writers are faster than others. I have known writers who produce 100 to 200 words per hour. I have known others who write 2000 words per hour. Writers who dictate their first draft claim speeds up to 5000 words per hour. I have my doubts on that.

I typically write about 1000 words per hour if I’m in the zone, and about 500 when not in the zone. I can’t control being in the zone. Some days just click.

If you are an Edit-As-You-Go writer, you may write just a few hundred words and then go back and edit it many times. This reduces your speed at writing first-draft copy, but the payoff is that you may spend very little time in the next stage, editing your manuscript. Don’t make this decision based on speed. Make it based on how your brain works best. If you need to Edit-As-You-Go, then do so and be happy. If you don’t need to, then don’t and be happy. You are who you are and you can’t change that.

The clock time to write your first draft is just your total word count divided by your hourly speed. So if you are writing 100k words and you write 1000 words per hour, then your clock time estimate is 100 hours.

The calendar time again depends on how many hours you write per week. You know the drill, so I won’t repeat it.

Estimates for Editing Your Manuscript

If you skip editing, then this stage will cost you nothing. Edit-As-You-Go writers may be able to skip this stage. I know a fair number of professional novelists who’ve written many novels and feel comfortable skipping this stage. I am not one of them. I usually put my manuscripts through 5 to 10 rounds of editing. The early rounds are slow. The later rounds are fast.

Most writers can edit their work quite a bit faster than they can write first-draft copy. But if you rushed the first draft, you may find yourself spending more time on the second draft, and probably also the third.

The clock time to do each round of editing is again easy to calculate by dividing your word count by your speed. If you have 100k words and you can edit 2000 words per hour, then a round of editing will cost you 50 hours.

And again, the calendar time just depends on your clock time and the number of hours you have per week.

Estimates for Working With Editors

This stage is different because now you’re working with somebody else. Your editor can’t send you a revision letter instantly. I’ve had an editor who once got a revision letter back to me in 3 days. That’s practically a miracle. But most of them will take weeks or even months to respond. When I worked with traditional publishers, it usually took them 1 to 3 months to return a revision letter. I’ve heard stories of much longer wait times. Yes, really.

While you’re waiting on your editor, you are spending zero clock time of your own. But the calendar continues to turn. This can be frustrating. It’s probably a good idea to have another project to work on while you wait.

Once you get your revision letter, you then need to edit your manuscript again, based on your editor’s comments. (The editor doesn’t make the changes; you do. Their job is to guide you in what needs reworking.) When you work with a publisher, they may well hand you a revision letter and ask for revisions within a few days or weeks. Yes, they really can give you only days to make revisions. If you complain, they’ll point out that you signed a binding legal contract and they invested a lot of money in your book, and now it’s time to buckle down. This can get very uncomfortable.

After you do revisions, a traditional publisher will always send the manuscript to a proofreader, who will catch all the last little Punctuation, Usage, Grammar, and Spelling (PUGS) issues. Most publishers will send the final proofs back to you for a final read-through. They will often give you a short fuse (“Can you get it back to us tomorrow? Thanks! You’re a prince!”) Again, this can be not-fun, especially if the proofreader decided to change your wording. I’ve heard horror stories of proofreaders making drastic changes that wrecked the dialogue or the author’s voice. I’ve not experienced this myself. Self-published authors have a lot less pressure here. They can always just throw out what the proofreader did. But trad-pubbed authors may have to grin and bear it.

It’s very hard to make estimates here, but when I was traditionally published, I figured about 40 hours to do edits based on the revision letter, and another 10 hours to review the final proofs to catch the errors the proofreader missed. I tend to put more time on the edits now that I am self-publishing, but that’s probably because I have no deadline and I’m a perfectionist. So for me, 100 hours is about right.

Estimates for Producing Your Book

If you are traditionally published, your publisher will handle all the production. So this stage costs you almost zero clock time. (The only time you take will be an hour or two to complain about the awful cover your publisher created for you. This will get you nowhere, usually. Also, you will be asked to approve the terrible back-cover copy that a marketing intern wrote, which will cost you another hour to rewrite.)

A traditional publisher may take a few months to over a year to work through production. The wheels of traditional publishing grind slow. You should have other projects to work on while you wait.

If you are self-publishing your work, then production is your job. You have two tasks:

Typeset the novel. You can do this yourself in an hour or two using Vellum (a Mac-only piece of software that is fantastic) or Atticus (runs on Mac OS and Linux and Windows and Chromebook, and I’ve never used it, but I hear it’s very good). The calendar time here is typically one day.
Get a cover designed. If you have excellent graphic design skills and excellent marketing skills, you can do this yourself in a few hours. Otherwise, you should hire a freelance cover designer. This will take an hour or two of your time to create a cover design brief that tells the designer what you think you want. Then you’ll spend a few hours telling your designer what they got wrong. This can take weeks to months of calendar time to get right, so it’s a project you should launch long before you’re ready to publish.

Estimates for Launching Your Book

Whether you are traditionally published or self-published, you will probably spend some time on your launch. The main thing here is letting people in your Target Audience know that your book is available and giving them incentive to buy it right now. The list of possible tasks you could do in your book launch is gigantic. Pick a few that mesh with your personality and do those well. Don’t let your publisher steamroll you. I had a publisher once give me a list of 25 things to do. I had a talk with my editor and the head of marketing and the head of publicity and told them the 3 things I was actually going to do. One of my tasks was not on their list—they didn’t know you could do that. We had a terrific launch.

It’s reasonable to spend anywhere from 1 to 50 hours on your launch. The calendar time is usually compressed. Most authors commit no more than a week or two to a book launch.

Hard Numbers

For reference, here are a few hard numbers from my own life, which show how much variance there is in the real world:

The fastest I ever wrote a traditionally published book was about 300 hours, which took only 9 months from signing the contract to seeing books in the store.
The slowest I ever wrote a traditionally published book was about 500 hours over 12 to 15 months (I don’t have good records on either of these numbers, so they’re estimates).
The fastest I’ve written a self-published book was about 150 hours in 3 months.
The slowest I’ve written a self-published book was more than 1000 hours over more than 5 years.

A lot depends on where you are in life. If you have a demanding day job and young children, you may not have much time and energy to put into writing. As you get older, your energy level may drop, but you may also find yourself with more time for writing after you retire.

Homework:

What is the expected word count for the novel you’re currently working on?
Which of the 7 stages do you need to do?
What is a reasonable estimate for the clock time for each of these stages?
What is a reasonable estimate for the calendar time for each?
Multiply all estimates by 2 and add them all up. That is a pretty decent estimate of the amount of time you will actually spend on your novel.