How long does it take to write a book?

How long does it take to write a book?

Let’s look at some numbers. People are busier than ever these days, so you want your book to be quick and easy to read. Aim for around 50,000 words – this will give you enough content for a book with a decent spine width that looks nice on a bookshelf, but will not be too long. If you find yourself writing more than 50-60K words, you might have enough material to split it into two books (and that’s great news).

With a goal of 50,000 words, if you work at a pace of the equivalent of one blog post per day (500 words), you can have your book drafted in 100 days! And remember all the content you’ve already produced if you’ve been positioning yourself in your niche on social media or producing a podcast or video series, or even material from emails you might have sent your coaching clients… that means you don’t have to spend every one of those 100 days writing from scratch. Mix it up: go through old content, expand on it, polish it up, find what’s missing, then spend a few hours another day writing something new to fill the gaps.

Doable, right? ?

What if you’re not a writer?

What if cranking out 500-word articles is really not your thing? What if you don’t have a lot of content already produced, and you looked at yesterday’s numbers and realised it would probably take you twice as long or more to write your book?

That’s okay.

Quite often, people who find writing hard to do are really good at speaking. So, speak your book!

There are all sorts of methods you can try, from straight dictating to phoning up (or video-chatting with) a friend or colleague or a virtual assistant and just talking through your content. The bonus here is that their questions and your answers can be even more valuable, because it’s so easy to miss something obvious if you know the topic inside-out.

Writing a book will give you so much more credibility as an expert or coach, and is a great way to land more public speaking opportunities, so it’s worth setting aside some time each day over the next quarter to pull together anything that could fit into the book that your clients need from you and start arranging it into a logical sequence.