Writing a Book FAQ #1

A photo from one of my bday celebrations last week! Photo credit: Norma Fulwiler

As of today, it’s been one week since my book launched and it has been a blast! That, plus my birthday, led to a whole lot of celebration, social time, and love from loved ones. It has been an amazing whirlwind!

Among all the texts, phone calls, and social media messages, I received a lot of questions about writing and self publishing the book. One of the most popular questions: How long did it take you to write the book?

This book is business nonfiction, and still nearly everyone is surprised when I tell them I wrote it in 30 days, the result of a nonfiction writing challenge I co-hosted last year. The challenge was to write every day for a month. Every other decision was up to each participant to choose for themselves.

I decided to set a daily word count goal, and had to do some math to get to what that goal should be. It’s a widely accepted rule of thumb that 250 typed words fit on one written page, and I thought a 100-page book sounded like the right length for a book tentatively titled “Tiny Talks.”

Based on that, I set my daily word count goal to 1,000 words a day. If I ended the challenge with 30,000 words, it seemed reasonable I might cut 15% or so during editing, and ultimately end up with 25,000 words or 100 pages.

Here are some interesting word count stats:

• The first manuscript had ~30,700 words.

• The final paperback clocks in at 22,259 words.

• About 1,200 words were put into a downloadable “tools, resources, and examples” section.

Doing this math: about 7,000 or so words were eliminated from the manuscript, after three rounds of edits.