How long does it take to write a book?

A book’s writing time comes from three numbers: how many words the book needs, how many words you write on a writing day, and how many days a week you write. This page counts a first draft, which is the whole book written once, from the first page to the last, before you fix anything.

Two made-up writers show how the sum works. Both want to write a novel of 80,000 words.

Nora writes 500 words every day, before work. 80,000 divided by 500 is 160. So Nora needs 160 days. That is about 23 weeks, or a little over five months.

Ben writes more each time he sits down. He writes 1,000 words on Saturday and the same on Sunday, and nothing on the other days. That is 2,000 words a week, so his book takes 40 weeks, which is about nine months.

Nora writes half as much as Ben in one sitting. But she finishes about 17 weeks sooner, because she writes every day. How many days you write matters as much as how many words you write.

The table shows the days a first draft takes if you write every day.

A novel for adults should be about 80,000 to 89,999 words, according to a guide in Writer’s Digest, a magazine for writers. The guide is advice for people who are about to send a book to a literary agent. It gives a range for other kinds of book too.

Typing 1,000 words takes about 19 minutes at an average typing speed. Writing that many new words takes longer, because you have to think of them first.

The typing speed comes from a study of people who took a typing test online. Their average speed was 52 words a minute (Dhakal and colleagues, 2018). But they were copying sentences shown on the screen.

We found no study that gives a fair average for writing new words. To measure your own speed, write for one hour, count the words, and find your row in the table.

The biggest group of writers in one large survey wrote about 10 hours a week. The survey asked authors who publish their own books, and more than half of that group also had a day job (Written Word Media’s author survey, 2022). These are the authors’ own reports, and the company that ran the survey says it is not a scientific study.

Ten hours a week is enough to write a book. At 500 words an hour, ten hours is 5,000 words a week. A draft of 80,000 words then takes 16 weeks.

A much faster draft is possible too. National Novel Writing Month was a yearly challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days, which is 1,667 words a day. At its height, hundreds of thousands of writers took part (Publishers Weekly, 2025).

You finish a first draft by writing a small, fixed number of words on most days, and by leaving the fixing for later. Three things help.

Pick a number you can do on a bad day.

If 500 words is too much after a long day, choose 250. The table above shows that a draft of 80,000 words still gets done in under a year.

Give writing one fixed time.

Choose one time of day for writing and keep it, such as the hour before work. A fixed time helps writing become a habit, and a habit takes weeks to form.

Do not fix the draft while you write it.

Write the next part and leave the mistakes where they are. You will fix them when the whole draft is done. Freewriting is good practice for this.

A finished first draft is not a finished book. Rewriting and editing come next. We found no reliable count of how long they take, so this page gives none.

Every figure on this page that is not a plain sum links to a source below. We read each one in full.

1. Sambuchino, C. (2016). Word Count for Novels and Children’s Books: The Definitive Post. Writer’s Digest.
2. Dhakal, V., Feit, A. M., Kristensson, P. O. and Oulasvirta, A. (2018). Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
3. Noblit, C. (2022). The Making of A Six Figure Author: How Authors Evolve With Their Income. Written Word Media.
4. Stewart, S. (2025). NaNoWriMo Nonprofit Shutters. Publishers Weekly, April 2.