- One of the most common questions I get asked
is, "How long will it take to write and publish my book?"
Whether you've got the first draft done on your manuscript
or you're just thinking about starting to write,
I'm gonna walk you through how long it takes
the average author to write, publish,
and launch a nonfiction book.
Stick around.
(light rock music)
Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad from Book Launchers.
We're your professional self-publishing team,
helping you write, publish, and sell a nonfiction book
that grows your brand, builds your business,
and makes you money.
The best part, you keep all rights and royalties.
We just provide you emotional support
and expert guidance along the way
and we care more about you and your book
and your success than anyone else.
All right, lemme show you something.
Come closer.
This is some super-duper top-secret
Book Launchers juice right here, my friends.
It's our book publishing timeline.
So, let me just enter a little date in here
and I'll pick a random date that may or may not be the day
someone you know was born (laughing) as a start date.
Our Platinum-level service
is where you write your book yourself
with the support of one of our writing coaches
and one professional works on your book at a time.
If you're doing this on your own,
you may double up on some things,
but generally you're going to follow this same order
when you do your own book on your own.
So, here's the fun part: How long will this take? (laughing)
Well, this spreadsheet calculates a projected launch date.
But every author is different
and we generally don't run this timeline
to create that launch date until the first draft is written
because some authors hammer out a first draft
in a few months, while others take a year,
maybe a little longer. (laughing)
So, this really does come back to the author,
so you gotta know yourself and also have a sense
of how much time you're gonna put on this,
'cause some authors work on the book for a bit,
take a break, come back, change things,
work on it a bit, and it takes a long time.
And again, there's always exceptions,
but typically someone who comes to us with an idea,
a clear goal, an idea of the audience,
and they have the material,
so they've been working in this field for a while.
They've been speaking on it, teaching it,
or at least thinking through the concepts
and steps for quite some time,
so it's not a brand new concept to them.
In that case, the book can move fairly quickly.
What surprises people most is that developing the hook
and creating the outline takes most people a month.
Once you have that in place though,
you might be able to write the book in 60 to 90 days.
This depends on so many things, though:
the length of your book, the complexity of the materials,
the amount of research,
the amount of thinking you've already done
to develop your messages, stories, steps, tools, and tips.
In this timeline, we plan for you to take
about four months to write your book.
Now, a lot of our clients will actually take longer
and a few will take a little less.
Now, from a finished first draft,
depending on how solid that first draft is
and what the length is,
editing is a two-and-a-half-month process.
Some people take three months or a little longer
because they slow down after the content edit
or they make a lotta changes in copy edit
and you need a third round of copy edit.
But this editing plan allows for a content edit,
which some people call a developmental edit,
two rounds of a copy edit, and a proofread.
It's rare someone goes through editing
much faster than this.
And if they do, it almost always spells problems later,
problems in the form of adding a chapter
they thought of later (laughing)
or extensive wordsmithing once the book is locked down
and changes aren't supposed to be made anymore.
So, rushing editing can have issues later.
Shorter books will go through
this content, copy, and proofread phase
in two months if the draft is solid,
but it does typically take two-and-a-half months.
Once the editing is done, you can start your audiobook.
Now, parallel to the editing,
you could be doing keyword research
and some of the other things noted here
if you have spare time,
but many authors don't have spare time. (laughing)
Now, you can start on your cover earlier,
but you can't finalize the spine or the back cover
until you have the description or the number of pages,
which you really can't do until the book is done.
So, that's why it's happening later
in the Platinum level for our process.
Now, I wanna draw your attention
to another spot where people slow down
and don't realize the work is involved,
and this is at line editing.
Once your book goes into layout,
you need to be prepared to read it again.
A lotta times you think when you're done all of the editing
that you're done.
But when it gets laid out,
little errors can pop in, (laughing)
so this is when you have to read the book again.
And by the way,
this is when you're likely sick of your book. (laughing)
And if you're not sick of your book,
you probably rushed through editing
and are gonna find a lot of issues in the line edit.
Here's the thing though.
When you wordsmith when it's in this phase,
and wordsmithing means you make changes
that are larger than correcting typos
or changing a single word,
it means your entire book has to be recoded
because layout is hard-coded with page numbers,
so your change can cause things
to change over into a new page,
but it doesn't flow through like a Word document.
So, it takes way more effort to change a book at this stage
than editing a Word document.
That said, this is the final opportunity to change
before you go to print, so you need to plan on reading it
or get a proofreader to read it.
If you take a long time to do it,
it will slow this process down a lot.
So, you can see, at this point,
we're eight months into it. (laughing)
But the good news is you now have a book
that you can begin to use to solicit reviews
and begin to get excitement and momentum building.
And for some authors, they skip the presale
and jump right to selling.
I've talked about presales in this video right here
and discussed all the things you need to do
to prepare your book for launch and beyond.
Now, here's a few things we do in prelaunch
that are noted in this timeline.
Rallying the book army.
We've talked about book army in another video,
so you can look up that video.
We prepare material for social media
and even do some posting on social media.
We send out books for book reviews
and early media opportunities.
We begin pitching for podcast interviews and media.
And did I mention book reviews?
Yeah, we're doing a lotta that in prelaunch.
Also, it's for Platinum+ clients,
but you might wanna do this for yourself
is setting up NetGalley reviews,
which is a paid service, and Goodreads giveaways.
All this leads up to your book launch,
which, in the case of this book example,
is 11.5 months after the start date.
There you have it.
How long is it gonna take you?
(laughing)
I don't know.
Most people will fall in the nine-to-15-month range
from start to finish.
Some people go a little faster, not a lot.
Some people go a little longer,
sometimes a lot longer. (laughing)
So, hopefully this sneak peek at the timeline
gives you a sense of the many steps involved
in producing a professionally-published book.
And of course, that all just gets you to launch.
There's a lotta things to do in post-launch
for book marketing.
But in summary, how long does the book take?
Well, that's gonna depend on the complexity
and size of the book, the author's organization,
the skill of the author,
and the speed at which decisions are made throughout.
I can tell you that working hard in the early phases,
specifically, working hard to get clarity before you write
so you have that cool hook, the great outline,
clarity on your audience,
and specific goals for your launch,
and you've tailored your book to that
will help so much later on.
Finalizing the first draft and the content edit
takes time to think through.
And if you take time to think, "Is everything here?
"Am I happy with the tone?
"Do I need more research or content,"
and you do all of that before you leave content,
you will go much faster through everything else.
A book is a big project,
even if you skip some of these steps
or you have a smaller budget
or different goals for publishing
versus the folks that we typically work with
who are writing a book that they will use
to build their brand, grow their business,
and that book, in order to do that, has to be awesome
because they want media attention, bookstore distribution,
they want speaking engagements, and more.
And to have a book do that,
it has to be professionally published.
But even skipping some of the steps,
you might be surprised at the time and effort
that goes into some of the phases
that you thought would be easier.
So, I'm curious: How long did your book take
if it was nonfiction?
Fiction is a different ballgame.
And what surprised you about the speed of the process?
Let's chat about it in the comments below.
And when you comment the day a video is released,
you'll be entered to win some sweet Book Launchers swag.
New videos come out every Tuesday and Friday,
so make sure you subscribe to the channel
so we can hang out in the comments after a video comes out.
There are tons of videos to help you
with the process that we've outlined here,
so I'm going to put the entire playlist
of how to self-publish a book up here for you.
And this one over here is super important
to understanding the different kinds of editing,
because hiring one editor isn't usually all you'll need
to create a great book.
So, go ahead, click on one of these videos,
whichever one you wanna watch. (laughing)
And woo, congratulations!
This was a pretty intense video,
so let's unwind together in one of these other videos.
Fun times ahead, I promise, or your money back, guaranteed.
(laughing)
(light rock music)