Getting into the habit of writing every day is the first step in producing your masterpiece but it doesn’t answer the question of how long it will take. You don’t just take the type of book into account, nor is it all about the estimated length. It comes down to how much you write each day. The following will give you some idea of how long a 30,000-word book would take to complete if you stuck to these daily limits:

500 words per day for five days a week – 12 weeks

1,000 words per day for five days a week – 6 weeks

1,000 words per day for 6 six days a week – 5 weeks

1,500 words per day for 5 days a week – 4 weeks

2,000 words per day for five days a week – 3 weeks

When you set your daily goal, base it on how much you know you can commit to writing every day – if you don’t have time to write 2,000 words a day, it's no good making it your goal.

How Long is a Book?

Well, again part of that comes down to genre and part to how complex it is. For example, fantasy novels tend to be the longest books and epic fantasies can surpass 120,000 words. Using the above estimates, you can work out how long it would take you to write a book that is 60,000, 90,000, even 120,000 words.

With non-fiction books, the number of words will depend almost entirely on what the subject is and the complexity, not to mention whether there will be one big book or several smaller ones.

Have you a book in mind that you wish to emulate in terms of structure and length? Look at the page count, look at how it has been split down into sections and chapters, look at the number of pages in each chapter. You can learn quite a lot by looking back over books you enjoyed reading and focusing on these details, along with anything else that you think made that book enjoyable.

What About Words per Page?

How many words are on a page is dependent on these factors:

The size of the page

The font type and size

Spacing – paragraphs and letters

Margins

Indentation

Structure of each paragraph

Images, charts, any other feature that isn’t text

We need the answers to at least one of those before you can determine how many pages are in a 30,000 word book  For a standard Microsoft Word document page, with a font like Lato in 12-point, one 8.5” by 11” page takes about 500 words with a 10-point space between paragraphs (not indented) and single spacing. Change spacing to 1.15, no space between the paragraphs and a first-line indent of 0.25 and it stays at about 500 words.

Change the page size to 6” by 9”, maintain the margins and 500 words suddenly becomes about 1.75 pages.

So, if you opt for a trim size of 6” by 9”, approximately 50,000 words and you are looking at around 175 pages. Start setting margins, spacing, adding images and so on and that page count will change.

In part 3, we’ll look at how long it takes to write 500 words.