How long does it take to write a book?
FOREVER! (no but really...)
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is a reader-supported newsletter providing advice and support for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. If you know someone this applies to, you can forward them this email and encourage them to sign up. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response.
News!
My debut novel Greenwich will be out in July! Adrienne Brodeur called it “A stunning debut…Fast-paced, beautifully written, vividly peopled… impossible to put down.” Greenwich is one of Publisher’s Weekly’s “buzz books” for summer 2025, and on Zibby Owens’s list of most anticipated new releases this year. Hit that preorder button!
“Care and Feeding” is out in The Rumpus
“Good Dead Girls,” is out in No Tokens
And two more pieces are forthcoming! A short story in The Booklyn Review, and an essay in The Bellevue Literary Review. Can’t wait to share more!
Dear Kate,
How long did it take you to write and revise Greenwich?
- Michelle
Michelle is a fabulous editorial client of mine and her debut THE DESCENDED will be out in September 2025. (Congrats, Michelle!!) Michelle asked me this question in an email, and I checked with her to see if I could share it here, too. I went back through the archive and saw I had a post from October 2023 that’s about a similar question: How Many Drafts Does it Take? (spoiler: a lot) so definitely read that one too for a more in-depth look at how many versions of Greenwich I went through before submitting to editors and how that whole process worked.
What’s wild about looking back is that I wrote that previous post when I had VAGUENEWS but couldn’t officially announce yet that Greenwich had sold, and I hadn’t yet embarked on edits with my editor. So this feels like a good time to revisit that question, now that Greenwich is fully out of my hands and ready to get into your hands in July.
In “How Many Drafts Does It Take?” I wrote:
I’m going back through my files and the book that will be coming out sometime in 2025 started as a kernel of a short story in 2020, and it looks like I began writing the novel version in earnest, with a different title than its current one, in May of 2021.
Here’s the timeline that followed:
Winter 2020: Prewriting, outlining, and planning (If you’re new here, I’m a planner!)
May 2021: Writing begins
[lots of revising on my own]
Sept. 2021: First draft out to first reader-friends
[lots of revising based on their feedback]
Nov. 2021: New draft out to wider-but-still-small circle of readers
[lots of revising based on their feedback, and sending out to new readers along the way]
Apr. 2022: Draft sent to my agent (this is the first draft she reads — but not the first draft I wrote. Note that I’d already been working on it for a year before I sent it to her.)
[multiple drafts of revision based on her feedback, plus sending out to new readers along the way]
Mar. 2023: I go on submission (after a year of revising with my agent, two-ish years since I started writing)
Oct. 2023: It’s a book! Greenwich sells to St. Martin’s Press. There is champagne but also a total dazed and surreal feeling I can only describe as strange. (7 months isn’t an immediate deal, but publishing is SO SLOW, and there was the summer in there. It was agonizing to live through, but in retrospect feels pretty fast as far as these things go.)
Early Nov. 2023: I get my first round of edits from my editor (this seemed like a fast turnaround to me, but maybe it’s normal? I honestly don’t know.)
Late Nov. 2023: I send my editor the first 25% of the manuscript for feedback on my edits, to make sure I’m on the right track. I get a thumbs up and also get more edits back.
Dec. 2024: I send the first 50% of the manuscript for feedback. I get a thumbs up and also get more edits back.
Jan. 2024: I send the full manuscript for feedback. I get a thumbs up and also get more edits back.
Feb. 2024: I send a new draft of a the full manuscript. I get a thumbs up and also get more edits back. (Noticing a trend here?)
Mar. 2024: I submit the final draft, considered “accepted” by the publisher, and it goes into production to begin copyedits and then two rounds of proofreading.
The book was fully done in the summer of 2024, a full year in advance of the release date. (Done as in, no changes to the interior content.) From idea (2020) to book in hands (2025) will have been 5.5 years; from first writing (2020/2021) to “I can’t make any more changes” (2024) was 4 or 4.5 years, depending on how much you count the pre-writing I did before I was like “welp, guess I’m writing a novel now.”
This is just my experience with this one book. There’s no timeline that’s “normal” and so no way to be ahead of, or behind, the curve. There is no curve!! There’s just you and the work and how it feels to be in it. Hopefully it feels good! Even when it’s hard — which it often is. I hope there’s joy in doing hard things.
My general sense is that I’m a pretty fast writer. I’ve always just kind of been this way. (I’ve also worked hard in adulthood to learn how to slow down, because there are valuable reasons to take more time.) The last three books I’ve written (Greenwich, a manuscript before that that I still hope to sell one day, and a manuscript after Greenwich that I also hope will one day be a book, too) have all followed a similar timeline: about a year of writing on my own and a year of revising with my agent. (A book I wrote before these three I started nineteen years ago lol/sob, so that one has its own special beast of a timeline that’s best not to dwell on.) Greenwich is my debut novel, but it’s not the first novel I wrote. One of the not-so-secret secrets of publishing is that MANY debut novels are far from the author’s first book. It takes time to get good at something. It takes a lot of time and a lot of luck to get a yes in this industry. It has been a gift to myself to take the time and space and patience and practice I needed to get better at my writing. It’s also been a gift to let myself get better at my writing by taking what I learned from a project and using it to start something new.
It might look like my drafts of Greenwich must have sucked, because why did I have to go through SO MANY ROUNDS of revision with first my agent and then my editor. And I mean, maybe??? But this is just what the industry is — this is what it looks like to publish a book. I had no idea until I was fully immersed in it just how intensive, and intense, this process is. You think you’re done and then there’s more to look at, more to think about, more ways to strengthen and deepen and tighten and develop. And I’m so, so grateful for it. I feel like this is the part of writing and publishing that’s the hardest to convey when people ask for advice: just how many rounds it takes, far past the point where you once thought that you were “finished.”
A lot of this is genre-dependent, too. Romance tends to move faster. Self-publishing tends to move faster. Literary fiction tends to move slower. What’s “normal” in your industry probably depends on what you’re writing, who your audience is, and what your goals are from publication.
It’s also important to note that I currently have no long-term caretaking responsibilities, I have a spouse to share household labor with, and my day job is flexible enough to work around my writing schedule. This isn’t typical, I know. I wasn’t writing like this when I was in graduate school or teaching. I have had spells of writing much less when life has had a lot more going on. We don’t all have the same 24 hours in a day, and it’s wildly unfair to expect yourself to match someone else’s timeline if your day to day looks completely different.
I’ll have to see what the timeline looks like for writing and revising after this — if it’s different for different books, and what contributes to those changes. Some books are just harder to crack than others, and all you can do is stick with it. It takes however long it takes, you know?
At one point when I was despairing about never getting published, a friend pointed out that we had, say, 50 years of life left (fingers crossed) and it seemed really unlikely that in 50 years of writing, I wouldn’t see a single thing in print. Honestly, that perspective was helpful and I think of it whenever I’m feeling stuck or frustrated with my own timeline. If it takes 6 months longer, or a year, or three years, or five years longer to finish a book than I’d hoped… in 10 years, or 20 years, or 50 years, will that timeline matter? Or will I be glad that you took the time I needed to finish the work?
I hope that whatever your timeline is, you keep writing!
Kate