Do you know how long it will take to write your academic book? I don’t mean how long it took your friend with the cushy postdoc or how long you wish it will take – I mean how long it will actually take. The reality is that most people don’t. Today I’m breaking down how long it REALLY takes to write a book, and the factors that you should consider when making your personal timeline. Let’s get into it.

INTRO

Hello, hello and welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joann Jones, and today I want to talk about book timelines. I know that a question that is sure to create a deer in headlights response is, “when do you think your book will be done?” The reality is, most people don’t know. In fact, most folks have quite unrealistic expectations. I’ve surveyed my newsletter – which you can sign up for if you look in the show notes – and gotten some interesting responses. A lot of people think that a book can be written in just one year, or that a chapter of a book can be written in just one month. This is a misconception. People RARELY write that quickly. Unfortunately, I hear this misconception most frequently from first time book writers. This makes sense because they’ve never written a book so they shouldn’t be expected to be experts. But I think there are also deeper reasons they don’t know:

First, first-time book writers think they are going to follow some simple process to revise a dissertation. THIS IS NOT ACCURATE. A book is more than a revision of a dissertation. If you’d like to hear my extended rant on this topic, go listen to episode #4 – “Your Dissertation Isn’t The First Draft of Your Book.”

Second, first-time academic book writers have some naive optimism about how much time they have. This isn’t limited to book writers. There’s an entire body of literature in psychology on a concept called the planning fallacy.The planning fallacy is a cognitive bias where we underestimate how much time we need to complete a task. I’m not going into detail here but you can go research it if you’re interested in understanding why humans are wildly optimistic about how much time they need.

Third, most first-time academic book writers don’t truly understand the scope of work required to write their book. Again, not anyone’s fault. It’s hard to understand this before you get started. You may not know what’s required to write a publication-worthy book.

Now that we’ve established the three reasons why you may not know how long you need to write your book, I’m going to teach you how to create your timeline. Because here’s the truth: even though it’s not your fault that you don’t know, it’s your responsibility to figure it out. You need to get a firm handle on your timeline because you can’t negotiate with your tenure clock.

I hope you have a notebook handy, because I’m going to teach you a four-step process for creating your timeline. Let’s do it.

STEP ONE: Reverse Engineer Your Publication Timeline

I am going to shout this from every rooftop: FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU NEED FOR TENURE. Do you need a contract from a press? A book? A manuscript under peer review? Get as much information as possible. You can ask your department chair, contemporaries in your department, trusted senior colleagues and mentors. You can also ask peers at similar institutions OR places your institution emulates.

STEP TWO: Figure out the scope of work

You can’t really do this until you figure out what your book is about and how it will unfold. In my group coaching and editing program Elevate, we do this through what I call the OFOR method. That stands for Overview, Framework, Outline, Roadmap. You first write an overview, or extended abstract of your book. Then, you write a framework where you hone in on the key concepts and literatures you’ll be discussing. Then you outline the entire book. This helps you understand what gaps there are that must be filled through additional research, thinking, asking for feedback, and revision.

STEP THREE: Create your roadmap

Although in Elevate this is part of the OFOR method I just mentioned, here it’s step three. Create a writing plan, chapter by chapter. What needs to be done? How and when will you do it? This plan MUST be aligned with the publication timeline you established in step 1.

STEP FOUR: Start writing

This is where you stress-test your plan. You get to work writing, thinking, revising, and so forth to see how long things take. It’s very likely that you’ll have to make some adjustments to your plan and that’s OK. If you’re thinking, “what’s the point of doing all this planning if I don’t stick to the plan,” I want you to think about it as a literal roadmap. If you use a map to chart your course somewhere and you hit a detour or realize you can make a turn and avoid some traffic, do you set the map on fire and declare that you’ll never use a map again? No, of course not. You would course-correct and move on. That’s what you can do with planning too.

Alright, I hope you take these steps and get to work creating your personalized timeline. Remember, you can come back to this episode as many times as you’d like to work through the steps one at a time. This isn’t something you’ll finish in one work session! It is, however, an exercise that’s worth your time.

As always, thank you for listening, and I’ll see you in the next episode.