With any piece of academic writing, you’re going to write multiple drafts. The question is, how many? In today’s episode, we’re going to discuss the writing and revision process to determine how many drafts it will take to get you to a publication ready book. Let’s get started. Welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joanne Jones, a writing coach and developmental editor who’s here to give you some tough love about the way you write. This podcast is for women and non binary scholars in academia who are writing academic books, but feel as if the process is a little or a lot like a mystery. If you’re ready to create your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, You’re in the right place. Let’s head into today’s episode.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s episode of Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joanne Jones. I’m going to get right into today’s topic, which is writing drafts. Now I think by now, we should all know that excellent writing happens through the revision process. Nobody’s first draft is perfect nor should it be. However, you all have a finite amount of time to write your books. So the question is, how many drafts is enough? Let’s discuss why this is an important question to consider. First, of course, like I just said, you have a finite amount of time to write your book.

Everyone has a timeline. You can’t write forever, so you need a plan. Another reason it’s really important to consider how many drafts you need is because there are many bases you have to cover to write a good book. There’s never just one thing that makes a book excellent. So you’re not going to only work on making the prose sing or only focus on having a really good introductory chapter. You’re going to have to account for every moving part, and the way you do that is through multiple drafts. Related to that, considering each version helps you understand the level of complexity of the project. We all know that books are complicated.

The argumentation is complicated. Presenting all of the evidence is complicated. And while we might wanna make it seem very straightforward and clear for the reader, of course, there are a lot of complicated steps we have to take to get to that finished product for the reader. So considering each version helps you understand that level of complexity. It helps you understand all of the different things you’re doing simultaneously, it seems. Taking that simultaneity apart and working through one part of complexity in each version. Okay? So that’s why it’s so important for us to think about how many drafts will be enough drafts. And the way we think about that, where we answer that question is through thinking about what we want to accomplish in each draft, and that’s where a revision plan comes in.

So I wanna be really clear. You can’t cover everything in one round of rewriting or revising. We’re gonna use rewriting and revising interchangeably in this podcast episode. Although I know for some people, they mean very different things, but we’re using them interchangeably. You can’t cover every issue in one round of rewriting. This is why you need a revision plan so that you can decide what you’re going to focus on and when you’re going to focus on it. If you have a targeted goal for one round of revision, then it will be easier to know, number one, when you’ve accomplished that goal. And number two, when to move on to the second draft.

So what would be an example of a targeted goal for a round of revision? It might be something like making sure your evidence is clear. That can be a goal for one round revision. It might be just getting to a certain word count so that you have what seems like a full chapter. That can be a targeted goal for our draft. Another targeted goal can be cutting words. Right? Like, I need to get this chapter down to a certain word count. Or even a fourth goal can be making sure that the analysis is really clear, that I am explaining my data in a compelling way. Those are all different versions of targeted goals.

And you can address one of those goals in every round of revision. If you’ve received feedback from somebody, it will likely be easier for you to create some of these targeted goals because you will hopefully have clearly articulated suggestions for how to change your work. If you’re revising based on your own reading of your work, you can create similar suggestions for yourself. And this is where I’m going to remind you that you likely have a better handle on your work than you think you do. However, if you’re truly at a loss about what to do to improve your writing, ask for help. Ask someone to read it, talk to somebody about it, present it somewhere, submit it for a workshop. All of those things can help you figure out what needs to be done in your writing to bring it to the next step and its path to completion. As you’re working on revising and going through multiple drafts, I want to remind you to not fall for the temptation to go down every rabbit hole.

So I’m gonna give you an example, and this is something I hear from writing clients all the time. It’s like, you know, I was working on a chapter and I went in to do this one specific thing, and I noticed that there’s this other thing I need to fix. So I started fixing it. Don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t start fixing it at that moment. Write yourself a note and come back to it. Right? Like, stay on target when you’re revising.

Otherwise, you’re going to make a mess. You know, it’s like if you’re cooking something and you’re in the middle of the recipe and decide you need to start a different recipe and suddenly you have way too much going on in the kitchen, don’t do that to your draft. Don’t be the person who has way too many pots on the stove at once, and you can’t keep track of them, and things are burning, and your kitchen is smoking, and that is your book chapter. Right? So don’t fall for the temptation to go down every rabbit hole. Stay the course. Even if you have to keep a little notebook next to you while you’re writing to jot down the things that come up because they will come up because your brain will be percolating on a lot of different ideas as you’re revising. Make a note. Move on.

Another important point to remember when thinking about drafts is that they will likely be uneven. And this is what I mean by that. Some chapters will need more work than others. In addition to the quantity of work they need, they’ll need qualitatively different work. Some chapters might need a lot of work on the analysis. It might be a new chapter for instance, that you just wrote and you haven’t really thought through all of the ideas yet. So it requires a lot more effort than a chapter that maybe was originally an article or a conference presentation that is already well developed and needs to be turned into a chapter, but you had already given a lot of thought to. So when we think of drafts, especially in regards to books, what we’re really thinking about is chapter drafts.

Okay? Because we usually work chapter by chapter. Then, of course, you will go in and work through the entire book to make sure everything fits together properly, that the transitions are working, that it’s in the right order, but we are normally at the chapter level. So if you are thinking of drafting at the chapter level, you want to remind yourself that each chapter is going to be different. Is it going to require a different level of energy and probably a different type of effort, and that’s totally okay. So to go back to our question of how many drafts is enough drafts. There’s no magic number. Okay? You’re not going to say I have to do five drafts of every chapter in order to get it done. Or, you know, once I hit three, I’m stopping and moving on.

That’s likely not the case. And it’s also the case that with each round of rewriting, some rounds might be very quick. You might go in and fix just a couple of minor issues, and that’s the entire bulk. That’s the entire, like, scope of the revision for that draft. Other revisions might be much more intense. Okay? And this can depend on what stage you are at. Right? In early stages of rewriting, there might be a lot of effort going into shaping the chapter and building out the structure and thinking of the analysis. And later rounds of revision might have more minor issues because you’ve already addressed a lot of the major ones.

So in some cases, revisions will get faster and easier as you go on. And when I say as you go on, I mean up until peer review. Then when we get to peer review, we’re in another situation which we’ll talk about on future podcasts, but we’re not gonna talk about that here. We’re talking about the manuscript you prepare for peer review. Okay? So some drafts will be quick. Some drafts will be slower. But if you really think about what you want to address in each draft, that will help you figure out how many you need because there are likely going to be several important issues that you need to address and then a couple of minor issues that you may be able to put together and address in one round of revisions or go through one by one just depending on your workflow and what would help you make it through a draft more efficiently. One more thing to consider before we begin to wrap up is that there will always be a tension between just wanting to get a draft off your desk and wanting to add just one more thing.

It could be easy to get stuck in one draft of a chapter because you keep finding things to do. Right? So you’re like, I don’t know how to get closer to completion because I keep finding things I need to address. And at some point, you are going to have to choose to be done. This is why I always remind you, like, your timeline is the ultimate decider for you. You are going to have to choose to be done because you are going to realize there are other things you need to do with your time. There are other chapters you need to write. There’s copy editing you wanna do. Right? So at some point, you’re going to have to choose to be done and say that even if this minor issue was unaddressed, it’s okay. I have to move on. My timeline is telling me it’s it’s time to keep it moving. Okay?

So to recap, because we are getting beyond you know, I try to keep these to ten minutes, and we are past ten minutes. But in order to figure out just to recap, in order to figure out how many drafts is enough, you want to make yourself a solid revision plan. And keep in mind that this revision plan will change. It will change as you get feedback, as you reconsider ideas. You are thinking as you’re writing. Right? So new solutions, new perspectives are going to come up, and you put them into the plan.

Right? So think about what your goals are for revising always. Like, what is it I want to achieve in the draft I’m working on? Or better yet, how many things do I need to achieve in total for this draft to become a publication ready or peer review ready manuscript? What are the things that need to happen? And how can I break those things down into multiple drafts? As in I will address these two in this draft. I will address this one in draft two, draft three, draft four, etcetera. Okay? And as I said, just remember, some of those goals are gonna be very obvious, and some you are going to learn as you get into the revising. Okay? So use your plan to structure your drafts. And from there, you will be able to figure out how much work needs to be done in order for you to get your chapter closer to ready for peer review. Thank you for listening today. I hope this was helpful, and I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. Remember, writing an academic book is challenging, but that doesn’t mean you have to overcomplicate it. If you like what you heard in today’s episode, please leave a review. This helps get the word out about the podcast so more people will listen and we can continue the conversation. Take care, and tune in for our next episode.