#18: Writing an Academic Book Takes Longer Than You Think! 4 Steps to Completing Your Book

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. If you don’t know now, it’s your responsibility to figure it out as soon as possible. That’s why in this episode, Jane breaks down how long it REALLY takes to write a book, and the factors that you should consider when making your personal timeline. 

In this episode, we’ll discuss: 

• Three reasons you’re confused about how long it takes to write an academic book. 
• My 4-step process for creating your personalized book writing timeline.

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Transcript

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Do you know how long it will take to write your academic book? I don't mean how long it took your friend with a cushy posta 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. 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 trade your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, you're in the right place. Let's head into today's episode. Hello and welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I'm your host, Jean Joanne 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 before. So they shouldn't be expected to be experts on the process. But I think there are also deeper reasons that they don't know. Actually, I think there are three of them. First, first-time book writers, especially academic book writers, think they are going to follow some simple process to revise their dissertations, as most first books are based on dissertations. 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, because I have a very strong opinion about it, go listen to episode four. Your dissertation isn't the first draft of your book. Reason number two, first-time academic book writers have some naive optimism about how much time they have to work on their book. And this optimism isn't limited to book writers. In fact, there's an entire body of literature and psychology on a concept called the planning fallacy. Essentially, the planning fallacy is a cognitive bias where we tend to underestimate how much time we need to complete a task. That's why we think we need a month to write a book chapter when we really need two or three or even more. I'm not going to go into detail here, but you can go research the planning fallacy 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 their fault. I'm not here to blame you. It's hard to understand how much work you're going to have to do before you get started doing that work. You just may not know. Okay, 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 because you don't know, it is your responsibility to figure it out. You need to get a firm handle on your timeline because ultimately you can't negotiate with your tenure clock. Tenure's tenure. And if you're writing towards a deadline, you need to figure out what work you need to do and when. So I hope you have a notebook handy because I'm going to teach you a four-step process for creating your timeline. Let's get into step one, which is to reverse engineer your publication timeline. Now, this is something I would shout from every rooftop. Figure out what you need for tenure. Do you need a contract from a press? Do you need the physical published book in your hands? If your manuscript is under peer review, is that enough? Get as much information as possible. And I know that some departments are not forthcoming with this information, especially at private institutions. You might have to do some research and some investigating. Ask your department chair. Ask people in your department who are either the same year as you are just a year or two ahead of you. Ask trusted senior colleagues and mentors. You can ask peers at similar institutions. Or you can ask peers at places that your institution emulates. We've all been in those departments that want to be a different department, right? Like they're strivers. Look at who they're striving to be, go and look at some CVs and craft accordingly. It's unfortunate that some departments do not give you very clear guidelines for tenure, but you can still do some research to figure out as much as you possibly can. Okay. So after you have figured out what is needed for tenure and your publication timeline based on that, or just your book preparation timeline, if you don't need a book published. Step two is to figure out the scope of work. And in order to figure out the scope of work for your book, you have to figure out what your book is about and how it will unfold. So the way I do this with clients in my group coaching and editing program, Elevate, is through what we call the O4 method that stands for overview framework outline and roadmap. You first write an overview or an extended abstract of your book. Then you write up your framework where you hone in on the key concepts and literatures you'll be discussing. Then you outline the entire book. Going through this process helps you understand what gaps there are that must be filled. They might be filled through additional research. Might be things you simply have to think through. If you're developing a new concept, for instance, you might have to think about how to present it, how to compare it to existing concepts. You might have to ask for feedback or mentorship on some areas of the book. And of course, you'll have to write and revise. So doing this overview framework and outline helps you determine where you feel good. You might look at chapter two, for instance, and say, okay, this already feels pretty thorough. I feel like a lot of this is done. Versus chapter three, where you notice I need to engage this new body of literature, or I need to do some more field work to, you know, boost this chapter, right? And through outlining, you will be able to determine some of that. So that's what you do in step two, figure out your scope of work. Step three is to create your writing roadmap. So although in Elevate, this is part of the OFRA method I just mentioned. Here, for our purposes, it is step three. And with your roadmap, you create a writing plan chapter by chapter. You do this based on your outline. What still needs to be done? How and when will you do it? Again, like if you need to do more field work, when is this field work happening? If you need to write a brand new chapter, when are you writing it? What's important to remember is that this plan must be aligned with the publication timeline you established in step one. Okay, you cannot make a roadmap that is completely different than the timeline. That would make no sense. So you have to look at your timeline and give yourself milestones. If my entire book manuscript is going to be due to the press in December of 2026, based on my timeline, what do I need to have done by say August of 2025? Right? So figure out that roadmap. Step four is to start writing. And this is where you test your plan. You get to work writing, thinking, revising, and so forth to see how long things take. And it is very likely here, as a matter of fact, that's not even very likely. This is going to happen. You're going to make some adjustments to your plan. And that's okay. You're testing it, you are experimenting, and you're realizing what was realistic and what might have been quite unrealistic in your planning. Totally normal happens to everybody. Now, if you're thinking, well, what's the point of doing all this planning if I don't stick to the plan? I want you to think about this as a literal roadmap. I use the word roadmap intentionally. If you have a roadmap to chart your course somewhere, you're driving somewhere, and you hit a detour, or you realize, hey, if I turn here, I'll beat some traffic up ahead. That doesn't mean that you set the roadmap on fire and declare that you'll never use a map again. No, of course not. The map was still there to give you really important information that you tweaked. That's what you do with planning. You course correct based on the structure you have given yourself, but you wouldn't even know to course correct without first having that structure or roadmap in place. Okay, so writing is operationalizing your roadmap. You're putting it into action. All right. So I hope you can take these steps and get to work to create your personalized timeline. And remember that you can come back to this episode as many times as you'd like to work through the steps one at a time. You're not gonna finish all of these steps in one work session. With planning, don't set yourself up for an unrealistic outcome, right? Like you're not gonna sit here an hour and figure out the entire scope of work of your book, your entire publication timeline, and create a chapter-by-chapter roadmap. It's not gonna happen. You need to give yourself time. So come back as many times as you need to to work through the steps and then rework some of the steps. Like I said, you might have to tweak your plan. So that might be a step you go back to multiple times. But even though this isn't something you will finish in one work session, it is an exercise that is well worth your time. You want to make sure that as you are nearing tenure, you're not completely stressed out, wondering how you're going to get everything done. You don't want to wake up in year five and think to yourself, I'm just really behind because I didn't think that I needed this much time to do this and I put it off for other writing projects or other equipments, and I didn't prioritize it in the way I should have. Your timeline and your roadmap will help you understand when to prioritize your book. All right. As always, thank you for listening. I really do hope you take these exercises to heart, and I will see you in the next episode. Take care. 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 liked 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.