Writing 40,000 words will take about 16.7 hours for the average writer typing on a keyboard and 33.3 hours for handwriting.
To reach a goal of 50k words in 24 hours you have to write an average of 2084 words each hour. That's a huge amount of output and creative strain to keep up for so long. I never thought I'd struggle with the word count because I type quite fast.
The average reader will read 40,000 words in 2.2 hours when reading at a speed of 300 words per minute (wpm). Typical documents that are 40,000 words include novels, novellas, and other published books.
Apparently Hemingway wrote between 500 and 1000 words a day and Stephen King has claimed to write 2000 words a day. Many lesser known or unpublished writers who blog claim word counts anywhere in the range of 500 to 3000 words a day with 1000 being the average.
Anyone can write 40,000 words a week. All you need are the tools to help you get there. Let me help you by sharing some of the tools I use daily to increase my writing output and productivity. I'm a genre-fiction writer and one genre I enjoy writing in is cozy mystery.
On 11 January 2007 the author stepped out of Edinburgh's Balmoral hotel having completed the last novel in the Harry Potter series — the culmination of 17 years of writing. But that wasn't all J.K. Rowling wrote while she was there…
If you're writing your first novel, the general rule of thumb for novel writing is a word count in the 80,000 to 100,000 range. While anything over 40,000 words can fall into the novel category, 50,000 is considered the minimum novel length.
4) Stephen King – 2000 Words
In it, King discusses his writing routine and how he writes around 2000 words (or six full pages) every workday.
He still writes every day, even on the weekends, but as he says, “I used to write more and I used to write faster – it's just aging. It slows you down a little bit.” Earlier on, he used to pump out 2,000 words a day, but these days, he aims to write for about four hours each day and gets down about 1,000 words.
A good goal for many professional writers is to turn out five to ten pages a day during a four or five day work week. On average, a page equals 250 words set in 12 point Times New Roman. Assume you write 1250 words a week or 5,000 words a month. You would produce about 60,000 words in a year.
A story that is over 40,000 words is generally considered a novel. However, it will be on the short side, as the average length of a novel hovers around 50,000-70,000 words. That said, if your book is around 40,000 words, you're in good company.
40,000 words is 80 pages single-spaced or 160 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 40,000 words include include novels, novellas, and other published books. It will take approximately 133 minutes to read 40,000 words.
The Average Writing Time for a Book
Still, for the sake of argument, let's look at some examples of average book-writing times for new authors. 40,000 to 70,000 word novel – 3 to 4 months. 70,000 to 100,000 word novel – 5 to 8 months. 100,000 to 130,000 word novel – 8 to 12 months.
A few years ago, on a quiet Mississippi morning, Jesse Ball woke before sunrise, plugged a folding keyboard into his iPad and started writing. Within a day, he'd finished an entire book, the forthcoming Autoportrait.
Writing 10,000 words in a single day takes considerable time. That's obvious, but each writer must figure out how long it takes for them to write 10,000 words. A good indicator is to calculate how long it takes for you to write 1,000 words. I can comfortably produce 1,000 words within 30 minutes.
NaNoWriMo Words Per Day
A novel is defined as any book-length project that contains 50,000 words or more. The month of November has 30 days. So, at minimum, you should be writing 1,667 words a day, or approximately 11,700 words a week.
Who is the richest writer in the world? J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, is the richest writer in the world with a net worth of $1 billion.
Shakespeare, who displayed a greater variety of expression than probably any writer in any language, produced all his plays with about 15,000 words. Milton's works are built up with 8,000; and the Old Testament says all that it has to say with 5,642 words.
“When I'm in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation.
Are you one of those “four hours a night is all I need!” people with sleep, or do you need a minimum to recharge? I usually get about six hours a night, sometimes seven. But I also try to take a nap in the afternoon, about an hour. So I'm going to say I get maybe seven and a half hours of sleep in a 24-hour period.
Erica Vetsch: The true answer is—it depends. If I'm on a deadline of some kind, I can write from 4-6 hours a day. Mostly, I write from 2-4 hours on weekday afternoons. I do lots of other writing tasks like editing, marketing, blogging, etc, but for writing on the manuscript, I average about 3 hours per weekday.
Agatha Christie is acknowledged as the all time best-selling fiction author. It is estimated that she has sold over 2 billion copies of her books. Her book sales are only exceeded by The Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.
The last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is 157.63% longer than the first book. In total, all seven Harry Potter books contain 1,084,170 words.
For most publishers, a book is “novel-length” when it's between 50,000 and 110,000 words. At a writers conference I recently attended, publishing veteran Jane Friedman said 80,000 words is good for most fiction, below 60,000 isn't novel length territory, and above 120,000 is likely too much.
Average Word Count For A Novel
The average word count for adult fiction is between 70,000 to 120,000 words. For children's fiction, the general rule is the younger the audience the shorter the book, and for YA novels the average is 50,000-70,000 words. Non-fiction word counts sit between 70,000-120,000 words.