Some output statistics produced following the King system.

[Bill Ricardi]

Not a lot of people share writing statistics. I'm a nerd, so of course I will. The hope is that it will be a helpful benchmark to anyone following the King system. I'll be cross-posting this on Reddit and the On Writing forums.

I thought it might be helpful to show real world numbers produced by semi-rigid adherence to King's 'On Writing' system.

Why 'semi-rigid'? I don't write every day. I write 5 days a week, 8 hours a day. I also need to do a lot of the work that an editor or agent would do, as I'm self published.

The book (book 2 in a trilogy), was started on August 28th, and the final pass before being handed off to the beta read team was completed on November 3rd. That's ten 40 hour work weeks.

Statistics for 'Book 2':

• Pages: 193 - A4 - Google Docs
• Chapters: 20
• Words: 100312
• Characters: 552256
• Characters w/o spaces: 454804
• Average word length: 4.53

100K words puts us at exactly 10K words a week, or 2K words per workday. Revision history showed some 225+ individual writing sessions over 50 days, taking into account things like lunches and breaks.

The mean workday was 8 hours. This pace was good enough to maintain the 4 month inception-to-publish cycle, on time for an early December release date.

Expectations are that the third book will follow nearly the exact same timeline,

If there's interest, statistics for 'Book 1':

• Pages: 154 - A4 - Google Docs
• Chapters: 18
• Words: 87141
• Characters: 477341
• Characters w/o spaces: 392243
• Average word length: 4.50

This was done over the course of 11 weeks, the extra time spent in trilogy planning, world building activities, and creating the actual world-map.

I hope this is helpful to others!

 

[GNTLGNT]

 

[mal]

Thanks for sharing Bill Ricardi. If I got it right, 2 thousand words a day more or less. How many typical novel pages is that? Thx, Mal.

 

[Bill Ricardi]

Thanks for sharing Bill Ricardi. If I got it right, 2 thousand words a day more or less. How many typical novel pages is that? Thx, Mal.

Pages will depend on the format. One page in a big hardcover can be several in a trade paperback, and several more on the Kindle.

2000 words is around four A4 pages. A4 is about the same as a 6 inch by 9 inch jumbo paperback.

In terms of Stephen's books, 100,000 words is somewhere just under 'Eyes of the Dragon' and 'Misery'. So a 2000 word day is 1/50th of one of those books (give or take).