Want to write a book? Prepare to make 200,000 decisions.

Why is it so taxing, and why does it take so long, to write a nonfiction book? Here’s one way to think about it.

A typical book might be 50,000 words long. You must decide which words to use — and those are not easy choices. That’s 50,000 decisions right there.

Of course, not everything in the book is words. You use punctation: commas, periods, colons, questions marks, quotation marks, apostrophes, semicolons, and, hopefully, a very limited number of exclamation points. A 50,000 word book would likely include 10,000 punctuation marks. You need to decide on each of those punctuation marks and where to place it. That’s 10,000 more decisions.

You’ll also have paragraph breaks, headings, bullets, and other formatting. As a rough guess, that might be another 500 decisions right there.

You’re going to need to do research. It’s not unusual to review 200 sources, including web sites, research reports, other books, and primary research interviews or data analyses. Each of those sources will require you to decide which elements to use, what to quote, where to put it, and how to cite it. There are at least 30 decisions you are going to make per source. Let’s estimate that you’ll be making 6,000 decisions on research.

But of course, your first draft is not your final draft. When you revise the book, you’ll have to decide which of those 50,000 words, 10,000 punctuation marks, and 500 pieces of formatting to keep, which to change, which to rearrange, and so on. That’s at least another 60,500 decisions.

If you have an editor, the editor will make suggestions about which words to keep and which to change. You’ll have to re-examine all of those words, punctuation marks, and formatting elements again. So, 60,500 more decisions. Even if you don’t have an editor, you likely have beta readers who are making suggestions that you’ll have to consider, so those 60,500 decisions are unavoidable.

Then the copy editor will suggest other changes that will likely affect at least 15,000 words and punctuation marks. You’ll have to decide what to address and how. Add 15,000 decisions for that.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll ignore graphics, the title of your book, the marketing copy, your promotional strategy, and so on, even though there are likely hundreds of other decisions there. Concentrating only on the text of the book, the count so far is:

• 50,000 words
• 10,000 punctuation marks
• 500 pieces of formatting
• 6000 research decisions
• 60,500 rewriting decisions
• 60,500 editing decisions
• 15,000 copy editing decisions

Total: 202,500 decisions

Your mileage may vary. But regardless of how you write, there are hundreds of thousands of decisions in your future.

Why planning matters

Maybe you know some authors. They may seem tired or stressed. When you consider how many decisions they are making as they write their books, this is not surprising.

Is there a way to reduce this stress?

You may have heard the advice to just put your butt in the seat and write. If you do that without sufficient forethought, you’re not only going to have to make the decisions about what words and punctuation marks to use, you’re going to have to look at the mess of spaghetti you have created and attempt to organize it. That means more rewriting, which means more decisions, which means more work and more stress (and probably, more alcohol consumption).

Imagine, instead, that you started by deciding on your audience and problem you are going to solve for them. You can also decide on the list of chapters and what will be in them. You may also make some decisions about the tone you’ll be using (direct, academic, lighthearted, or sarcastic for example) and choices like the length of chapters, the use of subheads, the use of graphics, and the types of research you’ll be doing.

That’s probably 20 to 40 planning decisions right there. Those are not easy decisions. But those planning decisions might save you 60,000 decisions as you write. That’s a pretty good tradeoff.

And consider one more thing.

If you have a coauthor, you’ll be making those 200,000 decisions on your book together. If you divide up the labor intelligently, you can be more efficient — each of you can make some of the decisions separately. If you think making 200,000 decisions is stressful, imagine having to agree with somebody else on each of those decisions. That’s why planning how you collaborate before you get started is a good idea.

Writing a book gets easier once you’ve done it once or twice. But it’s still hard. The 200,000 decisions are a big part of the reason why.