Expert Round-Up Topic: Start to Finish, How Long Did Your Book Really Take? Which Step Took the Longest?
DALE L. DADOY
The process of writing my book Back to Myself took me less than a year, but the internal drafting took a couple of years. What took the longest was discovering its central theme. I already knew the story I wanted to tell, but it took time to understand how all my experiences connected to who I am and my values, and how those values ultimately led me “back to myself.” The challenge for me was living through each experience and understanding what it meant.
My advice to any memoirist is to not rush the meaning and foundation of your story. I spent months simply identifying the six principles of my leadership philosophy that emerged from my grief. If you try to write the ending before you’ve fully sat with the middle, the messy, unaligned parts, the book will lack the resonance readers crave. A book is ready when you no longer feel like you are hiding behind the prose.
Dale L. Dadoy is the author of Back to Myself.
KATE FREEBAIRN
I self-published my first cookbook this year, Easy Sourdough on Any Schedule (it’s currently in presale, releasing 18th September).
My book actually sat as a draft on my computer for a few years, even though my website and social media audience had been asking me to write one for a long time. In July 2025, I finally made the decision to self-publish rather than pursue a traditional publishing deal. Once I committed to it, I finished the manuscript, including the draft recipes, in around 12 weeks. From there, the book went through professional editing, which took about a month, before moving into design and photography.
Photography ended up being the most time-consuming part of the entire process. I originally photographed the book myself at home in my kitchen over the course of about a month. But once the design started coming together, I realised I wasn’t happy with the quality of the images, so I made the decision to re-photograph much of the book. That added a significant amount of work, but it was important to me that the finished book reflected the standard I wanted. The final print-ready PDF was sent to the printer in June 2026, so from the point of making the decision to self-publish to having a finished book ready for production, the process took roughly a year. Now the real work starts – selling the book!
Kate Freebairn is the Founder and CEO of The Pantry Mama and the author of Easy Sourdough on Any Schedule.
PERRYN OLSON
I just released my book Choose Your Own Construction Marketing Journey. From concept to release, it took over 2 years, but I wasn’t actively working on it the entire time. I probably put in 200-250 hours from outlining, drafting, revising, editing, and flowing the content into InDesign.
The longest step was the proofreading and editing portion. I ended up printing out the book and reviewing it on a few flights. This also put some time between reading each draft, which helped me see it with fresh eyes.
The worst part was prepping the print files for self-publication because I ran into issues, and the system wouldn’t provide details to the error message.
Perryn Olson, FSMPS, CPSM, CCMP is the author of Choose Your Own Construction Marketing Journey.
MICHELE TREACY
I am a former CNBC TV reporter (personal finance and consumer news) now in media & PR for my own clients. I am a storyteller at heart, so I still love to write. I co-authored a military bio/memoir in 2016 with my late Dad, Col Lester Romine. We self-published it on Amazon’s Create space platform.
We were accidental authors. In 2013 my dad moved into a retirement community as a widower. He was lonely, and it was a big transition to meet people. He lived in a retirement community solely for retired military and government workers, so everyone had that in common. We purchased a laptop for him, and I encouraged him to learn how to use it by just starting to write his life story. Which was an amazing one. I thought it was so neat that he would write paragraphs about how he grew up so poor as a cotton farmer’s son in Alabama, left to pursue the Air Force, became a highly decorated fighter pilot and then ended his military career at the Pentagon.
It was a true labor of love, and it took us 3 years from start to finish and having the book in our hands.
Michele Treacy is the Founder and CEO of MRT Communications and co-author of High Flight.
https://mrtcommunications.com/
STEPHANIE JANÉT
My book, Trying My Hardest – A Timeline Testimony of Pain, Perseverance, and Purpose, is uniquely structured because, in many ways, I had already begun writing it for nearly 20 years without realizing it. Eight of the twelve chapters contain dated and underlined passages taken directly from my Facebook Timeline, allowing readers to experience my story through my own words as events were actually unfolding. The book became my New Year’s Resolution on January 1st, 2025. I started with roughly 12 pages of rough notes outlining the stories I wanted to tell and where I thought the book might go. 15 months later, on March 6th, 2026, my daughter Makayla’s 18th birthday, I officially published it, with her beautiful face adorning the cover.
The longest step was actually putting all of those years of life into a cohesive story, and a close second was the editing process. Some of these documented moments were written from hospital rooms, both while I was a patient and while I was sitting beside my daughter through heart disease, life altering diagnoses, and numerous surgeries. Makayla ultimately passed away in 2020 at age 12, and completing this book became a testimony to her life and the impact she had on mine and the world around us. It is the complete why behind the non-profit I started in her honor: The Mighty Heart Warrior Project Inc. In hindsight, I wasn’t starting a book in January 2025; I was finally gathering the pieces of a story I had been documenting, and living, for years already and created something beautiful and worthy to hold my sweet girl’s memory.
Stephanie Janét is the author of The Journey of a Mighty Warrior: Trying My Hardest – A Timeline Testimony of Pain, Perseverance, and Purpose.
http://www.themightyheartwarriorproject.com/
FB & Insta: @TryingMyHardestBook
