The modern author’s dilemma, why writing a book feels harder than ever

Across fields, and most clearly in tech publishing, turning deep knowledge into a book is hard. The blocker is not ideas. The blocker is structure, steady feedback, and the long grind between drafts.

Many authors report six to twelve months for a manuscript, based on Reedsy’s survey data. Community sprints show the appetite for structure, more than 413,000 people joined NaNoWriMo programs in 2022, each aiming for 50,000 words in thirty days.
The bar for attention is rising as well, Bowker counted over 2.6 million self published ISBN titles in 2023, up 7.2 percent year over year.

In a world like this, process and steady feedback are not luxuries, they are the only way through the grind.