A current piece of advice floating around Twitter is that one way to approach writing a book is to take the total word count and divide it by the days in a year. Alright, let’s assume 100,000 words is our goal. This is considered a “generally safe” range for mainstream fiction. Taking 100,000 words and dividing it by 365 you get 274. If you take off a couple of days a year for birthdays or holidays then you’re looking at somewhere around 280 words a day.