How long are books in political science?

As a polisci student who has passed his prelims, I have a very good idea how long books take to read. But I realized this week that I didn't have a good idea how long books take to write.

As I was setting up the template to write a book-format dissertation, I decided to give it a look. Here are some rough stats for five well-known polisci books*, pulled from my reading shelf more or less at random:

	Hindman	Zaller	Mutz	Lupia and McCubbins	Huber and Shipan
Lines/page	38	45	35	42	39
Words/line	13	13	11	12	11
Total pages	141	310	125	229	210
Total chapters	7	12	5	10	8
~Pages/chapter	20.1	25.8	25	22.9	26.2
~Total words	69,654	18,1350	48,125	11,5416	90,090

These estimates are probably biased upwards, because I based them on pages of full text without any tables, graphs, or chapter breaks. But still, it's a pretty good idea for the rough scale of the project.

To put it in perspective, the current working draft for my dissertation includes 10,653 words. If I'm shooting for 70,000 total, that means I'm 15% done already!


*These are the books I used for estimates:
Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy
John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
Diana Mutz, Hearing the Other Side
Arthur Lupia and Matthew McCubbins, The Democratic Dilemma
John Huber and Chuck Shipan, Deliberate Discretion