Hidden Helper said:
...how long (either as a unit of time, or percentage of complete project) it takes, on average, to research a book?...If you don't know of a statistic, would you be willing to share how long it took you to research your book, how long your book was, etc.?...
I used to research and write policy reports for a government policy shop. Some were book length, and some more like articles. For the full-scale projects, it could take several months to do the research, and longer if the time were available. Often, it was necessary to start from the due date and work backwards, fitting in all activities with a view to being done on time.
My style was to (1) lay out a Word document for the new project, title page, section to accommodate table of contents, place holders for front matter, and a couple of section breaks to accommodate the body of the work and possible other needs; (2) set up styles for paragraphs and headings; (3) assure that the endnotes would appear where they were supposed to go (that is a matter of properly using section breaks and properly defining the setup for endnotes); (4) as I did the research, also create the working draft, plugging in full, properly formatted endnotes (and footnotes where appropriate, for information that did not belong in the text OR in endnotes) AND creating the bibliography, with each entry complete and properly formatted; (5) when draft completed, revise, revise, revise. That way, when the paper was done, it was DONE. No need to scramble for documentation or clean up bibliography and notes. That sort of approach makes it difficult to separate research from writing from editing, as it is an integrated process, and further research might be needed even well along in a project.
There are some other tricks to keep everything straight during the process, with the understanding that some mechanics need to be tidied up as part of the final revision and editing process. The same approach can work for books per se. I have one such project underway right now.
--Ken