I wrote the first draft of Broken Money in about 6 months while running other aspects of my business, and that was 160,000 words or so. Things can come out really fast when you already thought a lot about what you say.

So in Broken Money's case, five years of research went into it, but it then spilled out into a solid first draft in six months, followed by a lot of editing.

In this fiction case, I had this portion of a story pretty mapped out in my head, so the words just flew out. It won't be like that consistently.