How much research does it take to complete a book? If you’re thinking about a narrative book – a story of a person or event or company – my research program for Merchants of Virtue: Herman Miller and the Making of a Sustainable Company might provide some guidance. The book was published by Palgrave/Macmillan.

Merchants is essentially a twenty-year history. It tells the story of a group of committed people who set the standard for an environmentally and socially responsible corporation. The book features about two dozen characters, some still with the company, some not, some at the front lines, some at the top.

I did my research in two phases, the first for the proposal, the second for the manuscript. For the proposal, I conducted 25 interviews and read about three dozen documents and four books. I also spent three days at Herman Miller headquarters in Holland, Michigan, where I did about half the interviews. All told, the research took me about four weeks.

When I received a book contract in early 2010, I spent about seven more months on research as I was writing. I filled a searchable document database as I went. Here is the final tally (cumulative) of the pieces I digested and entered into my database before writing:

Interviews (phone and in-person): 127

Articles (magazines, journals, newspapers): 76

Books: 17

White papers: 34

Minutes/memos/letters: 160 (roughly)

Emails: 35 (roughly)

Corporate reports: 26

Videos: 25 (roughly)

Journal articles: 8

Presentations/speeches: 7

Fact sheets: 6

Cases: 3

The total database included over 500 entries. This did not include documents I skimmed but didn’t register in my database. If I were to include the stray cats and dogs of research, the tally might look more like 650. This would include miscellaneous articles, books, research reports, press releases, slide presentations, photos, surveys, web pages, and so on.

It goes without saying that if you are about to start on a book, you need to plan enough time to read and digest a lot of material. If you’re already an expert in the topic, you won’t have as big a research load. Then again, in my first book, Counting What Counts, my research database had over 800 entries—and my slush pile of castoff documents half again as many more—and I already knew quite a bit about the subject.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published March 24, 2011]