How likely is it that a young man of Joseph Smith’s limited education could produce such a lengthy book as a first-time author?

Limiting our scope to just the length of the Book of Mormon, shouldn’t our starting point be that it is unlikely a first-time author like Joseph would have produced such a long book on his own?

In 2021 Kyler Rasmussen analyzed 116 authors with prominent literary works published between 1800 and 1860 and compared:

how old they were when they published their first fictional work (of more than 50 pages)
how long that work was (in pages)
how many years of formal education they received.

Just looking at page counts, Joseph Smith was a clear outlier. He was younger than average, had substantially less education than average. Taking that into account, he produced a work far larger than anyone would have guessed (around 531 dense pages).

Isn’t the length of the Book of Mormon a simple piece of evidence that Joseph Smith likely did not write it himself?

See:

Kyler Rasmussen – Estimating the Evidence – Episode 1: On Ages and Pages

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