These notes are based on How To Write A Book In Less Than 24 Hours by Stefan Pylarinos. The book is very short and targeted at use of minimal effort to make money on short nonfiction books with no quality control. While that inherently colors its advice, there are useful tips within it. If you are enthusiastic about writing, rather than making money, I would not advise reading it.
“Good” Advice
These are the things that can be useful if you are trying to rush publish something simple. There are also pieces of advice that may apply for more serious efforts, but I do not make the effort to distinguish them.
Market-Based Advice: Make it quick and cheap because most people don’t read past the first chapter. Shorter books are less intimidating, quicker/easier to make, and cheaper. These make them more likely to be purchased. Series encourage people to buy multiple books, and they are more likely to believe there is more value in several cheaper books than a single equivalently priced book with equivalent content. Find your target market first. Specificity in topic is rewarded. Spend 30 minutes on coming up with at least 10 ideas. People choose highly specific titles over broader titles. Make a bunch of title ideas. Keep them as short as possible. Think of them like a headline. Figure out where to publish. (Stefan only focuses on low-effort self-publication systems. I didn’t bother to include them here, as it’d be a waste of your time.)
Research Advice: All of their research advice is bad in my opinion.
Outlining Method: Take 30-60 minutes to come up with a list of ideas to cover, then come up with chapter titles, cut them down or combine them depending on overlap of topics, and finally write 3 things to cover for each chapter.
Writing Advice: Perfect is the enemy of the good enough. Schedule time to write. Publicly commit to your work as a way to encourage yourself. Distractions are evil, and should be treated as such. Timers can help you focus. Aim for 500-1000 words per chapter. (That would make this blog post chapter-length.) Spend an hour per chapter. (They promote this as a limit.) Don’t filter, just write. (Proofreading and editing is a separate task that comes later.) Spelling and sentence structure can always be fixed – after you’re finished writing.
Writer’s block? Exercise, take a break.
Editing Advice: Stefan focuses on proofreading. They suggest only waiting 30 minutes between writing and proofreading, when you should at least sleep on it. Reading aloud can help you find clunky sentences. Having someone else proofread makes it easier to spot issues.
(If you really want to follow the idea of rapidly producing simpleton books, you should have each day’s tasks be for different books so that you have an appropriate rest period between each step. To be clear, I define tasks as everything before writing, the writing itself, and editing/proofreading. These are the 3 main “categories” of action that benefit from having a break in-between. Realistically, research should be its own block too, and editing/proofreading shouldn’t be done in one day.)
Really Bad Advice
I include this because it can be helpful to understand why a particular piece of advice is bad (and to share a few related thoughts).
Misunderstandings: The 80-20 rule is that 20% of effort generates 80% of value. This author seems to think this means you can put minimal effort into something and still have most of the value. The reality is that you can’t know which effort generated the most value until you are done. Skipping 80% of the effort just means you’ll have very little very low-quality work.
“I’ve researched this for 1 hour, therefore I understand it.”
Worst Advice: “Research for only an hour.” This is the single worst piece of advice in the whole book. It encourages perpetuating common misunderstandings and repeating surface-level information that doesn’t actually get to the heart of a topic.. or explain it at all. Anything produced with this philosophy will be of minimal value, maybe equivalent to this blog post at most. (This is why large language models appear to be very knowledgeable at a surface level, but if you have any experience in a particular field or knowledge on a topic, they immediately fall flat. LLMs are fundamentally a “highest probability” surface-scanning machine on everything.)
For comparison, when I wrote a blog post about taking breaks, the end result was 2 paragraphs explaining the practical result of current research on taking breaks. That came from 3 hours of research on summaries of studies and articles on the topic. If it takes 3 hours to make 2 paragraphs that just cover the surface of a topic as simple as “how often and how long should breaks be”, then anything book-length will be worthless if it is based on only an hour of research.
“Forums are better than research.”
The 2nd worst piece of advice was to use forums for answers rather than checking credible sources or doing original research. While forums can help you find good answers for a lot of things, making them the main source of a book is a woefully inadequate idea. Such information must be used carefully, and checked for validity. (You’ll note that I include a disclaimer about my blog posts not having been thoroughly checked for validity. This is why. I am confident in what I say, but not an authority on any particular topic.)
Stefan suggests taking advantage of someone from the global south to transcribe a voice recording if you don’t like typing. They also assume you can write at 50 wpm on average and thus it is theoretically possible to bang out a chapter in 10 minutes minimum. (This can be fine for a first draft, but Stefan expects it to be your final draft.)
The book ends by hard-selling an online course of some kind. I suspect it fits the colloquial definition of a scam. (Most “scams” are not legally scams because they contain ill-defined value – much like this book. One must be careful on their wording when publishing to avoid lawsuit. This is part of why it took me several months to go from writing these notes to publishing this overview – I needed to make sure that my descriptions of the content of this book do not violate copyright.)
A great example of hard-selling and “scams” that aren’t scams is the focus of this lovely video by Dan Olson: