How To Write A Book In A Weekend (How We Did It)

If you’ve considered giving up on your dream of writing a book in your lifetime due to time constraints, listen up. Today I want to share with you a product creation strategy for anyone interested in writing a book rapidly.

There are actually many ways to write a book if you’re short on time. In fact, in this post, we’re going to share with you four different strategies you can use to write a book in a weekend.

Yes, I said one weekend!

But, before we begin, if you’re still figuring out what exactly you want to write about, learn the 3 step process you can use to envision and take action on your book writing goals.

Write a book in a weekend with these 3 strategies

The following strategies can be applied to anyone interested in writing a book in a weekend, regardless of how far along in the process you are.

1. The first strategy you can consider is pretty simple. You can write an outline of talking points for your book, record your voice discussing each talking point, and then hire a transcriptionist to transcribe the whole thing. You can use Rev for this.
2. Another simple strategy you can use is to have a friend interview you about a subject that you want to write a book on, get that interview transcribed, and use that transcription as the starting point for a book. You can also use Upwork for this.
3. Another strategy that you can use is what I did when I wrote my first book WordPress Revealed. Before writing your book, reach out and ask your mailing list or your social media following to submit a ton of questions to you on a topic, then write your responses to each question and organize them into a book.

Or, you can do what we just did with our latest book, Evergreen Wisdom.

For the most part, Evergreen Wisdom is a curated book. We knew that we wanted the book to be about mindset and the mental shifts required to succeed as a business owner.

There are a few ways to curate a book, here’s how we recommend doing it.

How to curate content and write a book in a weekend

By following these steps, we curated our book Evergreen Wisdom.

• Step 1: The first thing we did was look through all of the content and articles that we’ve written on the subject over the years and organize them into an outline. These could be old lead magnets, PDFs, products, social media posts or blog posts.
• Step 2: We then decided on a logical order for each post, based on the titles of all the articles.
• Step 3: Finally, we added all of those articles into a single document in Google Docs. This alone gave us a 75-page book. Because we knew we wanted our book to be a minimum of 120 pages long, we took the following step.
• Step 4: We had three podcasts transcribed from a few years ago where we talked about mindset shifts to be successful. These were from our original podcast that was called “The Evergreen Wisdom Podcast.” We picked the best transcript of the three that we had done, cleaned it up a bit, made it a bit more readable, and added it to the book. The cool thing about these transcripts is that these podcast episodes are no longer available. The only way to find this content is in our new book.
• Step 5: Finally, Joe and I each wrote two or three brand new, unique, chapters for the book. The final result was a 135-page book that was a combination of blog posts that we’ve written over the years, transcripts of content that you can’t find anywhere else, and a handful of brand new, unique, chapters to bring it all together.

If you want to take this concept even a step further, you can do a fully curated book of other people’s content.

This is actually something we plan on doing with a future book. The idea is that you would find about 20 amazing blog articles on a specific topic from around the web.

I know you’re probably wondering if this is ethical.

Here’s how we recommend curating blog posts for a book, the right way:

• Contact the original writer of each article and tell them you’re writing a book on the topic. Ask if they mind if you include their article within the book.
• Something you can do is offer to share their website URL within your book as well as send them a handful of free copies as a thank you.
• Once you’ve rounded up 15 to 20 posts and received permission to use them, you could add a chapter or two of your own content in there to tie everything together and launch your book.

Boom – just like that, you’ve got a published book that’s for sale and you get to borrow the credibility of the various people that you curated throughout the book.

You’ll also have a little bit of built-in marketing as many of the people featured are likely to mention that they’ve been featured in a book.

Win-win for everyone.

Curating content can be extremely valuable and powerful when it comes to your online business. Here’s how to drive traffic and grow your brand with content curation.

Ready to write a book in a weekend? Check out the following resources mentioned in this post:

• Evergreen Wisdom
• Designrr – Not mentioned, but great for turning blog posts into PDFs.
• A bunch of ways to use Designrr
• Rev
• Upwork
• WordPress Revealed