Morning: brief and outline
Do not open a blank page. Write the reader in one line and the result in one line; if either takes more than ten minutes, the book is not ready to be written today, and knowing that is the morning's real work. Then the outline: five to seven chapters, each a step from problem to result, each with a one-sentence purpose. Build it with a model if you like, but decide every title yourself. Give the outline the three tests — do the titles tell the story, does each chapter depend on the previous, which one would the reader open first — and fix what fails. Aim to have the outline approved by ten.
Midday: draft chapter by chapter
Draft one chapter at a time, each with the whole outline in view, each to a word target. With a model doing the typing, a 6,000-word draft arrives in about an hour of wall time; the studio streams each chapter onto the page as it is written so you can read while the next one runs. Do not edit while drafting. Read each chapter once when it lands, mark the sections that are wrong or generic with a word in the margin, and move to the next. By early afternoon you have a complete draft and a list of marks.
Afternoon: the edit that makes it a book
Go through the marks. Rewrite the weak sections — one section at a time, not whole chapters. Cut every opening paragraph that announces instead of starting. List every factual claim and number, and either check it now or cut it; a lead magnet with no statistics is better than one with an invented one. Then write the two things only you can: the example from your own work in the chapter that needs it most, and the last page that bridges to what you offer. Set the cover, export the PDF, and stop. Day two is for reading it on a phone as a stranger would.
Common questions
Straight answers
Can a 15,000-word book be done in a day?+
Drafted, perhaps; edited, no. The editing is the part that scales with length. Give a longer book a week and spend most of it editing.
What if the draft is bad?+
Usually the brief was vague. Tighten the reader and the result, regenerate the outline, and the draft improves more than any amount of rewriting would.
Continue