How I Wrote a Book in 3 Days

I will not pass final judgement on the book until I've had an opportunity to read it, of course. But my initial reaction to this title is one word:<p>“Poorly.”<p>Not that there's anything wrong with that. Every application I've seen that was written in three days with any amount of functionality was also written poorly. But it didn't matter. Because you don't consume the application's code, you consume the application. The trouble with writing a book is that you <i>do</i> consume the product of the book directly. That's why I'm skeptical.<p>That said, maybe this book is awesome. That would be awesome, and hopefully would get more people riding the writing train and flexing that language muscle so many often forget about.

Having been working on a science fiction novel that covers economics, futures markets, genetic uplift, AI, finance, combat, and orbital mechanics, and having been working on it for 3-5 hours per day for 18 months ( <a href="http://morlockpublishing.com/the-book/" rel="nofollow">http://morlockpublishing.com/the-book/</a> ), I'm somewhat underwhelmed with anything that can be done in three days.<p>I suspect that I spent more than three days on researching lunar geology, minerology, titanium refining, the compresibility of air, etc.<p>Not to mention that my first draft took 9 months, and my revisions have taken 12 months.<p>Some things require iteration and polishing. Writing, IMO, is one of those things.

I honestly dont understand what the take away is from these articles...<p>Lots of people communicate information in a hurried manner using a similar formula.<p>- College students do it the last week of every semester but its called a paper<p>- Bloggers do it all the time but its called a blog<p>A book typically infers to most people something that has been written in a very thoughtful or high quality manner with much thought put into it (and we have many descriptors for the "lesser" forms... articles, stories, etc.) That doesnt mean you can't write a proper book in 3 days... but whats the point? - you are just likely putting yourself at a disadvantage. What matters is how impactful the book is. If you spend 3 days and its forgotten (sorry but likely based upon effort) and somebody else spends 1 year to craft something meaningful (much more likely based upon the history of literature) its pretty obvious who is creating value for their readers.<p>These articles read to me like "hey look at me I wrote a book in 3 days"... there is no mention of what is truly unique or skillful about it. Sorry to be so negative but I just feel like this encourages the creation of pretty artificial stuff that will be forgotten in a week.

"Great products are simply the result of decisions made aong the way."<p>So are shitty products. So are mediocre products. So what? That pull-quote tells me nothing useful. Products are the result of decisions.<p>Is this kind of trite observation indicative of the book's content?

Unless the author is Hunter S. Thompson or someone of that ilk, I'm not sure I'd really want to read a book written in 3 days.

You do it by stretching the informal but accepted definition of "book". Which reminds me of the more irksome side of marketing.

Clearly, this shows how you wrote a book in eight days (five days for the first draft, three days for the second). Still impressive, but it isn't the same as writing a book in three days.<p>As noted by others, this also discounts the time taken earlier, discussing the process to be documented, with your friend -- so I guesstimate "How I wrote a book in a short month" might be more accurate.<p>I really wonder if you didn't just demonstrate how to write a (good) blog post in a month -- I'll be very surprised if your book is better (sheds meaningfully more light on your process) than the blog post.<p>Either way, I respect you for doing it - and getting it done. It reminds me of someone (couldn't find the link now?) writing that their first book took one year to write, spending less than a month on the structure, and the rest on writing (and re-writing) -- and the second book took three months, two of which was spent on the structure/table of contents. Moral being that time spent on design/plan is returned many times when "fleshing out" the text.<p>Perhaps it was noted somewhere in "On Writing Well"[1] -- a book I highly recommend for anyone interested in doing any kind of writing.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060891548/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&#38;camp=1789&#38;creative=390957&#38;creativeASIN=0060891548&#38;linkCode=as2&#38;tag=hypertekstnet-20" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060891548/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...</a>

What I see <i>every</i> time I see an article like this is that it understates the real time investment, whether intentionally or because people get over-excited about learning how quickly they could do it.<p>He did not "write a book in 3 days" in anything but the purely mechanical sense that he put the words of the final version down in 3 days.<p>Usually these articles on "How to do X in Y days" boil down to:<p>- Prepare upfront (in this case 5 days on the draft that he threw away + time spent learning the subject by doing + time spent talking about the idea with someone).<p>- Divide and conquer.<p>- Don't do more than necessary (in this case, make the book only as long as need to convey your message; adding more words to make the word count longer does not improve quality)<p>- You'll be a lot faster at pretty much anything you already know well enough to talk about at length.<p>If you have a decent amount of practice formulating yourself, putting the words down is not the hard part of writing a book.<p>Learning to understand the subject, and then structuring the material is.<p>In this case, by the time he'd learned about the subject and invested the time in figuring out how to communicate it, actually <i>writing</i> the final version was not a huge investment in time, and that is the real takeaway.<p>Still a big accomplishment and something most people will never do, so good on him for doing it.

Regarding the negative comments, time alone is not an indicator of quality. The consumer doesn't care how long it took you to do something. In many instances, we don't even know the time it took. Some people take decades to produce work, while others take hours or days. The proof of value is always in the work itself.<p>There are countless examples of artists producing work at breakneck speeds; Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Frank Zappa, Issac Asimov, Alexandre Dumas, etc... I could go on and on.

I didn't read this article because of its title. I think it is either a lie or a lie that's nuanced in a way to be technically true.<p>Assuming the book actually was written in three days (planning, research, the actual writing, typography, editing, etc), I'm not sure I want to read it, because I fear the quality to be low. Similarly, I'm not sure I want to read an article by the same author.<p>Pity.

Renowned author Oliver Sacks tells that he wrote his first book in 10 days. He had committed to kill himself if he didn't make this goal. The story is in this RadioLab episode: <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/</a>

It would be interesting to read a preview of the book.<p>I think that releasing software quickly is completely different to releasing a physical item quickly. You continue working on the software and update as necessary but you cannot update a physical book that is sitting on someone's coffee table.<p>How much time was spent on the content of the book versus the design? Is the content alone worth the price asked or is the content just a filler for the book design/marketing effort?

I believe in the vision that these guys have. I contacted Drew and before ordering and he was very pleasant to deal with, so I went for it.<p>I would be lying if I say that I'm not curious about the quality of the content, which is exactly why I decided to jump the gun. Worst case scenario, I'm out $29. Best case scenario, I improve my execution abilities.<p>Will keep you posted.

With the word "execute" I also associate the word "ship".<p>So if there's an big push to "execute" as quickly as possible, why did they go with a physical book when they could have shipped a finished book in digital format exponentially faster?<p>I would love to read the book, but I don't buy physical books anymore.

So where can I get a sample of this masterpiece that took 8 days to write?

Christ, it took me 4 months to submit a passable draft of ONE chapter. Good on ya.

Is there an ebook version coming? I don't really need/want a hardcover copy.

Anybody notice the table of contents and page numbers?

must be awesome! if books start to be written like blog posts then.. oh well I have nothing to say, I will write a book about it.