This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Can you really write and publish a book in just one week? Got this question from a listener. I'll just be real here, I'm a little bit skeptical as an author who spends a long time writing books. But let's talk about it. In this episode, we're gonna explore whether speed publishing is realistic or just a recipe for creating low quality content.
If you use the internet these days and who doesn't, you probably encounter a lot of what we might call low quality content. Nevertheless, let's take the question at its face value. Writing a book is no small task, but the internet is full of claims that you can publish a book quickly. Apparently there's a company now claiming you can do it in just one week. So is this legit or are we being sold a fantasy?
Or could there be a middle ground? I mean, we'll be fair. So let's hear from Jasmine in New York. She wants to know about speed publishing. Let's break down the reality of these claims and also talk about that whole thing of efficiency and quality.
How can you have both of them or what are the trade options and so on? I'll do my best to give a short and helpful answer, her question and that answer coming right up. [Music]
Hey Chris, this is Jasmine from New York. I've been working on a book idea for months, but every time I sit down to write, I feel overwhelmed by how long the process seems. I recently saw a post from someone claiming they published a book in just one week.
Is that even possible? If so, how do you structure such a fast timeline while still creating something worth reading? I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether speed publishing can work for first time authors or if it's just hype. [Music]
Well Jasmine, there's nothing wrong with hype in general. You know, it's cool to hype things.
We get excited about stuff, but I do think you're right to approach this claim with some skepticism. You know, the idea of publishing a book in a really fast time period, whether it is a month or a week or, you know, maybe next, you know, next season, it'll be like publish a book in a day. It's often by people who aren't writing in a traditional sense. They're outsourcing work. They're using AI tools.
Nothing wrong with either of those things, but either way, they're simply producing something that barely qualifies as a book. So yes, you can use chat GPT and other language models these days and go and tell it to write a book. It's usually a little bit more complicated than that. It won't just write the book in one go. You have to do some repeated prompting.
What you get is not gonna be consistent. There's gonna be a ton of mistakes in it. So technically it can produce words. And if you say, well, a book consists of 50,000 words or whatever your number is, then maybe you have produced a book. But I think you have to ask, like what are you really trying to do here?
You know, do you want to write a book or do you want to go to a website and have it produce this low quality content and then put your name on it and call it a book? If you wanna do it, then sure, you can do that. Just like you can now go to AI tools and say, hey, write songs for me, you know, make an album for me in an hour. Make great art for me, you know, whatever it is, whatever the medium in a short period of time. And as I said, I'm not anti-AI at all.
I just think it's better to focus on creating value, not hitting some arbitrary timeline, like publishing a book, you know, in a week, for example. So I think you should be skeptical of it and figure out what are you really trying to accomplish. And I actually value the whole process, the creative process that takes time to produce work of quality. And there is still a market for that. There are a lot of people that are like, well, there's just so much, you know, it's called AI slop that's out there on the internet.
People are still reading real books. They're still listening to great music. They're going to concerts, you know, to hear live artists who are still performing. And so if you're into that, well, it's gonna take some work. It's gonna take some process and you have to learn to like the process also.
By the way, I think the process is not something to be afraid of. It's actually something to be embraced. It can be fun, it can be frustrating, but those two things are not exclusive. Ultimately, you wanna make something that you can say you're proud of, right? And if you can use a tool that does this for you in a very short period of time and you feel proud of it, then that's, you know, that's for you to decide.
It's not for me to say what you should be proud of, but I think that's a good little kind of yardstick to think about. Am I proud of what I have created here? So I'm gonna leave you with that, again, just always sharing my opinion, giving it to you straight. Listeners, let me know if you have a question or comment, sidehustleschool.com, the complete archives of Side Hustle School, available there for free. New episode every day, seven days a week.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
