NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

writing a book in two weeks

books are the training weights of the mind

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“Books are the training weights of the mind.”

–Epictetus

I’ve read a helluva lot of books, and they’ve helped change my life for the better, and maybe that’s why I’m so interested in making them (that desire comes/goes in spurts).  

Two years back I wanted to see if I could write a book in two weeks.  AND I DID!
https://www.nevblog.com/category/writing-a-book-in-two-weeks/

But only recently did I think of publishing it on Amazon.

I buy pretty much EVERY book through Amazon Prime….and I was curious if I could get that little book available to everyone on Amazon.

And it happened……check it out!!

I just get a kick that someone can order that book on Amazon, and get my face delivered to their door!

When I show people the physical book, they get curious how I made it.

It was pretty damn simple:
1.) I went to CreateSpace.com

2.) Uploaded the book in PDF format (I wrote it in Microsoft Word, although now I’d suggest you write your book in Google Docs and do “save as PDF” when done).

3.) After entering in other random info, the book was ready to ship!

Within a few days, the Amazon.com listing goes up live.  You can separately upload the same book to Amazon’s Kindle Publishing platform, and within a few days, the physical book and Kindle book get linked…..like mine are here:
https://amzn.com/0615836720

I started giving out random copies of this book recently, and everyone so far has loved it, and said, “This makes me wanna go out and do my own experiments!!”

Just thought it was cool that nowadays you can publish something so easily.

Maybe if there’s a solid piece of material you wrote, you could upload it and get it published on Amazon.com just for fun too!

The Book is Done!

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Remember that Writing A Book In Two Weeks Experiment I did?

Well I got the first copies of the physical book from the printers! Check it out!

Hahahahaha….I couldn’t stop laughing that this book actually exists :-)

The front cover is actually a subtle ode to my favorite copywriter: Gary Halbert….you can see his book was clearly the inspiration *COUGH*exact copy*COUGH* for my book:

The image I used on the cover was a cheeky nod to the show Family Guy….where Brian Griffin’s novel has this cheesy oil painting of him looking very profound:

You can see the similarities here:

I printed out 3 copies of the book through Lulu.com just to see how the formatting would come out, and it came out better than expected!

There ARE a bunch of very small changes I want to make (like page breaks and spelling errors).   That’s to be expected since this was written in two weeks.

If you really want this you can buy it here…

…..and I will laugh my ASS off if someone actually buys it!  I priced it at $14.92…

….because that’s when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” :-)

But this kind of concluded my totally-useless-goal of “Having a book with my name and picture on it”!

CHECK!

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UPDATE 9-22-2011
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Someone actually bought the book!  That means my book sold ONE more copy that Brian Griffin’s novel :-)

Book In Two Weeks – Day Whatever

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Alright…..so sometime last night I finally finished all 7 chapters of the Book in Two Weeks!

You can see all chapters collected on my desktop:

Honestly it wasn’t THHAAAT hard, it’s just that I have lots of other stuff going on at the same time (who doesn’t), so I think I’m a day or two behind.

Who cares.

Time to move on.

The next agenda-item is to write the Index for the book.  This shouldn’t be too hard since it’s ONLY SEVEN CHAPTERS :-)

The next step might take a bit of extra work though.  I noticed a lot of the pictures in the book are weird sizes…and I might have to go back and re-edit a lot of them so they’re visible to the readers.

I’m also not entirely sure about how the pictures will affect the page spacing (I think Lulu.com has some cool tools to fix that problem).

Anywhozit….we’re a few days behind schedule, but it’s been two weeks and I HAVE indeed written a book (even though it’s just on my computer for now)!

Book In Two Weeks – Day 8

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I believe I’m ONE day behind the original schedule for this….but so far I’m up to speed to get this book published in two weeks.

I’m done with 4 chapters (and will be writing the 5th one today).

Just a quick update…..I appreciate all the emails I’ve been getting about this :-)

As for those of you “who just can never seem to get around to writing my book”

…..maybe you’re just a big lazy-ass ;-)

Book In Two Weeks – Day 5

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I’m a day behind…..but I got the 2nd chapter written.

This chapter was all about the Selling Notes Experiment.

I’ve noticed I have NOT been copy/pasting these experiments into book format.  In fact, pretty much 90% of each is completely re-written.

This is a little more work than I anticipated, but it will make a much better book than just lazily copy/pasting blog posts!

Book In Two Weeks – Day 4

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Today’s portion of work involves:

“Writing Chapter 1”

I decided chapter 1 of the book will be based off this experiment I did in April 2005:

Bottled Water Experiment

I’m in Houston visiting my family for the weekend….so I planted myself on the living room couch for about 2 1/2 hours and re-wrote the experiment out.

6 more chapters to go!

Book In Two Weeks – Day 3

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Day three of the “Book In Two Weeks Experiment” involves:

Finding out what format to write in (PDF or Word) to get it printed correctly.

Once again, I’m pretty lazy, so I just asked a friend who’s already written a book and self-published it and had a good experience.

He used a service called OffTheBookShelf.com.

He used them instead of others because they’re kind of a one-stop shop.  So if I upload my “7 Ways I Made Money” book (or whatever I end up calling it)…..I’ll get from them:

  • An ISBN number for the book.
  • Their “distribution engine” automatically puts the book up for sale on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, Kindle and a bunch of other online book stores.
  • You can order PHYSICAL copies of the book from them.
  • You can order DIGITAL copies of the book from them.
  • They’ll convert your .DOC digital version of the book into a .PDF (good, because I’m not writing a whole book in PDF!)

SO I just have to write the book in .doc format…..however I wanted to run a quick test to see how a sample conversion would go (I don’t wanna have to re-format the whole thing after the conversion).;

I copied a blog post into Word (from this post) and then converted it to PDF from a free online conversion tool:
https://www.freepdfconvert.com/

….to see what would happen:

….the conversion went perfectly!

So today’s question has been answered:

The entire book will be written in Microsoft Word.

The writing begins tomorrow!

Book In Two Weeks – Day 2

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Day 2 of the “Writing A Book In Two Weeks Experiment” was stated as:

“Start putting Facebook ads out like 4HWW style to split test names (optional step)”

This was an optional step…and I’m NOT going to split test what title is better because:

1.) I’m lazy <—-probably the main reason.
-and-
2.) I don’t care if the title is for this experiment because I don’t care about selling any copies of this book.

So this means I get a day off from this experiment…woohoO!  #nohomework

Book In Two Weeks – Day 1

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Gonna write a book in two weeks……which means at the end of the month I’ll have a book sent to the printers and I’ll be a (self) published author!

….if you don’t count the Homeless Experiment that I posted on Amazon.

Every journey starts with a single step (or some crap like that….) so here goes:

The first step is coming up with a title or concept for the book. I already know the book will be based off experiments on this blog….and most of those experiments are based somehow on money.

I also know the book will have 7 chapters (I only have time to write one chapter a day for about a week).

So the book will be a short collection of 7 different ways I’ve made money.  I originally wanted to keep the book somewhat “Timeless” …..but this would eliminate any mention of internet businesses I’ve created.

The possible experiments to include in the book are:

I’ll pick 7 of those and run with it.

I presume the “point” of the book will be to “expand the mind” of someone looking to make extra money.  Often people are stuck at “Get a job”…..and have no other ideas.  I think this will open people’s minds to business ideas…..much like my Behind The Scenes product opened people’s minds to the fact starting an online business is NOT as complicated as one thinks.

Here’s a Title-Brainstorm:

  • 7 weird ways I made money through college <–I like the best
  • 7 ways I made money without a job
  • 7 stupid ways I’ve made money
  • 7 ways a college student made money
  • 7 rather odd ways I made side-income
  • 7 ways I made side-income without whoring myself out
  • I didn’t want a job so I did this instead to make money
  • 7 random ways I made money without having a job

DAY ONE: Got the title and concept of the book down!  Tomorrow’s step is to figure out what format everything needs to be in to get it printed.