How to Write a Book as a Busy CEO
Almost every founder I've worked with has a book they've been thinking about for years. They haven't started it. The reason, almost without exception, is the calendar.
They're running real companies. They've got boards to answer to, customers who need something today, employees who need direction, and a family that already gets the leftover hours of the week. When they picture writing a book, they imagine two years of nights and weekends staring at a blank page. The math doesn't work, so they shelve it.
What I've found is that the calendar problem is almost always a process problem. Writing a book takes years for most people because the process they've been handed was built for novelists with sabbaticals. It wasn't built for the person running a $20M company. When you swap the process, the math changes on you.
So let me walk you through what the time commitment actually looks like.
There are three phases. Only one of them needs a focused block of your time.
Phase one is pre-work. This is the strategic part, before you've started writing. You're figuring out the bullseye reader, the table of contents, and the stories that belong in each chapter. There are three exercises, and I tell every author to do one a day rather than crunching them together, because your brain needs to sleep on each one before moving to the next. Roughly two hours each. So five to ten hours of focused thinking, spread across a week.
One of our recent authors is a good example. She's a CPA who came to us while running her own practice. On one of our office hours calls, mid-pre-work, she described her time commitment like this: "I have a couple hours now to work on this. Like two hours every day, really." That was it. She got the pre-work done without missing a client meeting.
Phase two is the recordings. This is where the bulk of the first draft gets captured. You speak the book aloud and the typing happens on the back end. The chapter talking points are prepared in advance, so by the time you sit down with a book director you already know what you're hitting on each chapter. You're just talking through your method, the way you'd talk through it on a podcast or a sales call. (We wrote about why we built it this way here.)
You've got two options for the recordings. Two full days in Austin to get the whole book on tape in person. Or three- to four-hour remote blocks spread across a couple of weeks, fit around your existing calendar. Most founders come to Austin because they want the focus of doing it in one stretch. Some can't, because of travel or board commitments, and they record remotely. Either way works.
The part of the process that traditionally eats a year, which is getting the first draft on paper, gets compressed into roughly sixteen hours of speaking. (Here's the longer version of why that's possible.) The short version is that the structure is locked before you ever start talking.
Phase three is editing, publishing, and launch. This runs four to five months on our standard timeline. The time you actually spend on it is light. You're reviewing drafts your editor sends back, signing off on cover design rounds, and sitting in on a few launch planning calls along the way. Most weeks you're looking at an hour or two. Some weeks it's zero, because the work is sitting with someone on our team.
Here's the math. Pre-work is five to ten hours over a week. The recordings are sixteen hours total, either compressed into two days or split across remote sessions. After that, editing and launch averages an hour or two a week, over four to five months.
If you total it up generously, the active hours from you come out to somewhere around 60 to 90 hours across roughly six months.
That's not nothing. I'm not going to pretend it's nothing. But the version of writing a book most founders have stuck in their heads is closer to a thousand hours alone at a desk. That's the version their network told them about. Their network mostly came up through traditional publishers, or through processes built for people who write for a living.
Geoff Woods, who built The AI-Driven Leader, drafted his book in just over a month while still running his company. The economics of the book have since dwarfed the copies-sold number by a wide margin. I don't recommend that timeline to everyone. I bring it up because the upper bound on what's actually required, when the process is built right, is much lower than the number you're carrying around in your head.
Founders who try to write a book the traditional way usually fail. They're capable enough. The problem is that the traditional way assumes you have time to teach yourself how to write a book while you're writing it. You don't have that kind of time. What you have is twenty or thirty years of expertise that can come out of your mouth, if someone competent shapes it into a manuscript on the back end.
That's the whole Author.Inc design. You already have the wisdom. The pre-work tells you what to think about. Once that's locked, you record the chapters. After that, our team takes over the parts you'd otherwise be teaching yourself, which is the part that eats the year.
There's an analogy I use with authors. If you decide to summit Everest, you can either spend a month climbing to Camp 2 on foot, or you can take the helicopter to Camp 2 and start the summit from there. You still have to do the hard part, because there's no helicopter to the top. But there's no reason to spend a month getting yourself to the starting line if you don't have to.
If the math still feels like too much for where you are right now, that's worth paying attention to. There are real seasons when a CEO shouldn't be starting a book. A fundraise quarter, or a turnaround, or a launch that needs all of you. Don't fight those. But if you're in a normal stretch and you can find five to ten focused hours in your next month, the rest of the process can be built around your schedule.
It depends on which phase you're in. The pre-work is the most concentrated stretch, usually two hours a day for three to five days. The recording phase is either two full days in Austin or three- to four-hour remote blocks spread across a few weeks. After that, editing and launch is much lighter, an hour or two a week over four to five months. The total active hours across the project tend to land between 60 and 90.
Four to six months is the typical timeline, from the day you start pre-work to the day a finished book is in your hands. Some authors move faster. Some take a year because they want more room to think. Either way, the first draft of the manuscript usually exists within the first month. The rest of the time is editing, design, and getting the launch infrastructure in place.
This is exactly who I built the process for. Most of the authors I work with are running companies between $1M and $50M. The pre-work fits around client meetings. If Austin isn't feasible, you can record remotely. Editing requires steady review but no heavy lifting. The minimum input is about five to ten focused hours a month.
You pause. The program runs for a full year of coaching, so the timeline has flex built in. Authors pause for board meetings, product launches, family obligations, all the time. They pick back up when they can. The only phases where momentum really matters are pre-work and recordings. Past those, you can stretch the editing process to fit your life and the book still turns out well.
No. Austin's the most efficient option because we can get the entire first draft on tape in two focused days. About half of the authors I work with record remotely instead, breaking the sessions into three- or four-hour blocks over two or three weeks. The quality of the final manuscript is the same either way.
If you've been telling yourself you'll write a book when things slow down, I want to be honest with you. Things don't slow down for founders running real companies. There's always a quarter coming that looks busier than the one you're in. The authors I've worked with who actually finished their books are the ones who decided to start in spite of that, not because their schedule cleared.
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