The writing part is, as everyone knows, crazy painful. Crazy high failure rates. For experienced authors, it takes nine to twelve months, blows all your energy right up front, and you feel defeated before you even get into editing. Sometimes you have to start over. It's the single biggest landmine in the whole process.

I've been saying some version of that to authors for years. And I've watched the biggest publishers handle it the same way every time. Here's a check. Good luck. Try not to die. Just sending authors out into battle with no game plan.

That's the industry norm. And it's insane.

What Six to Twelve Months of Writing Actually Looks Like

I'm not exaggerating the timeline. I've worked with hundreds of authors. The typical nonfiction book takes five years from idea to published product if the author is doing it themselves. Six to twelve months is the fast version, and that's just the first draft. You're not even in editing yet.

What kills people is the sitting. You've got a full business to run, clients to manage, a team that needs you. And then you're supposed to find two hours a night, or give up weekends, to grind through a manuscript that you're not even sure is structured right. By month three, you've lost the thread. By month six, you're wondering if the whole thing was a mistake.

I've had authors come to me after spending over $150,000 on two ghostwriters and a year and a half. That was just the first draft. It still needed structural work.

The dirty secret of the publishing industry is that the first draft experience is miserable for almost everyone. And nobody has a good answer for it. Or didn't, until recently.

How We Got the First Draft Down to 39 Days, Then a Week

The first author who went through my process got his first draft done in 39 days. I've written about Geoff Woods and that story elsewhere. But what I haven't talked about as much is how the process kept compressing.

The second author recorded his book in one day and I had his manuscript back to him in three days. The third was similar. I've now refined it to where an author can do the full book recording in two days, sometimes one, and have a manuscript that rivals what a ghostwriter would produce in twelve months.

Every single first draft we've produced, I've run it through AI and asked: how does this compare to a typical first draft? Every single time it comes back saying this is either a polished second draft or a third or fourth draft. We're leapfrogging authors past the entire painful first-draft phase.

How Much Time Does a CEO Actually Need to Invest?

I had an author recently who asked me to just lay out the timeline so he could allocate resources properly. Fair question. Here's what it actually looks like.

The pre-work takes roughly a week. Three assignments: the Book North Star, a story gathering exercise, and the table of contents. Most of that gets generated for you after you fill out the onboarding form. But the table of contents is where we over-index. I tell authors to expect that phase to take more time than they think, because we're going to test it with their target readers before we record anything.

Then the recording sessions. If you come to Austin, it's two full days, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day with a break for lunch and walks. If you go remote, it's up to three hours at a time. After three hours, you start to fall apart, so remote tends to stretch across about two weeks broken up into sessions.

One of our authors just finished his second week of recordings. He'd gotten through five chapters in his first two sessions and told me the recordings felt really good. His book director was encouraging. He anticipated needing one more session to wrap the remaining chapters plus the intro and conclusion, so he's looking at maybe three weeks total of recording spread across his normal schedule.

After the recordings are done, the manuscript comes back fast. I could technically get it done in two hours after uploading. I don't, because I put it through quality controls first. But we're talking days, not weeks.

Can You Go at Your Own Pace?

Yes. You do not have to move fast.

I have authors in the program who are like, yeah, I'm going to take this slow. Enjoy the process. Do it at my own pace. They might not start recording for months. They just want the structure and the coaching first. Totally fine.

Others show up and say, I need this done yesterday. Also fine. The process works at whatever speed the author wants. But I designed it specifically for the people who can't afford to lose a year. The founders running a company who have maybe two to four hours a week to give this. The ones who've been thinking about a book for years and just need someone to pull it out of them.

One author told me flat out: this is so much better than anything I've seen before. He'd tried another publishing service that was structured poorly. He said he realized looking at his old work how badly structured it was, even though at the time he thought it was well-written. The structure we build before the recording sessions is what makes the difference. You show up knowing exactly what you're going to say. The book director just makes sure you don't miss anything.

What Happens After the First Draft?

Once you have the first draft, the rest is a four to five month process if you do it right. Line editing. Read-aloud edits. Beta readers. Cover design. Interior design. Proofreading. Proofs. (I wrote about what that full process looks like in detail.)

Can it be faster? Yes. I've gotten books on Amazon in a few days. I don't recommend it. Good things take time, and the book will outlive you. It makes sense to live with the manuscript for a while and really forge that sword before you release it.

But the key insight is this. The traditional process front-loads all the pain into the writing phase, which takes nine to twelve months and has a staggering failure rate. Our process collapses that phase into days or weeks, which means you can spend months on the part that actually matters: making the book great through editing and design. That's a completely different experience. You're not exhausted and defeated when you start editing. You're energized, because you have something real in your hands.

That's what I couldn't find anywhere else in publishing. And it's why we built this.

If you've been thinking about writing a book but can't afford to lose a year, let's talk about what the timeline could look like. Or see what a published book could generate for your business with our ROI calculator.