How to Write a Book in 7 Days with AI

How to Write a Book in 7 Days with AI

Want to write a book? Struggle with writer's block? Curse of the Blinking Cursor or just don't know where to start? You came to the right place.

‍The 7 Day Book Challenge is a proven framework that teaches you how to write a book in just seven days. The challenge is designed for writers who want to write a book but don't know where to start (I will show you the entire book writing process), or for people who want to fight writer's block and those who have an idea for a book but don't know how to turn it into a finished product.

This is also for people who wants to explore different writing style and develop good writing habits. This article takes you step-by-step through the entire process, from coming up with an idea, walking you through the editing process, to getting your finished manuscript published.

We hope you'll join us in taking this challenge with the resources available to your to make your writing aspirations a reality. The challenge is self-paced, so you can study at your own speed, but we recommend that you devote at least two hours each day to writing during the Challenge if you are serious about getting your book out of your head and on to paper in one week.

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The first pioneering book written with Jasper was authored by yours truly in January 2021. Since then, thousands of people have been using Jasper to smash through writer’s block and accelerate their journey to publication. I’ve teamed up with my publishing partner Zachariah Stratford, who has helped publish over 100,000 titles, to form our company The AI Author.

The framework below makes up The 7 Day Book Challenge, a process that hundreds of students have gone through in live settings with Zachariah and me to produce spectacular results.

The challenge is simple: for one week, you will commit to writing your book for just 30-60 minutes per day. Writing time doesn’t have to happen all at once–in fact, it’s better if you break it up into manageable chunks throughout the day. The goal is to make consistent progress, not to write the entire book in one sitting!

I’ve found that the vast majority of people who want to write a book have jobs, families, and other important commitments that make it difficult to find large blocks of time to sit down and write. Book writing takes time, and if you want to write a great book, you need to be prepared to commit several hours each week.

But what if you don’t have several hours each week to devote to writing? What if you only have 30-60 minutes per day?

The good 30-60 minute per day approach is designed to be sustainable over the long haul so that you can actually finish your book and see it through to publication.

If you have more time some days and less time on others, that’s perfectly fine. Just try to stick to a minimum of 30 minutes per day and you’ll be well on your way.

To help you make the most of your time, I’ve created a simple but effective daily routine that you can follow during the challenge.

The 7-Day Book Challenge Overview / Start Here

Over the next week, new writers will go from a blank page to a complete Minimum Viable Book (MVB). It doesn’t need to be your “Magna Carta”. It doesn’t need to be perfect. What it needs to be is finished and from there you will have a strong foundation on which to build increasingly better iterations until you reach your final product.

The goal is to get words on the page and to gain a better understanding of the writing process so that you can finish your book once and for all. Writer's block, self-doubt, and distractions will try to stop you along the way but if you stick to the process, I guarantee you will make incredible progress.

This challenge will also give you a chance to “work out loud” and receive feedback and support from other writers who are going through the process with you.

Ready? It’s time you let your creativity flow and get to work! Begin writing!

Day 1: Preparation

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You’re at the starting line. While the Challenge’s goal is to produce a finished manuscript, the real genius of it is its repeatability. Once you have finished the first week of work, then you can begin the process again from the top. Each time you reach the week’s conclusion, you will be left with a stronger representation of your book’s concept realized in tangible form.

There are a few things you should do on Day One in order to set yourself up for success. For the first day, however, you need to start with some preparations. These include:

• Time blocking
• Find your accountability partner
• Post about your journey on social media
• Complete the 4 Core Worksheets:
• Know Your “Why”
• Setting Your Goals
• Ideal Customer Avatar
• Finding Your Spine & Content Brief

Time Blocking

Scheduled maintenance comes first. You are a busy person. This entire Challenge is dead in the water if you can’t carve out the necessary time to meet its demands. Set aside time, create a writing space, keep yourself focused, plan ahead, and go for it! 

Find Your Accountability Partner

Even if you’re going at this alone, you can’t do it alone. Your accountability partner may not have to be a writer or in your line of work, but they can still provide the necessary support needed to keep you on task, moving forward, and writing books. If nothing else, they can be the first people to give you some killer feedback.

You are not alone. This is a community challenge, which means that we’re all in this together. By posting about your journey on social media, you can reach out to others for support and encouragement, as well as offer the same in return. You may even find some new writing friends along the way.

Post About Your Journey on Social Media

Social media is one of the biggest outlets for your writing career. Not only does it give you presence, but it also makes you accountable to yourself. No one who starts a public journey wants to end up dropping out halfway through. It gets people involved, gives you some good talking points, and hypes up the work you’re doing to a larger audience.

Complete the 4 Core Worksheets (Workbook)

We’ve got some practical worksheets to establish your project foundations. While you hit roadblocks, what you put down on these sheets helps refine your vision, putting the project back in perspective and giving you the boost you need to power on through to the finish line.

Know Your Why (Worksheet)

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Why are you doing this? Who will benefit from this book? How will you grow as a result? Get philosophical if you need to, but every journey needs motivation that matters on a personal level. Find it.

Setting Your Goals (Worksheet)

Having a concrete idea of your goals will give you a ticket line to strive for. Are you looking for sales? To grow your brand? To change people’s lives? Whether your goals are pragmatic or metaphysical, giving yourself a reason to press on is important to keep things in perspective.

Ideal Customer Avatar (Worksheet)

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An ideal customer avatar is a description of a customer/client that is best suited for your business. It could be someone who spends a lot of money or is a penny-pincher, someone who buys your product or service repeatedly, or someone who actively promotes your business because they are sold on what you offer.

Your first step is to identify who that is – identify your target audience. Who’s going to be reading this book? How will they benefit from it? What will catch your reader's attention? Your core message will fall on deaf ears if you don’t have a clear vision of who you want to be receiving it. Ask these questions to help you develop your Ideal Customer Avatar:

• What’s my target audience’s basic profile?
• What are my ideal avatar’s goals and values?
• Where do my customers/clients primarily get their information?
• What are my customer avatar's challenges and pain points?
• What are my target audience's possible objections?

Pro tip: This is where the “The Hero’s Journey Outline” recipe shines! You can also use another recipe called "Big Ticket Customer Avatar" to take things a step deeper. Any way you approach this exercise, do not skip it.

Finding Your Spine

Why are you the best person to write this book? What makes you the most qualified professional for the job? The answers collected from the “Know Your Why” section can be applied here, so long as you create a solid backbone for your work ethic. Feel free to list qualifications and experiences, but you will need to answer three questions:

• Who is my book helping?
• What will my reader achieve?
• How does this book help them achieve that?

You’ll have a good starting point once you’ve identified these answers and can now hit your stride on the first day.

Day 2: Research & Outline

Congrats! You made it through the first day! Preparation is vital to project success, but from here on out is where the real work begins. Actively fleshing out your book and understanding where it takes its audience starts with its structure, plotting out its progression, and knowing what concepts it focuses on.

Research

This portion will not be for fact-checking alone, though you’ll certainly want to have your ducks in a row when it comes to quality content. The focus here is to make certain that your book will have the proper structure, as well as validation to ensure your book will be hitting the right markets with SEO-friendly chapter titles and subtitles.

Outline

The basic beat of any good book structure follows a reliable framework method that is developed over time. All the best-selling books use them. Without a strong outline, your book simply cannot easily hold water. Fundamentally, your outline keeps your book’s goal in mind, defining how each chapter leads the reader through its content to seamlessly arrive at the desired outcome.

Check out the selection of outline formats to work from. Some of our preferred frameworks include:

The Non-Fiction Book Problem Solving Outline Recipe

Since writing nonfiction books share facts or real-life events, they are great tools for making real-world connections to build on children's knowledge and personal experiences. This also means that you can use nonfiction books to further enhance people's experiences and interests.

‍The Hero’s Journey Outline Recipe

Without direction, a clearly defined goal, and problems to solve that keep your readers engaged, your book will lack the impact you are looking for. Solving that issue preemptively begins with solid planning and a good outline. and know the best book idea for new writers.

Once you've developed a solid outline, apply the outline to each chapter to build out your book's structure. After this, to keep things organized, you'll want to create a separate document inside of your project folder for each chapter so you can stay focused and bounce between chapters effortlessly.

Please note that while going through this process, you'll want to create individual “Content Briefs” for each chapter. This is another reason that organizing them in separate documents will be helpful. Since each chapter of a non-fiction book should be self-contained, you'll be able to quickly switch back and forth between chapters without needing to re-type content into the brief –- this will save you a lot of time in the short and long run.

You can also use Templates inside of Jasper for all areas of your book. For example, you can use the 'Blog Post Outline' Template to help brainstorm your book outline or chapter outlines. Or use 'Creative Story' to add some character to your writing and bring your story to life.

Another example, since you'll want to sell your book once it's written, is to use Jon Benson's "Mini-VSL" Template to create a compelling video script to sell your book, or as a base for creating book blurbs!

Format

While perhaps not as vital to the creation of your book, taking care of formatting now saves heartache down the line. It is your choice whether you want to handle the formatting entirely on your own, use paid or free software, or hire a professional to do it for you. So long as pain points are addressed and mitigated in advance, your progress should not be weighed down by formatting issues at the wrong time.

Day 3: Write, Write, Write!

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Finally, it’s time to put words to paper, (or screen, as the case may be)! Actual writing begins! This will be your first full day of cranking out text as fast as your brain and Jasper will enable. For practical goals, your benchmark is around 5000 words reached before the day ends. Try to have a daily word count goal (target word count). That’s a lot to work… which is why it is critical to keep one very important thing in mind: Do. Not. Edit.

No editing. Period. Editing while writing is where authors get slowed down the most during the Challenge. This is a step-by-step process. Finish writing! If you stop every you notice a typo, clear up a line, add punctuation, or any other form of editing, you are pumping the brakes on project momentum. Once you’ve started writing, keep that train moving until you hit the 5000-word mark. Editing will come later. The words themselves – no matter how messing or imperfect – come first.

What is currently swimming around in your head has to come out, one way or another. It’s not uncommon to hit your first real writer’s block at this point. That’s to be expected. Take advantage of Jasper to clear the road ahead by letting him simplify the text, edit a bit (he doesn’t get tripped up with editing as you do), and expand on topics.

You can even use voice-to-text tools, like Otter ai or Descript apps, to keep the ball rolling.. Speaking your book out loud often breaks down the mental blockades keeping your story down. Verbalizing your most valuable points up front can liberate your thinking. All those important points can later be uploaded, picked through, and pasted into Jasper’s “Long-Form Editor” to help you identify those nuggets of creative gold.

Other tools, such as Copyscape and Grammarly, integrate well with your writing to ensure everything is grammatically sound and wholly original. Both these apps integrate inside the Jasper app making tapping into them a piece of cake.

Day 4: Write, Write, Refine!

More writing! It should come as no shock that now there’s a new stipulation. At this point, you are still getting the bulk of your manuscript out of your head. With that goal of 5000 words from yesterday fresh in your mind, you get a new goal for the day: 5000 words. Today, however, refinement comes into play.

You will be working towards making your content accessible, digestible, and legible. You are not in the editing phase yet, but your mindset should take into consideration how to make improvements in the midst of your writing sessions.

Don’t forget to make full use of the tools at your disposal. Jasper provides inspiration where you need it. It acts as a micro-editor to resolve sentence structure, simplify your content to avoid complex syntax, and as a content generator to add some meat to your work. Jasper is a fantastic writer’s assistant built right into your computer. The main reason The 7 Day Book Challenge is even possible is that participants can accomplish so much without burning out. 

Day 5: Write, Refine, Edit!

As you can tell, you’re reaching the end of the word vomit part of the journey. Having text on the page is so much more important than the overall quality of it at the moment. Day 5 is where you’ll start being able to mold your text into the image you’ve captured in your mind.

Keep focus, zero in on your goals, and keep the forward momentum going! With two full days of writing at your back, the train should be nigh unstoppable at this point!

Writing is still the focal point of the process, but as you’re nearing the end of the bulk writing block, you can start taking a few liberties when it comes to refinement and editing. Pepper in some editing practices, and use your refinement techniques to spruce up your writing without compromising your momentum.

Once the day has closed, you should be able to proudly hold up the first draft of your manuscript. That’s the goal and it’ll be an enormous relief once you hit it. 

Obviously, you should be making full use of all you’ve learned up to this point. The hardest part, besides keeping focused, is making sure you are keeping things valuable. You’ll feel the temptation to start rattling off just to fill up space with fluff, and that does no one any favors.

Your readers expect to pull value from your book, so if they have to wade through an entire chapter of drivel, nonsense, and jargon, it immediately lowers the impact of your core message.

Be aware of your audience. Think about how your book speaks to them. Most of all… do what feels right. This is still your baby and while Jasper provides incredible support, everything that’s been written has come from your passion, drive, and creativity. With day 5 closed, you’ve finished the model and done some touch-ups, but in the next couple of days, your final product will come to life.

Day 6: Edit, Refine, Design!

Would you look at that? No more writing! The hardest parts are behind you and the conclusion is in sight. Now that you have finally got the book onto the pager, the next step is, well, tricky. Now you have to somehow transform what you have written into a better version of itself. You have all day to do this! Now,  a lot of people have trouble cutting into their darlings, but it’s time to trim some fat.

With your entire manuscript laid out before you, you can focus all your energy on editing and refining its content to reflect its final form. It still won’t be perfect, but it’ll be a heck of a lot prettier than it was at the start. Things should look good, flow well, and be readable without excess writing weighing down the book as a whole.

Now let’s talk about design. You shouldn’t expect to be a graphic designer - unless, of course, you are one, in which case this section is a cinch. You just need to create a working concept. Keep it simple. Make it complex. Whatever your approach, you just need a mock cover to get your formatting in order.

In the end, you will have pulled your MVB together and will have something presentable. For this stage, we recommend using Google Docs. Not because it’s good, not because it's free, but because it’s simply the easiest option.

If worst comes to worst, you can even skip the design portion. Your manuscript just needs to be presentable and taking a crack at the design is icing on the cake. Keep it simple. Don’t reach for super complex designs that overreach your skill set. You’ll have time later to really build a compelling book design… or you can hire someone to do it for you.

Day 7: Click “Publish”

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Take a moment to pat yourself on the back. You did it! In just one week you’ve made it to the end of the Challenge. You have a manuscript! Reflect on where you’ve come from, how far you’ve gone, and how Jasper accelerated the writing process in ways you never thought possible. Your book is real! It’s done! That, by itself, is one of the most fulfilling accomplishments to which anyone can lay claim.

If you like, take a last brush-through of your book, Make editing choices and refine word selection. For the most part, though, you don’t need to worry about that anymore. The next step is to let your Advanced Readers and editors read it. As scary as it sounds, they are going to tell you everything wrong with it. And that is AWESOME! Feedback is the most valuable part of the process. Feedback from the Advanced Readers community will give you valuable insights…  what works, what doesn’t work, and how it can be made better. 

With that kind of feedback, you can confidently make your final edits. Then you create a book blurb and write an author bio. At this point, you need that cover design in order, and then… the moment of truth. It’s time to upload your book!

Self-publication is more accessible today than at any other point in human history. Options like Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) are the most prolific, but other choices available may be more up your alley. You can Google ‘Self-publishing platforms’ or ‘print a book’ to find viable alternatives perfect for printing out the first edition of your new book. The publishing process is not as difficult as you may think it is. So sit back and relax!

Conclusion

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Take a breath. You did it! You have now finished your own book. After a week of hard work, effort, and maybe a few tears, it has paid off big time. Now you can say, loud and proud, that you are a published author! That book that has been gnawing at your brain for years has made it out into the real world, all with the help of Jasper AI. 

You are now officially a pioneer in a new field of writing! You have used artificial intelligence (book writing software) to accelerate the writing process in ways never before thought possible.

During the process, you were led to the right direction.The journey you had with fellow writers was a phenomenon. That is no small accomplishment. You have the right to be proud. Know that we are certainly proud of you!

So what next?

Maybe there’s another book that’s itching to get out. Maybe you want to give another crack at the one you’ve already written, and expand on it with new thoughts, concepts, and direction. Will you broaden the outreach of your book? Make a podcast, go on tour, expand your brand? Where can you grow from here?

Ask yourself “Why?” again. The goals for this project might have been reached, but you might have found some new goals along the way. This was more than just a finish line, more than just a first completed book. It’s the start of a new career path, the dawn of a new version of yourself as a professional and individual. It’s in your grasp. All that needs doing is for you to reach out and take it.

And of course, the byproduct of this Challenge is not only getting a book written... but leveling up your AI writing skills with Jasper so you can create all sort of content 10x faster! If you aren't already using Jasper, sign-up and get 10,000 free credits to get started today - good luck!