The Fast Book Handbook, I can hardly say it in American!
The Fast Book Handbook as I would say it - there is a really interesting story there, as well.
So.
Books, and the writing of books, is something that I have a personal passion for.
I did a bunch of kid's books with Random House, and then I started to some more of my business
books with Morgan James - the same publisher who published Jack Canfield for example.
And then I moved on to doing other ways, self-publishing ways always looking for that greatest efficiency.
And then along the way, I started working with my CEO clients in particular.
And they always had the same problem which is a lack of time.
They've got incredible mastery, usually way more than Malcolm Gladwell's ten thousands
hours that they have accrued over decades.
But that information and knowledge is usually stuck in their heads.
But I would only ever have hours with these people to actually get that knowledge and
information out and into some more scalable form, more useful form.
SO the Fast Book Handbook, the Fast Book process evolved out of necessity - as we were working
with these CEOs who had no time.
So it's very easily described.
The Fast Book process is about getting a book out of you from nothing to on sale and making
money in the course of ten working hours or less.
Which seems like an insane claim!
And yet that's what we had to do when we were working with CEOs because getting access to
their time was so difficult.
Now, not everyone takes ten hours and the ten hours don't happen one after the other.
So they might happen over the course of a couple of months as the process unfolds, as
different people do their different pieces.
But certainly that's the case.
In the book, we go through the process using one of my books as an example - the Google
Gamble - and how many hours and what the steps were and how that all worked.
The book of course is, as with all of my books, very practical.
It really does go through every step, all the tools that you're going to need, which
are not expensive.
You know - there's things that are five dollars at a time to do, you know, for example - designing
the covers.
Step by step, screen by screen, it really shows you how to do that and refers by QR
code and shortlink back to a series of videos that give you further detail.
Screenshots as we go through click by click, screen by screen and actually show you even
more detail than is in the book.
And those are available for free, online.
So, that's what the Fast Book process is about.
That's where it came from.
And why it even showed up!
Oh, and I should tell you one more little kicker to that story.
So - here I am, innocently doing books, and because we're doing this Fast Book process,
this is happening quite quickly.
So in 2013 we released - I think I did four books that year but three books happened in
a little bit of a hurry, they all came out kind of together.
And I didn't know about this, but this came to somebody's attention.
So - I'm off on holiday and I get this random email from this woman called Eileen, who I
figure is a stalker.
Because when you speak in public, you get stalkers from time to time.
A lovely email that said, you know, I'd like to talk to you about this book thing.
How did you do three books so swiftly?
So I got back through my assistant and we figured out she wasn't a stalker and she actually
runs a company called Blurb, out of San Francisco.
Which, she's like this all star entrepreneur and this is her seventh company.
And she's in 125 countries in a couple of years, I mean - just incredible growth!
Based on the idea of how can you profitably print a one copy of a book right, because
the old model was printing five and ten thousand at a time.
So, she's then, you know, hanging out stalking, and we publish using her platform and so she
saw these books sort of show up.
And got in touch.
And then when I explained how we did what we did, she said 'Well, you've got to come'.
So I jump on a plane, go to San Francisco and I speak at the Blurb University Day.
Where it became clear that this was really worth sharing.
So, you know, because of that motivation from Blurb - thank you, Eileen, actually my stalker
who found me, thank you Eileen, we actually wrote this down and made it into a book so
that we could share it with everyone.
What I thought was kind of a normal process turns out to be quite helpful for people who
want to get that book out of them whether it's fiction or non-fiction , doesn't matter.
If you want to get that out of you swiftly and inexpensively, and get yourself published,
on sale - or just do the book for yourself - it doesn't matter.
The technique works beautifully in all of those circumstances.