The Eight-Hour Self-publishing Challenge

Can you go from blank page to published book in eight hours? Can you?

That’s the challenge raised by Joe Konrath in his blog post A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Guest Post by Tim Myers.

The article starts with a guest post about writing under pen names. The challenge is toward the bottom of the post, and starts out with this claim:

I wanted to see if it was possible to completely write, format, make my own cover art, and publish an ebook, in less than an hour. While drunk.

Well, I did it. Four times.

His beer-sodden books are clearly parody, with crappy covers and minimal content, but he obviously had fun with them, and amazingly enough are selling at $0.99 a pop! Only a handful of copies a week, but still –

$50 a month is $600 a year. In ten years, that’s $6000.

Have you ever made $6k in only four hours, drinking beer?

Realizing that not everyone has his background in writing and experimenting with self-publishing, he’s upped the time period to eight hours and issued this challenge:

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to write, edit, format, create your own cover, and publish an ebook in an eight hour period.

If you do that, I’ll do a blog featuring your ebook, so the whole world can learn what a speedy little creative dynamo you are.

You have until August 29th to get on his blog, so GO!