WE'RE GOING TO WRITE A BOOK IN 7 DAYS | DAY 1 OF THE 7 DAY BOOK CHALLENGE

Full video transcript

Welcome everybody to the September 7 Day Book Challenge. Real quick, an intro: back in January, Darby used Jarvis to write his first book with AI for his copywriting business, and that rolled into what’s now run as these seven-day book challenges on a monthly basis — this is around the ninth or tenth one. Every month a new group of people comes in to learn how to use Jarvis to write their books, and the team keeps adding resources as they develop them, especially recipes, templates, worksheets, and these live calls, which are designed to address roadblocks and to connect on what everyone is writing and how the team can support them further.

Zechariah runs a company called The Book Patch with his dad, Victor Ostrovsky — a self-publishing website where people upload, print, and publish their books. He joined as a partner a few years ago and, with an extensive entrepreneurial background, has since helped publish over a hundred thousand titles, giving him a close view of what sells, what flops, and what actually goes into making a book successful. When Darby started this challenge, Zechariah — a friend from the same circle — saw that Darby had written his book with AI and recognized the core problem in self-publishing: a lot of people start writing a book and never click publish. Thousands of people upload manuscripts to The Book Patch and never finish printing or publishing them, even though roughly 90 percent of people say writing a book is on their bucket list. The challenge exists to close that gap, and the team spends significant time on customer avatar, “why,” market research, and finding the writer’s voice to make the process easier.

For many participants this is their first time writing a book, and it’s a big undertaking even without a seven-day deadline. But the hosts find that the constraint of a hard seven-day window is exactly what makes it doable — chunking the manuscript down piece by piece, expanding an outline into 20,000–25,000 words. This also works well for nonfiction built from existing content, such as breaking down a podcast transcript into a book.

Participants then introduced their projects. Ryan, a licensed realtor in northwest Arkansas with a background in marketing and finance, is writing a personal-finance book aimed at people — like his own parents — who were never taught basic financial literacy, covering mindset, habits, budgeting, and retirement, with a real-estate angle around building equity by moving from renting to owning rather than chasing the biggest loan available.

Russ described his first book as more of a mind-dump of life experience. With a background in financial planning and counseling and a career running community banks and a trust company, he became concerned about a broader decline in people’s ability to think clearly, especially during the pandemic and political turmoil of the previous 18 months. His wife encouraged him to do something about it, so the book adapts business strategic-planning steps into a simplified framework for individuals and families, aimed primarily at people in their 20s and 30s, without a strong emphasis on sales numbers.

Allison, a practicing attorney, originally planned to write a book for a specific client but decided instead to write for other attorneys, to help them build happier lives in a profession she feels isolates people and equates success with something other than happiness. She had an outline in progress but wanted to include stories from other attorneys, which risked making the project larger than a seven-day book — the hosts suggested finding an accountability buddy to keep the scope manageable.

Mike, who recently sold part of his consulting business after growing frustrated watching clients he coached still fail despite his guidance, is building a step-by-step, exercise-based book from roughly four to six weeks of foundational sales-growth-strategy work he’s repeated with startup and early-stage software clients over the past six years — described as moving from being a personal trainer to running a gym: giving readers everything they need, without personally holding them accountable to use it.

Chris, a digital marketer who started his own company during the pandemic, is writing about overcoming addiction and moving from “poor man to businessman,” built around eight principles of self-mastery.

The hosts then walked through the challenge framework: a “why” exercise drawn from a Tony Robbins-trainer interview, four pillar worksheets (know your why, set your goals, find your companion, size up your dragon by researching competing books in your niche), and outline processes turned into downloadable Jarvis recipes, including the hero’s-journey and problem-solving outlines. The single biggest roadblock they see is writers not getting their outline down on paper first — it doesn’t need to be perfect out of the gate. One early student sat on his outline for five to seven years before finally dumping it out in a dedicated hour and refining afterward.

Reviewing the schedule again: Day 1 covers pre-challenge material and today’s goal-setting; Day 2 is live outline expansion; Day 3 covers editing and crafting an introduction; Day 4 brings in guest John Livesay, with the push to reach about 5,000 structured words by breaking a chapter into personal story, three supporting points, and a conclusion or hook into the next chapter; Day 5 features interviews on persuasive marketing (a guest credited with over four billion dollars in product sales from clients including GoPro, OxiClean, and Samsung) and on book-cover design (a designer featured in the Louvre and MoMA, also author of the bestseller “F*ck Perfection”); the weekend (Days 6–7) is lighter on content so writers can focus on finishing their manuscript, which typically lands between about 15,000 and 30,000-plus words (some students bring in 50,000–60,000 words and have to trim); and Day 8 is a celebration and discussion of next steps like launch or advanced-reader strategies. The Book Patch also offers a 3D book-cover mockup service once a cover is finished.

On formatting: a 21,000-word manuscript at 12-point font in a six-by-nine trim runs about 100 pages; five-by-eight and six-by-nine are the most common nonfiction sizes, though workbook-style books (referencing Alex Hormozi’s “$100M Offers,” which follows the same outline process taught in the challenge) can be sized differently. The hosts discussed using worksheets and companion resources — gated behind an opt-in, similar to Donald Miller’s StoryBrand model — as both reader value and a lead-generation mechanism, with the book itself serving as a low-friction “executive briefing” that leads into higher-ticket coaching or done-with-you offers, since The Book Patch doesn’t offer a done-for-you ghostwriting model.

One participant raised a concern about writing in a format (a sales-focused workbook) that he couldn’t find close comparables for in the market, wondering if the absence of competitors signaled opportunity or a bad idea; the hosts reframed it around the book’s actual purpose — lead generation into a larger engagement — rather than book sales alone.

On the most common mistake: writers who edit while they write tend to lose time and momentum, whittling a chapter down and re-editing it repeatedly instead of getting the full draft out first and refining later. The hosts described a student who, five days into the challenge, scrapped an entire manuscript she’d been trying to turn into an ambitious bestseller, then rewrote and published a leaner 15,000–20,000-word edition in under 48 hours once she reframed it as a direct, no-fluff training tool for her sales team and prospective clients — a reminder that the book doesn’t need to be a definitive, once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece to be useful. The session closed with the hosts using the term “minimum viable book”: write only what’s needed to deliver value to the intended reader, publish it, and expand or revise later if needed.