The 24 Hour Book Challenge

A couple of weeks ago I sat down with an idea in my head. I wanted to see if I could complete a book in less than 12 hours! Spoiler alert! I did! This is how I achieved it.
I had thought to myself for a couple of months about how neat it would be to write a book of haiku about the workplace. Last week I wrote up a simple haiku and submitted it to a poetry contest.

The Submitted Haiku:
The printer is Jammed
The man grows richer through me
My coffee is cold
I submitted my haiku and decided why not write a few more. I was about 10 haiku deep when I figured I’d try to publish a book in less than 12 hours.

My most important of the steps was out of the way. That step was to have a clear idea of what I wanted to write. In this case, it was going to be a series of haiku following an office worker throughout his day. Traditionally haiku are about nature and pretty peaceful. My take on the haiku was going to follow the nature of office work and how things get completed.

I sit still for about 3.5 hours with a couple of little breaks in between and wrote around 70 haiku. I found this awesome website (How Many Syllables). On How Many Syllables you can copy and paste your haiku into the syllable box. It will give you the number of syllables in each line on the left of your words. This was invaluable while putting my poems together! You would be surprised how hard syllables can be when you have to check yourself on a whole book.

I found myself a quick editor in my girlfriend. She graciously read over the entire document in a few minutes. It wasn’t a terribly hard document to read. I’m pretty sure it ended up coming somewhere under a thousand words so it was a quick edit. Years ago I had a media production professor who use to say “good enough for government work.” and that’s exactly how I felt about this project.

After editing I moved to the layout. I was a little rusty on Adobe InDesign. But I figured out the dimensions of the book that I wanted and set my paper size where it needed to be. Poem by poem I transferred the contents of my Word document to InDesign. That was around another hour.

Next came the cover. To publish this book in less than 12 hours I was going to have to be smart about the cover design. I thought for a few minutes about what it should be and I came up with a desk. Every office worker has a desk. So I went and found some free stock photos found the one I wanted. I then took the photo into photoshop and added a few filters such as watercolor and that sort of thing. It made it look more like a cover. I added my title “American Paper Pusher” put my name on the front cover and added a short book blurb to the back cover.

I Transferred everything to PDF and took it straight to Amazon KDP. I went through the steps Amazon requires. I got myself an ISBN through amazon. I had to go add it to my book because for some reason I always forget to do that before I render my PDFs.

After doing some final tweaking to the margins I had my book uploaded to Amazon KDP. I had done my part to construct my book. Now it was in Amazon’s large hands. A few hours later I was amazed when I received an email saying my book had been approved! I received the email sometime around 1 AM and I had started my book about 2 PM. If you do the math that’s right at 11 hours!

I went from idea to Amazon in 11 hours! It’s amazing how fast the world moves now!

Be sure and check out “American Paper Pusher” on Amazon. Also, if anyone would be interested in an e-reader version let me know in the comments and I could produce one soon. Share some of your projects in the comments!