7-40 Challenge | Planning Week
A few days ago I wrote that posting my first piece of book promotion took five minutes. Then I tried to make the next ones and watched each one balloon to thirty.
Here’s what was actually happening: I was overproducing. Building stylized videos — my cover, my music, text timed to the beat — and agonizing over every frame. Thirty minutes of polish on a post nobody asked to be polished.
That’s not sustainable, and it’s not even the point.
The math is simple. If every post takes thirty minutes, I can make two before I’m worn out. If a post takes five, I can make ten and actually run the campaign I committed to. The only way to get to five minutes is to stop overproducing — and the only way to stop overproducing is to be authentic instead of polished.
A stylized AI video with music behind it takes time. It looks great. But it’s not the thing that builds an audience. What builds an audience is me, talking, saying something true about the book or the story or why I wrote it. No editing suite. No beat-matching. Just the actual thing I want to say, said plainly.
So here’s the new strategy. Most days, I film myself talking. Five minutes, one take, done. I know my material — I wrote the book, I know why it matters, I don’t need a script. The stylized music videos become a treat, not a habit. Twice a week, maybe, when I have the time to make them sing.
The hangup was never really about video. It was about wanting every piece to be impressive. And wanting every piece to be impressive is just perfectionism wearing a production budget.
The Bible pictures taught me this already. The posts I labored over don’t outperform the ones I dashed off. Sometimes the tired, “good enough” ones hit hardest. I keep relearning the same lesson: done and honest beats polished and late.
Five minutes. Say the true thing. Move on.
Check out the post for Phase Defiant here.
David Willis 