today I'm going to show you how to write a book with AI in 2024 while it may look like you can just write a book with the push of a button anyone who's actually worked with AI knows it's not that simple hello my name is Jason I'm the nerdy novelist and I made my first video on this channel in response to so many people out there making videos about how to write a book with AI and it was clear from an author who's written multiple books at this point and who has worked for the last couple of years at kindlepreneur which is one of the largest websites about writing and self-publishing your books it became very clear to me that most of these people that were making videos about how to write books with AI knew nothing about what they were talking about uh and had clearly never written a book in their life I have and so in this video I'm going to be giving you the step-by-step method to write a book whether it's fiction or non-fiction using Ai and then I will show you two different methods that I believe are the two best methods to actually get the pros out and onto the page now before we do that I want to answer the question should we even be using AI to write books now I know this is a controversial question for a lot of people but here's my take on it a lot of people view writing as a single thing that you do when in fact it is actually a multi-step process it involves thinking brainstorming it involves outlining it involves developing characters and developing your world it involves research it might even involve travel it involves of course the actual mechanical Act of typing the words out onto a page or writing them down by hand if that's more your style it involves multiple types of editing we have developmental editing we have line editing we have proof reading that's just the tip of the iceberg and that entire process is something that we call writing most people are not going to need to use AI for every single step of that process and in fact what I recommend is that you pick the area that you love the least and choose to learn how to use AI for that particular step of the process and for other areas that you love the most make sure those are the areas that you spend the most time on yourself what this is going to do is it's going to maximize the amount of creative pleasure that you get out of writing while also making it a little bit easier on yourself so you don't burn out which is what happened to me several years ago and which AI was able to help me with but that said I'm going to show you how you can use AI in almost every step of the process in this video so let's Dive In now I'm not going to talk too much about the tools that we're going to need but there is a video that you can check out at the end of this video to know what tools are the best tools for writing fiction however my general recommendation is that you have one tool that is specialized for the type of fiction or non-fiction that you want to use and then a specific chatbot to help with basically everything else the two most common chat Bots are Claude and chat GPT however you also can use other tools such as open router or po to access multiple different models within one service now generally when writing a book I recommend a prompting strategy called the fractal technique which is very similar to another strategy that existed long before AI called the snowflake technique and in that technique you basically start with a small idea and then you expand that idea into something larger and then you expand that into something larger etc etc etc until you have a fully fleshed out manuscript I'll give you an idea of what that looks like right now I'm going to use a random brainstorming prompt you don't have to use this particular one any kind of prompt to get your ideas flowing will do give me an idea for 10 news stories set within a 1920s New York setting that could be used as the basis for a hardboiled detective story and now it's going to give me 10 news stories for a 1920s New York hardboiled detective story socialite found murdered in her luxury apartment apartment on Park Avenue police suspect her jealous husband or lover a police a politician is caught up in a Speak Easy shooting he claims he was there trying to close it down but rumors swirl and so on and so on and then we get a whole bunch of these ideas and you might start piecing them together so let's say we want to do this one a reclusive millionaire art collector is killed when a precious painting is stolen from his Fifth Avenue mansion you now take this and say please flesh out number six into a full synopsis with a three act structure and that's a simple version of a synopsis prompt to get a full synopsis out of this and you can see how this goes right we take act one and expand that into a more Ser a larger series of chapters then we take chapter one and expand that into to a larger series of Beats and from the Beats we create our full Pros now there's a problem that happens at this stage and the problem is that we might take a look at this and it's a little too generic or it's lacking creativity or what have you and so one of the most important things that you need to do and one of the reasons why AI is not going to replace authors but is instead kind of a junior writing partner is that you have to spend a good amount of time validating these words and making sure that they are good and so I'll give you an example of what that looks like here so let's say we take this synopses here into Microsoft Word and we say Edmund Charles clarage III is a waspish eccentric millionaire who lives in a palacial yet gloomy Fifth Avenue Mansion stuffed with Priceless rare art which no one ever sees he keeps all visitors out and leaves the house only for occasional trips to obscure galleries to buy more precious paintings one morning CL clar's longtime Butler enters the lock study to find his life lifeless body slumped over his desk a decorative letter opener stuck in his back and an empty space on the wall where his newly purchased 2 million rembrand painting hung all right not a bad opening kind of generic though and so one of the things we might want to do is say like what are some more creative ways that we could make this better and you can just write that in right here or you can say please brainstorm five ways to make the o opening hook more creative and then you let Claude or chat gbt whichever chat bot you're using I give you a few ideas and from those ideas then you can then pick and choose oh that sounds good or that doesn't I you know whatever it is you want to do now the other thing you might be asking is what about non-fiction and with non-fiction the fractal technique works as well but it's going to be a little bit different with non-fiction you might start out with a simple idea of a message you want to share or something you want to educate people on and then you ask chat GPT for a number of ideas for chapters that you want to include inside of that book for non-fiction in particular you have to be careful about the actual accuracy of your text which is something you don't have to worry about too much for fiction because it's fictional but it can give you a really good rundown of possible chapter types that you want to have within the non-fiction book and then what you can do is within each chapter you then ask the AI to brainstorm and outline for that chapter and then from there you can go into actually writing the entire thing I'll open up another chat here in Claude to give you an example of what I mean so let's say I already have an idea for a non-fiction book I want to write and so all I would do is say please give me a list of we'll say 30 possible chapters for a book about dopamine fasting so we don't necessarily need to get to this synopsis stage we can kind of skip from idea to fully a fully fleshed out outline but then what we want to do is like with the synopsis for the fiction we want to go through these and make sure that they are actual actual topics that we want to write about I cannot stress enough you should not be writing non-fiction about topics that you are unfamiliar with and I know some of you are going to be saying well if you're already familiar with it what do you need AI for and the reason you need AI is because it is a productivity assistant not something that's doing the work for you it is assisting you and so it can give you ideas you look at these 30 chapter types and you say oh yeah these are all really great things to cover but maybe this chapter isn't really relevant or this chapter is kind of repeating itself from an earlier chapter and you just go through and pick and choose the chapters that you want and then sort of figure out in what order they should go and then let's say we're ready ready to write one of the chapters we let's say foods to avoid during a dopamine fast all right number seven let's say we're writing that chapter right now please give me a list of topics to cover in chapter 7 and since we're using the same chat it knows the context of what chapter 7 means and so it's able to give a very clear list of topics to cover so Define what foods foods are considered stimulating and should be avoided discuss avoiding processed foods high in sugar unhealthy fats and chemical additives explain why foods like cake candy soda and junk food should not be consumed talk about cutting out or limiting caffeine intake from coffee tea and energy drinks and so on and so forth and it does a really good job and if you're an expert in the field you'll be able to know like yes that's a good one no that's not a good one and you might be able to also add a few chances are going through this list will help you really understand what you should be doing it'll help you add some things that that you might have missed but it'll also prompt you to add a few extra things that you with your expertise already know and then from here you can say write the first 500 Words of this chapter if you want to do Pros however this is a rather inefficient way to create your pros and that brings me to the two methods that I believe are the best to actually write the pros for you let me reiterate that you don't have to use AI for this process but if you do I'm going to show you the two best ways to do so the first is writing it one section at a time the second is writing entire chapters all at once and there are pros and cons to each the writing chapters all at once requires often a little bit more advanced prompting which I am going to show you later so the first one let's talk about going step by step I'm going to use a tool called novel crafter which is specifically for fiction but you can find other tools that are similar for non-fiction out there or you can just use chat GPT to do this chat GPT is actually set up pretty well to run a similar situation to this for non-fiction but basically what we do is here in novel crafter we can add what's called a scene beat these are similar to these individual bullet points that we want to cover so you in this case we say Cinderella runs from the ball and forgets her slipper right and then we generate the pros in novel crafter you can generate you can pick which model you want to use I'm going to use Claude 2 and it starts writing this particular scene Cinderella bursts through the Grand doors of the palace Ballroom her heart pounded in her chest the Chimes of the tall grandfather clock at the top of the grand staircase began to ring out signaling the start of the Midnight Hour and so what you can do is you can just wait until this finishes generating so after it's finished generating you get you have a whole bunch of text and you can basically say Hey you know I obviously this part here is where it says here's a 900 word to continue ination of the story you can get rid of that and then you can edit this to your heart's content for instance in this particular version it it cuts halfway through and says back at the palace the prince wander wandered days through the thinning crowds let's say we don't want that part so we just get rid of that and we edit this up because AI typically is not great at natural sounding Pros Claude 2 does seem to be the best model for natural sounding Pros but it it's usually very over the top and requires a lot of editing so what you can do is you can go through edit this down to your heart's content and then put in the next scene beat and it'll pick up immediately from where you left off and the nice thing about doing it this way is that when you're doing the second scene beat it will look at your first scene beat especially if you're using a tool like novel crafter and it will see the style of your writing and then it will continue in a similar style it won't be exact but it will be much closer to something that you want which means that as you go each section will require less editing because you've already edited the last little bit and it can see what you did and understand that in a tool like chat GPT you can do this in a similar fashion where you just take give it a number of story beats and say write 500 Words of these story beats and then you can give it the next couple of story Beats and say write 500 Words of this and you just move one step at a time that way however it's a lot less inefficient in a tool in a chatbot like chat GPT or Claude really it's great to have a tool like novel crafter to really handle it for the specific situation that you're in so that is the step-by-step approach where you're kind of editing it as you go however there is another approach that I find to be maybe even a little bit more fun although somewhat less efficient and that is writing an entire chapter at once here's how you do that introducing this super prompt this is an example of a super prompt which is a in essence a very long prompt that you take and you stick into usually it's Claude 2. 0 it's the only one that can really handle this G the latest versions of chat GPT can also handle this however they tend to export a little bit less words so with Claud you could actually potentially get two or 3,000 words in one go whereas with chat GPT you might only get around 600 so it depends on your needs and what you specifically ask for but I'm going to be demonstrating this with Claude so this is an example of a fiction Pros super prompt I have instructions here that says using all of the information on chapter beats overview setting and characters write 50,000 words of a chapter with plenty of detail and deep point of view use the style to determine the pro style of the output follow the chapter beats exactly etc etc etc lots of instructions here and then here I have the style that I wanted to write in then I have a space to add characters and I have a space to add the setting and a space to add the overview and a space to add the chapter beats the way this works is I add information about the characters here I add information about the setting here I add information about the overview of the chapter here which is just a one small paragraph about the chapter and then I have the chapter beats which is the bulk of this whole thing I'll show you an example of what this looks like when it's all filled out this is an example of a chapter from my book Heirs of Drcula which I live streamed the entire thing you can go ahead and check it out on the channel but I have the instructions here I have the style here I have a list of characters here right and then the setting and the overview and then here's my list of chapter beats all of these were generated with the help of AI but not exclusively I did in fact these chapter beats I actually wrote myself so they were not written with the help of AI although sometimes I will ask AI for a specific section that I might be stuck on and so that all goes into here and then I take this super prompt and I go into Claud now one thing I should note is that Claude 2. 1 which is the most recent version of Claude does not do well with the super prompt and so I come all I always come here and go to clae 2 0 instead then I paste in the super prompt and hit go and then here it goes and it's giving me a full chapter using the prompt that I gave it now I in this case it's doing an odd Quirk where it adds paragraph numbers here it sometimes will do that and in fact one of the least precise things about the super prompt is that sometimes you do have to run it multiple times in order to get something usable and so some times you can actually spend like a good half hour just rerunning the prompt over and over again to get the right thing however you can in many cases get the entire chapter generated in one go however these days with tools like novel crafter I think this this method is a little bit less efficient because with novel crafter you're able to run the entire thing and you're able to do basically everything that a super prompt can do because over here in the Codex you can add characters so it knows about characters you can add locations for the setting there's all sorts of different things you can do to get the same effect but you're editing it as you go which means it's not going to get derailed as easily as it might here if you're using a super prompt however there is a non-fiction scenario where I do still use the super prompt and I love using it and that is for online articles and I'll show you an example of what that super prompt looks like so this is an example of a super prompt for an SEO informational article the instructions go I want you to write a 30,000 word informational article for your topic by the way the reason I say 30,000 words is because I really want it to stretch this only works with Cloud 2.
0 so if you're using this with a gp4 model or with Cloud 2. 1 you would need to put in a lower number that's more realistic but with CLA 2. 0 you can actually get some good results by telling it to get have massive amounts of words so an informational article about your topic here from a first- person perspective Ive use I when describing your feelings about the subject just to kind of make it a more personal article and yada y yada and then I have the style here and then I for an SEO article I like to make sure it has a list of keywords and I will instruct it to include the keywords one to four times depending and then we add the article outline and this is where I will actually go through and manually add all of the headings that I want the article to have and this is one step that I do entirely myself based on my own experience as an SEO writer because I know what really a good article outline should look like so I'll just stick that all in there and then I will give it examples of other articles that cover the same topic because we want to make sure that it has all of the background information that it needs to have and in case you're wondering about plagiarism I have never and I've tested this almost every time I've done it I have never found that the AI plagiarizes the other articles when you do this uh and believe me I have checked that's an example of an SEO article super prompt and you could do something very similar for a non-fiction book chapter so those are the two different ways to actually write Pros you can do it one step at a time where you're editing as you go or you can use a super prompt however the super prompt is p is pretty limited it can really only be used with Claude 2.
