Full Beginners Guide to Writing Books With AI

Hello everyone and welcome to the Nerdy Novelist. I feel so grateful to be here with you right now because what you are about to see has never been done before in the YouTube space. This course has been in production for months now and I have spent literally thousands of dollars to put this in front of you. This course is several hours of content teaching you everything that I've learned over the last 3 years of doing YouTube on the topic of AI for creative writing.

Before that, I was the lead content manager for 3 years at Kindlepreneur, the leading online website for authors who want to write and self-publish their books. And before that, I wrote 14 books the traditional way. So, unlike a lot of tech bros on YouTube who have clearly never written a book in their life, I actually have experience with the process with and without AI. And I'm going to show you exactly how I would write with AI in a way that completely preserves your voice, your creativity, and quality storytelling, all while making the process far less likely to burn you out than the traditional method. And in this course, [music] I'm not holding anything back. I'm showing you my methods that have allowed me to write a book in as little as 4 days. And I'm not just talking about some random story that AI makes up. This was an actual story I had had in my head for years, finally envisioned in under a week.

I know it's hard to place value on something that you get for free, and that's why no one has done this before in my niche. Not only is this a full course explaining every part of the writing process, and I'm not just teaching you, I'm actually going through the entire process with you step-by-step. And I'll even show you how to get your book edited, formatted, and published. So, here is what you will learn in this course.

I'll show you the entire strategy I use to build a book from scratch, just like I did in 4 days. I'll walk you through the most important parts of AI writing, like how to maintain your voice and how to make sure the output is yours. Most people think that writing with AI is just slop, but that's really when you don't know what you're doing and don't put any effort into your work. The point of using AI is not to avoid work. It's to work smarter. And if you follow my instructions, your work will be of genuine quality, not AI slop. I also show you how we select a genre and optimize our book to ensure that readers are likely to want to read our book. And I'll also show you how we build our book bibles to ensure the AI has everything it needs to write an original book.

So, I hope you can see the amount of value that you're about to receive in this course. And I'll be real, a lot of you will go through this and not see the true value because you were able to just watch the video for free with no resistance. This is the exact reason why nobody is making free courses that are this in-depth. It is so easy for you to brush this off as not having much value because you didn't have to pay for it. But, I can genuinely promise you that every single person who goes through this course is going to have every piece of information that they need to write their first book, as well as their second book, or the third book, you name it. I'm serious. This course is a step-by-step blueprint to growing your author business, and we cover everything from mindset to final publishing. So, if you want to write a book quickly and effectively without sacrificing quality, there really is no better place you could be than inside this free course.

But, I will be completely real with you guys. This course has a lot of information. And if you follow it all the way through and follow every piece of advice, this will be a big challenge in your life. In module one, we're going to tackle the part most authors skip, and it's exactly why they burn out. We'll talk about the difference between chasing quick money versus mastering your craft, and I'll show you how my own write 14 books then crash and burn phase almost killed my writing career. You'll also see how focusing on the wrong metrics destroyed my motivation and how shifting my definition of success brought me back to writing with more clarity and less pressure. Then, we'll dig into abundance versus scarcity mindset for authors, and I'll give you concrete examples of how each one shows up in self-publishing. Things like the market is saturated, or if that author wins, I lose. From there, we'll zoom out and treat your writing as a real business. What it actually means to invest time and money into tools, education, and systems, and how those investments compound over years of publishing, and not just with one book launch. And yes, we'll address the elephant in the room, using AI without shame as a way to offload the parts of the business that drain you, so you can double down on what you genuinely love. By the end of this first module, you'll have a practical mindset framework for a storytelling driven business, one that keeps you out of burnout, gives you permission to use AI strategically, and positions you to build a long-term catalog instead of betting everything on one perfect book.

Module two is where we get tactical, and I give you a customized tool stack instead of a mess of random apps. You'll come out knowing exactly which tool is best if you are a total beginner, which option makes the most sense when you want to automate and scale like a power user, and which middle ground system gives you the most control without requiring you to be super technical. By the end of this module, you'll have a setup that matches your skill level and goals, and you'll know how to use it to support every other step in your writing and publishing process. And these are literally the exact tools that I use in my own author business and teach to my members.

By the end of module three, you'll never sit down to plot from scratch again. Instead, you'll have genre-specific story templates that turn vague ideas into clear, repeatable structures designed to sell. You'll know how to choose the right niche for a book idea, how to lock in the aspects that readers expect, and how to build a framework that prevents generic AI slot plots. The result is that every story you create after this module starts with a solid skeleton tailored to your genre, which makes everything else so much easier.

Module four gives you a repeatable brainstorming system that produces commercially viable story ideas instead of random concepts you're not sure anyone wants. You'll learn how to turn genre research into concrete plot hooks, as well as tropes and setting that align with real reader demand, and how to use that to generate story material that feels fresh, but still familiar enough to sell. By the end of this module, you'll have a complete story dossier filled with market-aware ideas, so that when you move forward, you have the best chance for success.

In module five, you'll discover the ability to create characters and worlds that readers genuinely remember and talk about. You'll come away with a clear process for turning rough character sketches into multi-layered people with goals and flaws and arcs, and for building settings that feel lived in instead of just broad and generic. You'll end up with a cast in a world that naturally generate conflict, making your plot more engaging and your book far more likely to turn casual readers into dedicated fans.

Module six gives you a flexible blueprint for your book, a clear beginning, middle, and end, plus key turning points and subplots, all aligned with your genre templates from earlier. The outcome is that you always know what happens next when you sit down to write without feeling locked into a rigid plan, so that you reduce writer's block and keep your story on track.

By the end of module seven, you'll have a streamlined approach to drafting chapters that balance speed with quality. You'll know how to break your book into manageable chunks, how to use AI to accelerate the drafting, and how to keep your voice and intent intact throughout the entire process. Because of this, the actual prose will become the fastest and most predictable part of your workflow, something that you can do consistently.

Module eight turns editing from a vague make-it-better phase into a clear step-by-step upgrade path for your manuscript. You'll learn how to spot and fix the most common issues introduced by AI-assisted writing, and you'll learn how to tighten your prose, you'll learn how to all of the different layers of editing to polish that book, and you'll get a practical editing routine that you can repeat for each project that saves you a whole lot of both money and time.

In module nine, you'll end up with a finished book that looks like it belongs on the shelf next to your favorite authors, and not in some sort of homemade experiment category. You'll understand what makes a cover actually sell, how to ensure your cover matches your genre's visual language, and how to format your book so it's easy and enjoyable to read in both ebook and print. The result is a package that converts, aka more trust from readers who are seeing you for the first time.

And finally, by the end of module 10, the last module in this course, you'll know how to get your book out into the real world with a strategy that matches where you are in your career. You'll learn the pros and cons of sticking with the biggest retailers versus going wide, what exclusivity really means for your income, and when it makes sense to move into more advanced options like selling direct from your own store. I'll also show you exactly what to do to publish that first book and get the finished version in your hands.

So, that's what makes up this course, and there will be chapters so you can go through this course at your own pace and skip the ones that aren't relevant to you. But, I want to quickly talk about how you can get more direct access to me through my school community if you are interested. If you want someone to hold your hand through the entire process, we hold weekly coaching calls to do just that. The membership also comes with a full step-by-step guide to write your book, and we just recently launched Story Hacker OS, which is our own proprietary AI software that is tailored to our methods and workflows so that you can write far more efficiently than you could even with the other tools that I'll be showing you today. But, most importantly, this is a place where you can be with the other authors, people who are on the same path as you, trying to write their books, and people who share your common interests, and people who understand how isolating the writing process can be, and want to form genuine connections with other creators and grow together.

I can speak firsthand, when I was starting publishing in 2018, it was just me in my room typing for hours and hours until I eventually burned out. None of my friends understood what I was doing, and often times I would get up at 4:00 a.m. just to get an hour of writing in while still working my day job, which naturally killed my evening social life. So, not only is this school community a place where you have direct access to me and my team to ask specific questions about your book and make sure you're on the correct path, but it's also a place where you can meet other authors that understand you. And that's what this community was built for. But, I'm going to leave things there, and if you're interested in getting a one-on-one connection with me and a community of like-minded people, then you can learn more through the first link in this video's description.

I hope it becomes evident as you watch this course that you can feel my intentions for making this for you. Seven years ago, I burned out hard when trying to go through the traditional writing and self-publishing process. In a few years, I wrote 14 books, but at a huge cost. Discovering the technology and the techniques that I'm going to show you in this course is what got me out of creative burnout and enjoying the writing process again. And that is what I want for all of you, whether you're just getting started or you're an experienced author already. If I had this information when I first started, then I would be way further ahead than I currently am and would never have burned out in the first place. And the results are already showing. For example, this person is now making multiple five figures a month from their books. And this person even got a huge promotion just from the technical advancements that they gained by learning in my community. And we have literally hundreds of authors so far who have already completed a full book in a month, one that matches their vision and avoids burnout. Understanding how AI can integrate with your human creativity is the biggest advantage that any creator can have, and I feel blessed that I'm able to share my knowledge with you. With that said, I want to thank you for this opportunity again, and it's time to take you through the first steps into this program. Once you complete this full video, follow the first link in the description below, and I will see you inside. Now, let's get in to module one.

For this first module, we absolutely must talk about mindset. And yeah, I know, I can hear you rolling your eyes right now, but hear me out because this is absolutely the difference between those authors who succeed and those who fail. You can skip any of the modules in this full course, but do not skip this one. It is probably the most important one.

Now, when I was first getting into writing and self-publishing, I was not in a good place financially. I lived in central Maryland, which is one of the worst places to live if you're trying to save money. And my salary was barely able to support a teeny tiny studio apartment above a friend's garage where I lived with my wife and my first daughter when she was born. So, when I tell you I was motivated to make this work, I really was. I started to hustle and I started to grind and over the course of about 2 years, I wrote 14 books. And this wasn't with AI, this was the traditional way. And my first book series actually did pretty well. I made a thousand in my first month and I was really encouraged after the rest of that series went out. So, I started making fairly consistent sales, but I, like many of the people in self-publishing at that time, knew that self-publishing was a numbers game. You had to get up a backlog in order to make a lot of money with books. Not just because every book provides an additional opportunity to make money, but because you also improve a lot as a writer every book you produce. So, once I finished my first series, which was eight books long, I started on my second. By that time, I had started working on the third book in that series, I released the first two and crickets. It did nothing. I even spent a thousand dollars and only received five hundred dollars in sales. And I had to take out a loan for that thousand dollars in the first place. I was absolutely devastated and this whole process ended up killing all motivation that I had to write for years to come, becoming the worst case of burnout that I have ever had. And I was so sure that this one was going to work. Everything I had learned from writing my first series, I was going to put it into the second and when it just didn't work, it drew everything out of me.

Now, thankfully, there was a light at the end of the tunnel because I later went on to work for 3 years at Kindlepreneur and all of that study of self-publishing and writing had eventually worked in my favor to make me the perfect candidate for that job. But, I still found it incredibly difficult to write. And to be honest, I wasn't a big fan of the writing process, either. It didn't feel like it the creative part to me. In fact, there are many authors that say the same thing. They will say that the creative part is more in the planning and the outlining in the editing process where you shape it into something truly good. You've probably heard the term writing is rewriting which was coined by Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park. Now, I myself found a lot more joy in the outlining process and coming up with the worlds. [music] That to me was the creative part that led to that coveted flow state that I craved so much. And I never stopped doing that even when I was burnt out shaping these worlds and enjoying that that part of it. The only thing I stopped doing was the actual butt in chair, hands on keyboard, mechanical typing part of it.

So, there are two main lessons that I got from this experience that I want to share with you today regarding mindset. The first is that you need to be focused on the right things. The main reason I burnt out is because I was focused on money. Had I instead been focusing on improving my craft or flushing out my worlds, perhaps I would have felt differently about the whole ordeal because those factors were more in my control. The fact that I was focused on money which is outside my control, at least outside my direct control, that meant my feelings of accomplishment were contingent on an external factor. So, as we go into this course, I recommend not focusing so much on the money. Money is definitely important, but I would go into this assuming that you're not going to make money for a while until you've truly mastered the craft and until you have a lot of high rated books out. And it can take some time to get there and you will need to be willing to do this. And I say this not just as an AI writer, but as a writer in general, it's going to take time. The chances of a one-hit wonder are almost zero. Now, the people who succeed at this have been doing it for a long time. That means you need to do this as well. Even if you're using AI, there is a lot you need to learn about craft and story and structure and character arts, you name it. So, if you focus instead on becoming a master storyteller, then every time you craft a story, you are going to be succeeding in that goal. Whereas if you focus on the the there is a good chance that you won't be succeeding on that goal for potentially years to come. And there's no faster path to burnout than not succeeding at what you perceive to be success. All you have to do is redefine your definition of success and you can avoid burnout.

The second lesson I want to share that I got from my burnout experience is this. Focus more on those things that light you up. In any small business, you are going to have to do some things that you find unpleasant and that's just part of it. But the more of these things that you can eliminate or outsource to other people the better. And AI has made this so much easier since its explosion onto the landscape. I know some writing purists are going to get really mad to hear me say this, but I don't and never really did like the actual writing process. [music] And I mean the butt-in-chair typing on the keyboard part of the creative process. And writing, especially creative writing, is a lot more than just one step. It includes, but is not limited to, brainstorming, character development, plotting, outlining, research, and staring at a blank window, working with a developmental editor, working with a line editor, working with a proofreader, getting your book cover designed, understanding genre and markets, understanding tropes and what readers actually want, learning to market your books, which yes, is a creative process in its own way. And there could be many more specific to the type of books you want to write. For instance, because a lot of my books are set in Arthurian England, I've had a blast just researching that era and all of the different myths and legends associated with it. My point is, writing is a multi-step process. And if we want to consider this like a business, we absolutely must focus on those things that interest us the most or that we are the most skilled at so that we can spend as much time doing those things as possible. Everything else, we should find ways to lessen the amount of work we have to do in whatever way we can, whether that's eliminating it entirely, sometimes there are things we just don't need that maybe we thought we did, or outsourcing it to another person, or outsourcing it to AI. For this course, I will be showing you how to use AI at practically every step of the process, but you definitely do not have to use it for every step. Instead, use it for that area that you dislike the most, the part that if you had to do it over and over and over again might burn you out over time.

Now, lastly, before we get into our next module, I want to mention two other mindset shifts that are going to be the difference between success and failure in a storytelling driven business. The first is that you do need to treat this like a business. Now, I'm absolutely fine if you just want to write a book for your kids or your grandkids or even for yourself, but I would not expect that to sell. And it's also totally fine if you want to treat this as a hobby. More power to you. But, if we want to be able to continue to create art of any kind in a way that allows us to work on it full-time, we must get paid eventually. I know I said earlier that we don't want to focus on the money, and we don't. We want to focus on growth because growth will lead to money. But, we can't kid ourselves and say that we can do this full-time without having some kind of income. Keep in mind that success isn't always the road we planned from the start, but at some point we must get an income from our efforts, otherwise we'll be forced to continue with these hobbies as just that, a hobby. You must treat this like a business, and a big part of that is learning about investments. And I'm not talking about investing in the stock market or anything like that. I'm talking about investing in yourself and in the business. [music] A lot of people look at what it costs to create a business. And while it is important to be frugal, especially early on when you're starting a business, [music] and to do much of the work yourself, doing things that free up your time to work on that which you're best at, or spending money on education to give you the best possible start to your journey, all of that could be considered an investment. For instance, I recently invested $8,000 of my own money into an organization that would help me identify good YouTube video topics to target. And that may sound like a lot for something so simple. But, already I've seen huge returns from that investment, and you have two things to invest, money and time. Which one you invest will depend on which one you have more of. But, the idea of investing is this: you put in the time or the money and hopefully by doing those things you get returns that are greater than what you put into it. But, creating a business will require investment and that is very important.

Now, the second mindset shift that I want to hammer home for you is the difference between an abundance and a scarcity mindset. A scarcity mindset is a habitual focus on what you don't have, combined with the belief that resources and opportunities or success are limited so that other people's wins feels like your loss. On the other hand, an abundance mindset is a belief that there are enough resources and opportunities for everyone and that you can create more value through learning and collaboration and experimentation. This is one of the core issues that plague most authors. Common scarcity thoughts for aspiring authors include the market is saturated so no one will ever find my book. Or, if that author in my niche succeeds, they're taking my readers. Or, I can't invest in covers, editing, or ads until I'm already making money. I only get one shot with this book. If it doesn't blow up, I've failed. That was my biggest mindset issue early on. Now, psychologically a scarcity mindset narrows your attention, pushes people into high-stakes thinking, and triggers anxiety and avoidance behaviors. And it's just not pleasant. Now, most successful entrepreneurs that I know have an abundance mindset. Now, this idea is that there's more than enough and that we actually create value instead of using it up. An abundance mindset doesn't pretend that resources are infinite, but it does focus on opportunities and levers that you control. For authors, that sounds like this: There are always more readers entering my genre and I can reach them over time with multiple books. Other authors' success proves that there's demand, so we can cross-pollinate audiences. Every dollar I invest, when I can afford it, is a test of return on investment, not a permanent loss. Or, this book is one step in a long-term catalog. Even a failed launch gives data that I can use later. Abundance thinking invites experimentation as well as long-term strategy and collaboration instead of perfectionism or jealousy or isolation. It also helps you become an opportunity seeker, making you far more likely to spot opportunities when those with a scarcity mindset would simply brush them off. This is why those who have an abundance and a growth mindset actually are proven in studies to be luckier compared to those without. Now, if this sounds like a lot, don't worry. These are mindsets that can be worked on over time. You are not stuck with the mindset that you currently enjoy. And if you want tips on ways to improve your mindset, you're already doing one of them, which is taking action and learning from videos like this one. I also strongly recommend a daily meditation practice, a daily movement practice of some kind, and a daily reading practice of books from other successful people in any field, honestly.

So, now that we have that all out of the way, let's move into the actual practice of writing with AI, starting with an overview of all of the tools that we are going to use for the rest of this course.

All right, so let's talk about the tools we will need for this entire process. Now, in the past, I have recommended having two tools. One simple chatbot as a kind of catch-all for everything else that you would need, and one writing-specific tool, which allows you to have a workflow that's kind of tailored to writing-specific. And in the past, you may have heard me talk about several of these writing-specific tools. Notably, there are three that I've talked about before. One is called Raptor Write, one is Novel Crafter, and one is called Sudowrite. As AI has advanced, I've found that my needs have changed kind of a lot, and today I will be showing you three tools, uh but you really need to only have one of them. Although, it can be useful to have more. I will show you one tool that's good for beginners, one that's good for advanced AI users, and one that's kind of in the middle.

So, let's start with the tool that I believe to be the best for beginners, and that is Claude. So, Claude, if you haven't heard of it, is very similar to ChatGPT, which you probably have heard of, but it's actually far better for writers specifically and in a lot of other industries, too. I know coders use it dominantly. It's just one of the best ones out there. And right now there's a free tier. There is a This one says $17, but I believe that's uh if you're doing the annual subscription. Uh yeah, it says $20 if billed monthly. And there is a max plan, which is $100 a month, which gives you more usage. And uh generally I'm on the pro plan. Uh it's usually enough for my needs. Uh although quite a lot of it is available on the free plan. Just understand that the problem with the free plan is that they're going to throttle you very quickly. Meaning as you're using it, they're going to say you've come to the end of your usage limits. You have to come back in a couple of hours or something like that. And that happens on every plan, but it will happen more frequently with the free plan. And with the pro you get a little bit more usage. And with the max you get even more usage. But for max it says five or 20 times more usage than pro. Uh the reason why it says five or 20 and it doesn't actually get specific is cuz it kind of depends on which model you're using and how much thinking it's doing and different things like that. There's a lot that goes into it. But you can still get most of the features on the free plan. But generally if you use it frequently enough, I would say at least go to the pro plan.

So once you've signed up for Claude, it'll look something like this. One of the things I love about Claude is that it has a very nice clean interface. And let me just give you a brief tour around this whole thing. So first of all, uh you have your your main chat window here. Right here is where you enter in your your text to chat with Claude. Right here is where you can add things. So you can add files or photos. And it is able to read the contents of a photo and stuff like that. There's a something that says add to project, which is another feature I will show you in a second. You can also add skills, which is another feature I will show you in a second. Uh there are other connectors and things that you can connect to this. Most of which are not really needed. Uh there's a research mode if you want to do more in-depth research. And I highly recommend that as a research tool for authors. If there's anything you want to research about your book or anything like that, the research function can be excellent. Uh there's also web search, which is turned on by default, [music] which is allows it to be able to browse the web and find different things.

Over here, we've got this right here that currently says Opus 4.8. This is the model that you are selecting, and Claude has multiple models that vary in intensity. For instance, there is the Haiku model. This one is fastest. If you use Haiku, you'll have more usage, right? Uh because it's less expensive. Then in the middle, we've got Sonnet, 4.6 at the moment. If you're watching this in the future, you might see different models here, but generally they fall into these families of Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. And uh as I'm recording this, they recently released Fable 5, but that's currently unavailable. So, uh these are the different models you can select. Again, Haiku is the simplest, and it's not going to be as powerful, but you will get more usage out of it, and then they go up in order from there. There's also this feature that says effort. And uh you can select how much effort you need. Again, the more effort that you put into your chat, the more will use up your credits, the amount of usage that you get through Claude. What this does is this essentially increases the amount of thinking time that you get out of these models. So, one of the things you can do that can actually be a good way of kind of balancing the your credit usage, you actually use a model like Haiku, which is very inexpensive. Now, beyond this, uh beyond effort, which by the way is only available for these higher models. It's not available for Haiku. Uh if you select Haiku, it will show you something different. It says extended, so it's using deeper reasoning, but you can't tell it how much of deep reasoning to do. Below that, there's also more models here, some past models that aren't as good, uh but they are available there if you want to use them.

Next to this, we have this little icon, which allows you to record. And so, if I use this and say, "Hey Claude, I would just like to say you're looking fine today." And then it will just transcribe what I just said. This could be a really good way if you have really long prompts or you're trying to describe something that's very lengthy, it can often just be way easier to turn this on and input your prompt there. Related to this but not the same is voice mode. So voice mode is if you want to have more of a conversation with the AI rather than actually transcribing what you say, this will allow you to actually have a back and forth conversation. It's not as good as the same feature other AI models. The voice itself kind of sounds very robotic and everything, but it is available there and it can be really useful especially at the brainstorming phase where you kind of want to have that back and forth. I will even sometimes just sit back in my chair and just kind of be thinking about things while I'm having this conversation, right? So that's another option for you there. I don't use it for everything, but it can be useful in certain use cases.

Below this you'll see all of these buttons here. Each of these give you basically just suggestions. I don't typically use any of these, but some of them can be useful. For instance, under learning you could say things like find the best books on a certain subject or create a curriculum inspired by my favorite cultural movement. Or under life stuff, you could have something like plan educational pursuits or something like that. But these are just kind of starters to get you started and they don't remain the same. So if I were to click away and come back, it would probably be something else. So that is just the main home screen here for Claude.

Let's go over here on the side and over here you will see a couple of additional things. Here's where you start a new chat. Here's where you find a record of all your chats. And then here's a little something called projects. And we're going to be using projects a lot in this full course. This allows you to have you can think of it as kind of a specific employee. Like think of it as a employee that does one very specific task. And what you do here if you want to create a new project is you select new project, you give it a name, you know, we'll just call this one test project. You don't have to give it a description of what it is and then just say create project. And this allows you to pull in here. You can pull in any files. So, anytime you have a lot of files that you want the AI to have access to, you can put these in a project. So, it will anytime you do a chat inside of this project, it will have access to those files. So, you could upload any any files from a device. You can also just say add text content, copy paste your stuff in here. And then there's also instructions. So, instructions, this is just a space where you can tell it specific instruction on what you want it to do. So, if we were to create a very simple type of instructions here, you could say something like, "Anytime I give you a long article, I want you to summarize it in one paragraph." All right, so I put that in here and save the instructions. And now, anytime I come here into the chat window, all I have to do is input my article here and it will summarize it in one paragraph. Okay, that's an example of what projects do. And they're pretty important for a lot of the tasks that we're going to go through here in this course. So, I'm going to go ahead and delete this test project.

Now, over here we have something called artifacts. Occasionally, as you're working with the chat, it will spin off a specific, call it a document. I think documents makes more sense than artifacts. For instance, I was working on an outline for a book and it gave me this document here. This document is editable and you can actually ask for specific feedback and it will go through and kind of mark this up and things like that. So, think of it as a as a specific document that is within your chat that you can modify with the AI.

Underneath that is customize. So, customize just allows you to add There's a lot you can do here, okay? So, this is one of the areas where I'm not going to go into too much depth because it's not necessary to be able to write a book in Claude. But, there are lots of things that you can do here to make your life a little bit easier. Notably, you can connect your apps. So, there's a bunch of apps and tools that it can connect specifically to. Some of these that are very useful are things like Canva, right? Or Notion, if you use Notion, or Slack. And of course, you got Gmail, Google Drive, Zoom. A lot of these things can be connected directly. And therefore, you can use Claude to have certain functionalities within these apps, right? So, these can be very useful, but again, a little bit outside the scope of what we're doing today. So, that's just one option there.

Additionally, there are plugins, and some of these were created by Anthropic, some are created by other AI or other tools out there in order to have specific things that they do within within Claude. Some of these are useful, some of them depends on what industry you're in. Like for instance, if you're into design for apps and stuff like that, Figma might be a useful one to integrate. Or Airtable, if you're doing database stuff. You know, lots of these things can be useful, but once again, this is a little out of the scope of what we're trying to do today.

Last but not least is skills. So, skills are actually function kind of similar to the instructions in a project. They are You can think of them as little autonomous agents that do specific things, and you can call them in to do those specific things whenever you want them. And in a lot of ways, you can use skills in the same way that we're going to be using projects. And I'll show you how to do both later in the course, because skills can be really useful. I particularly find them useful for things like editing and modifying your documents to sound more like you, that sort of thing. So, here are some examples of skills that they have available here, but again, these are something we'll get into a little bit later. All right, so that's under customize. And you'll see the list of skills and connectors here.

Now, going back to our left-hand side things here, you'll also see a list of all your past chats. And you can also minimize that if it's getting too much. But above that, you'll have this product section. You have code, code work, and design as I'm recording this. For Claude code and Claude code work, this is actually something I recommend authors maybe dig into a little bit because anytime you have want any sort of advanced functionality with Claude, these are the two you want to look at because there's a lot of potential for these two things. However, they are not necessary again, they're kind of beyond the scope of what we're doing today, and you definitely don't have to use them. And if you click on one, like let's click on code, it will lead you to a download because in order to do this, you will need to have a desktop version for either your PC or your Mac, right? So, I've got it here Windows machine, so I can download it for Windows. And when I do that, it looks something like this. So, the chat looks very similar, like a pretty much everything that we had before is available in the chat in the desktop app, but the over here on the left, you'll see there's also co-work and code, which do things in a slightly different workflow. And I'm not going to get into these in full court because again, they're not necessary for the scope of what we're doing in writing a book with Claude. You don't need But they can be a more advanced way to to do The only reason I'm not going to show you is cuz I have another advanced tool that I'm going to show you next that I believe to be superior for the purposes of writing a book for a lot of reasons, but one of which is you can use other models besides Claude because that is the number one issue with using Claude is that you are limited to their models only. If we come here to the main chat, you have to select Opus, Sonnet, Haiku, maybe Fable, or one of their older models. You can't use a GPT model. You can't use a Gemini model. You can't use any of the open-source or local model inside of this work. And as great of a workflow as it is, sometimes certain models do better for certain things. Now, I tend to stick to Claude as my default chatbot generally because I find it to be one of the best in terms of writing, and it has long been one of the best for writing. Uh there are some other models that are getting a little bit better with pros and things like that because they're trained to be more conversational in that way. And Claude is also known to have a lot of the telltale signs of AI writing. That said, it's still one of the best for writing. You just have to clean up some of those tells. So, this is the main tool that we're going to be using for a lot of the processes. I'm going to show you how to use this and the other tools to go through each of the modules here. But, the nice thing about Claude is that it really requires very little setup. You can get started right away and it's very easy for beginners.

In our next tool, I'm going to be showing you something called N8N. And N8N is a lot more advanced than what you see in Claude, but it can do a whole lot more and I think it can actually save authors a ton of time and actually get a lot of this done in a more efficient manner. So, I'm going to show you how to write a book from start to finish both of these tools as well as a third one that we'll get to next. But, before we get into the actual process, let's go over N8N just brief. N8N is a more advanced automation system. So, for instance, here is a example of a very basic automation that I've set up. Now, with Claude, you have to be chatting with it at every step of the way. Everything you do, you have to give it instructions. And [music] with an automation, there may be instances where you don't want to give it instructions until it's done a couple of things. So, in this case, there are a number of steps and it runs through all of those steps one by one so that I don't have to really look until it's finished what it's doing. N8N also integrates with the Google suite of tools and with Claude and with virtually all models that you can think of, which means you can use any model for any task, which there are many where Claude is not the best one to use. For instance, in this automation, if we go look at some of the models I'm using, for this one I'm using Gemini 3.1 Flashlight at the time moment because in this case, I want a very inexpensive model for this particular step. So, what this automation does in a just a few steps is it creates a style sheet based on samples of your work. Very simple, that's all it does, not much to it. However, these can get far more advanced. Here is an example of another one that I use and I use this to help me create genre guide. And as you can tell, this is a very involved automation. It goes through this entire process and saves me so many hours of work. If I were to go through this process one step at a time, even if I'm using Claude or another AI chatbot, this would still take me hours. Whereas, all I have to do is give it a couple of documents that it needs to start out, hit a button, and it runs through the process while I go have lunch. This is why I'm even talking about N to N in a full course like this, even though it is kind of an advanced topic. It is still my favorite way of writing books and my favorite way of doing a lot of things besides writing books. Like I'll use this to generate marketing tools. I'll use it to clean book into a erotic hook or vice versa.

I'll use it to do a bunch of things where, like for instance, I'll have like a whole book and let's say I want to convert that book into something a little bit different. Let's say a young reader edition of that book. I don't want to have to go through every single chapter in Claude and do it manually for everyone. I just want to like set it and have it go through the entire book step by step and it will it'll create the whole thing and I don't have to do anything. So, that's the kind of thing I like to use for N to N. It's a huge time saver for me and one of the most powerful ways of making book.

Another way in which it's most powerful is that let's use Claude as a good example because Claude, [music] as I said, it's a very good writer, but it does have a lot of AI tells in its writing. So, what if you just took that writing into an automation then once it's finished writing, you pass it to another model and that model checks it to try and find all of those tells. And then from there, it makes a list of all of those tells and passes that on to another model that then looks at the original text, looks at the list of AI tells and it goes through and fixes them all for you. And it can do that automatically so that you don't even need to worry about it yourself. It can just do a lot of that heavy lifting for you. That's the power of automation, all right?

So, now I'm going to teach you how to get started with n8n and how to get integrated with Google Drive, Google Docs, and other AI providers so that you can get models in here. And then I'm going to like walk you through what the process is of actually building a simple automation in n8n. This next part, I've actually already done a couple of videos on how to get set up with n8n and how to get your authentications for Google Drive and everything like that. It's the most technical part of this whole video. And since I already did some videos on it, I'm going to actually bring in a little footage from those videos because it's still relevant, still up-to-date. Uh this is the only time that I'm going to be bringing in footage from other videos. I promise everything else in this full course is completely original. But I feel like I might as well go to those videos because they're still perfectly relevant today.

All right, for starters, this is n8n.io. This is the SaaS version or software as a service uh version of n8n. And it's okay. Like um there there's a lot it can do. This is probably, in terms of functionality, the most capable version because there are certain things you can do with it that are going to be a little bit more up-to-date. You're going to have a better support system, stuff like that. However, there's a big problem with this one and that is the pricing. So, if you look at monthly pricing, it's going to be at least $24 a month for the starter version. And honestly, if you're taking this stuff seriously, you'll probably actually need the pro version, which is $60 a month. Although you could probably get by with the starter. Uh but regardless, this is a very expensive option. And there are other options that are a little bit better for most authors. Uh that said, if you want to go with this, you just go ahead and click on the plan you want and say start a free trial. And then just walk through the steps. It's a regular normal sign-up process. I don't feel like I have to show it all to you. You just go through that process and then you'll be in n8n in no time and be able to get started. And the reason I would recommend this one is really only in a couple of use cases. The first is if you have the money and want probably the simplest, most seamless solution to get started with the least amount of tech involved, this is probably the best one. The other reason that I might suggest using this is if you have a really complex business where you need lots of people to be involved in the process, lots of admins, lots of people helping you build the automations and stuff like that. For really complex systems, you probably want something a little bit more robust like this. But that said, I really don't think that most authors are in that camp and most of us just want something that is cheap and affordable and will get the job done.

So with that said, let's talk about the second option that we have available to us. And that second option is a hosting it locally on your actual computer. Now, the biggest advantage to this is obviously that it is actually free to do. There is no ongoing cost to hosting N8N on your computer. There are some disadvantages, however, to doing this. The first is it's kind of technical to set up. I'll walk you through it in a second. The second is that it is not an always-on system. What that means is if you have automations that need to run automatically at say like during the night or while you're out traveling or something like that, it can't do that if your computer is shut down. So your computer must be connected to the internet in order to interact with the internet in any kind of way, and that can just be a problem if you have things that need to be automated outside of, you know, you're actually using and interacting with it. For instance, I have some automations that go through my emails as they come in. If you had an automation like that or an automation that scans news items every day or something like that, if your computer was off, it would not be able to execute those things. And not just if your computer is off, but if the actual locally hosted version of N8N is not currently enabled, you're not going to be able to do that. There are also a couple of features that won't work on a locally hosted machine. The biggest one of these is webhook integration. You're not going to be able to have any kind of webhooks inside of your locally hosted machine. Now, I don't use webhooks a whole lot in my automations, but if you did and I could see circumstances where you would need that, it's definitely something that you would want a different solution rather than a locally hosted option. Another advantage though is that hosting locally is more private and secure. So, as long as you keep everything on your your actual system, you don't have to worry about your data getting into the hands of other people and stuff like that. Unlike the cloud solution, which basically you're you're putting all of your automations, your data, all of that is hosted in an a cloud system that you do not control.

All right, so let's actually get this installed on your computer. The first thing you will need is a program called Docker Desktop. And here's the website here. I will make sure there's a link to this down below. All you need to do is come here. This is not something that you need to worry about pricing or anything. You just go come here to download Docker Desk- Desktop and you want to choose the one that is right for your computer. So, if you have an uh Mac, you would choose one of these. If you have a Windows, you choose one of these. If you have Linux, you can choose this one. For most of you, if you're on a PC, you're going to be using this one that says AMD 64 uh and you'll go ahead and download that. And then you simply install that program on your computer. And then once it's installed, it will ask you to close and restart your computer. So, go ahead and do that now. Now, once your Docker is installed, you just come and search for Docker and load it up. And it will ask you to set up an account, but you don't actually need this. So, you can just go ahead and and skip filling any information you have here or just skip it. All right, and once you're in, it'll look something like this. And over here on the left, you'll see a number of options here. You want to make sure to navigate to images and then say search images to run. And then from here, do a search on n8n. And this is the one that you want to run right here. From here, you want to select pull in order to download this image.

All right, so our next step is that we want to create a container inside of Docker inside of this image. So, here you'll see this little play button right here that says run. Go ahead and click on that. And then it'll say run a new container and there are some optional settings here. I recommend giving it a name. You can't have spaces in this name, so make sure you use like an underscore or something like that. I'm just going to call this n8n [music] _test. And then give it a host port. Now, by default it it'll show 5678 over here. You can just use that number, 5678 right there, and hit run. And once it's finished that, you go here to containers up in the left menu and you'll see it'll have a number here under ports. If you click on that number, it'll bring you to the setup to setup your account. And here you just set enter in your email, your first name, last name, and password and you will be into n8n. So, that is everything that that you need to know. Now, if you walk through these steps exactly like I've shown it to you and it's not working like I like it works for me, Perplexity is your friend. Use Perplexity or any other search-based AI tool and say like that you're trying to set up n8n locally and explain the problem that you're running into. There's a very good chance it will be able to help you troubleshoot the issue.

All right, so let's talk now about the third option. This is the actual option that I recommend for most people as long as you're willing to pay just a little bit more than free uh cuz the free option is obviously installing it locally on your computer, but there is a way that you kind of get the best of both worlds, best of the cloud version which has some advantages, but it's really expensive and best of the uh cheaper option, putting it locally on your computer. And that is having your own cloud server that you install n8n on. So, essentially it's a local install, but on a different server, meaning a server different than your actual home computer. And there are a couple of different advantages to this. The main advantage is issue that I told you about the locally hosted option, being that it it isn't always on, is not an issue when you're hosting it on your own server. So, if you have it on a server, you can run automations whenever and it'll be always on, essentially, unless there's a problem with the serving hosting service that you're using or something like that. Additionally, you get all of the same privacy and security advantages of having it in locally, because it's still that your server, it's not on somebody else's server. It's still one that you currently are essentially renting out. Plus, even though it's not free, it is going to be a substantial discount from what you [music] would get through N8N's actual software as a service provider. So, if we go back and look at what the N8N cloud version is, you're going to be paying at least $24 a month, if not 60, and there is another web hosting option that I recommend, called Hostinger. And this is not sponsored by Hostinger or anything. I did reach out to them to see if they would sponsor a video, but I never heard back, and so I'm just doing this free for them. Um the reason I recommend Hostinger is you'll notice even at the top of their homepage, they have a option here for self-hosted N8N. Uh Hostinger has been really good about making this a very seamless process, which is why I'm recommending them. Uh but what you do, if we go here to pricing, you can see what the pricing option looks like. So, this is essentially the same as hosting your own website, and you can even use this [music] to host a website and host N8N, if you want. But if you come up to this pricing and select N8N VPS, these are just the VPSs that they recommend for N8N. You can select as low as $4.99 a month for the this option. I would probably get something with just a little bit more oomph for $6.49 a month. That said, the only way to get it at that low price is to opt into 24 months, which is what I have done. Now, if you wanted to go month-to-month, it would be a little bit more expensive at $7.99 or $9.99 for one of these two plans. Almost certainly, you will not need one of these higher plans. I've been on the KVM 2 plan. I've never had any problems with N8N overloading the server or anything like that. And honestly, you could probably make do with the KVM 1 plan as well. But to get the best prices, you crank it up to 24 months worth and buy it all at once for for 2 years. And that's what I did. And even though that sounds like a lot that you're paying for all at once, it was still less than just a couple of months of the cloud-hosted option. And so, I find this to be a incredible deal given that you get almost all of the advantages of the N8N cloud as well as a lot of the advantages of self-hosting. The only disadvantage that this one has to self-hosting is that it does cost a little. As you can see, it's not really a whole lot, and this is certainly a lot less than you'd pay for Novel Crafter or Pseudo Write or any of these other AI writing tools. So, if you want to use what I think is to be the the best option here, this is the one I would go with. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with going with the other two options. This is just what I do. And if you're really strapped for cash, you can absolutely do the local install thing. Or if you're unsure about what you want, you can try the local install thing. But if you want to go this way, all you have to do here is select choose plan. Then you'll go through the purchase process. As you can see, this is only $155 for 2 years, which is a really good price in my opinion. Like I said, 3 months of the pro plan here in N8N would be more than that. And here you're getting 2 years for the same price, for less than the same price. So, you go through this, and then and I'm not going to show it here because I already have this, but you just select N8N here and then walk through the process, and it will be installed for you, ready to go. It's a much simpler process than going through Docker and all of the stuff I showed you on installing locally. So, this is definitely the way I would go if you're kind of like you don't want the whole technical hassle, and you're okay to pay a little bit of money for it. I think this is a good option. So, that's just my thoughts there.

So, let's first talk about why you would need this, and then the main reason is a lot of the text that is used by an automation can be stored in Google Docs, as well as outputted. Anything that the AI outputs, we want to put that information somewhere we we can access it, and a Google Doc is a good way to do that. Additionally, there might be instances where you might need it to access your Gmail account or something like that. As you can see in this particular automation, which I won't get into, you can see right here I actually have it access quite a number of documents before it even gets started. And in order to have these documents, you absolutely need Google credentials. And one of the ways you can look at how to set up these credentials is to double-click on any one of these, and you'll see here it says credentials to connect with. And right now you If you're doing this for the first time, you won't see it say Google Docs account here like it says on mine. Let me zoom in here a little bit, because I've already set mine up here. Instead, you'll probably see something like this that says create new credential, and you can click on that, and it'll bring you to this page. And so, what we need to do is fill out this client ID and the client secret to in order to get this Google Docs connected. And thankfully, you can do this process once, and it will work for all of the different Google products. So, that's Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Gmail, etc. Uh all We only need to do this once, thankfully. Uh but it is a little bit of a complicated process to get this set up. Another way of accessing this, if you don't want to go through an actual automation like this one is from your n8n dashboard, you can see up here where it says create workflow, click the little icon here and instead say create credential. And then you can search through here on what kind of credentials you're looking for. So, if you just look through Google um let's say Google Drive and select Google Drive OAuth 2 API. That's one of the ones that we'll need to do. Now, like I said, you only have to get the credentials once, but you will have to plug those credentials in multiple times for each different thing. So, the hard part you only have to do once, but you do have to take those credentials and and stick them into multiple things. As you can see, I've got multiple credentials set up here. Uh namely, I've got Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Sheets trigger account, and a Gmail account. And those are the ones that I use most frequently, but if I were to use like say Google Slides or something, I would need to set that up as well. Thankfully, I can use the same uh credentials. Uh you'll notice also I have Anthropic and Open Router here. I will walk you through at the end how to set those up, and particularly Open Router because it's the most versatile and it's the best one to start with in my opinion, and it's the one that I use most frequently in my automations. But we'll get to that a little bit later because right now we're just focusing on getting Google Docs integrated because that is the most difficult step. Google, unfortunately, makes this whole process egregiously difficult to set up, but thankfully, once you get through it, it's all smooth sailing from there. Like this is literally going to be the hardest technical thing that you have to do in this whole process.

So, to get this process started, you need to come to console.cloud.google.com, okay? And I will link to this down below. Uh but this is where you come to create your auto your credentials. And you can see I'm already working in something that I've built here called n8n auto automations. So, the next thing that you need to do is up here where it says uh it won't say n8n automations for you, but you'll see something else here. You just click on this and then you hit this button here that says new project. And from here, you can call this whatever you want. I'm just going to call it test project because I'm only doing this for this video and after I'm done with this video, I will delete this. And I don't have any organization listed here, so I just leave this one blank and hit create. So, the next thing that we want to do is get these client credentials. And so, if we go back to the Google page. So, from here, from console.cloud.google.com, if you see this little hamburger icon here in the top left corner, you click on that, go to APIs and Services, and then [music] hit Library. Now, make sure you have the correct project listed here. Now, you can see it's actually on my N8N Automations project, which is not the one that I want it to be on. We want to select that new test project that I created. So, just double-check to make sure you've got the correct project uh selected here in the top left corner. So, from this API Library page, we want to scroll down until you see Google Workspace and click View All. And from here, you want to select any of the Google services that you think you'll be using inside of N8N. I would say you definitely want the Google the Gmail API, so go ahead and hit enable on that. So, of these, the ones that I would definitely enable are Gmail, Google Drive, um you'll probably want Yeah, this one, the Google Docs API, the Google Sheets API, probably the Google Forms API, and the Google Slides API. There may be more on here that you might want, but those are definitely the big ones that you definitely want to start with. So, once again, go through each one, click on it, hit enable, and then repeat that for every single one that you want to use.

So, the next step that we want to go to is once again, go up to the hamburger icon here, go to APIs and Services, and then hit OAuth consent screen, and then navigate down here to where it says audience, and it'll show you the Google OAuth platform not configured yet. Get started to configure your application's identity and manage credentials for calling Google APIs and sign in with Google. So, go ahead and hit get started on that. And what you're doing is essentially creating a sort of internal app. And so, just give it a name. I'm just going to call it test app for now. Your user support email can just be your regular email. Then hit next. And for most of you, you're going to want to select under audience select external, unless this is something like if you have a set up Google workspace in your organization. If you have like a business that already has some kind of internal thing, you can do that. But otherwise, you just select external. That's going to be for most of you. Note that even though we say external, it's not actually going to be external for just anybody to see. The it'll be something that will be kept private to your account. So, under contact information, just put your email address in there, select I agree, and continue, and then hit create. And now we go back here under audience, go under where it says test users, and say add users, and make sure your email address is listed here. And then you should be able to see your email under there under the test users.

All right. Now, finally, the next step is to actually set up our credentials that we need inside of N8N. So, for that, go back up to the hamburger icon, go back to APIs and Services, and then select credentials. From this screen, you go up here to where it says create create credentials. Click on that, and then say OAuth client ID. You want this to be a web application here. Name this whatever you want. I'm just going to call it test application. Then scroll down a bit, and you'll see this one that says authorized redirect URLs. Go ahead and select add URL, and then this is an important moment. If we go back to N8N in as we're setting up our client ID and client secret here and everything, you'll notice it has this OAuth redirect URL. You want to go ahead and copy that and then paste it into this specific space. And once you've got this URL in the correct place, go ahead and hit create. And from here, you will see the client ID and client secret right here. Make sure you copy these and put them in a safe place so you know where they are. I don't mind just showing you this here because um essentially I'm just going to be deleting this as soon as I finish this video. Um but you want to just copy this, go to your N8N credentials, paste it in, copy the other one, the client secret, paste that in here. But you'll notice this little warning here that says starting in June 2025, you will no longer be able to view or download the client secret once you close this dialogue. Make sure you have copied or downloaded the information below and securely stored it. So, please, if you don't want to have to go through these steps again, make sure that you copy the client ID and the client secret and put it in a safe and secure place. I like to use a platform like [music] LastPass, which saves all my passwords and stuff, but you can also have secured notes in LastPass. That's just how I do it to make sure that information like this is still encrypted, but I can access it easily. Um that's what I do. Uh but at the very least, jot this down somewhere so that you don't lose it. Otherwise, you're going to have to go through this entire process again to create a new client ID and a new client secret to then put inside of your your credentials in N8N.

So, now that you have the client ID and the client secret in here, all you have to do here is click this button that says sign in with Google. It'll bring up something like this. You go ahead and select it, and it'll say Google hasn't verified this app. And the reason it says this is because it's worried that this could be some kind of third-party malicious thing that is getting access to your data. But you created this app, so it's not actually you know it's not malicious. So, all you have to do is select continue, select all of the different things that it wants to access. So, just select all and then hit continue and it'll be done. And now you have successfully filled out your Google Drive um credentials here. Now, I'm going to go ahead and delete this because I don't need it, but you will need to get that same client ID and client secret for each of the Google automations here. Now, I do thankfully, you only once you've got the client ID and the client secret, you just copy and paste it to each of these and run through the same process. You can see if I click on Gmail, for example, I've got the client ID and the client secret here and you just copy and paste those for each of the different accounts. And from there, you should be good to go as far as establishing your Google credentials and uh everything should work. I do sometimes have to reconnect my Google account, but really all I need to do for that is, you know, if we come to this and you just say sign in with Google, it'll walk you through that sign up process that I did right at the end there and you just have to repeat that, but you don't have to go and get a new client ID and all of that again, thankfully.

All right, now I'm going to show you how to set up OpenRouter. Um you can run through a very similar process to set up Anthropic, to set up OpenAI, uh to set up any of the others. And if you've worked with a platform like Novel Crafter or Raptor Write to write your books, this should be a familiar process to you. So, uh OpenRouter, if you are unfamiliar, is a uh third-party platform where all uh they essentially provide access to most of the major AI models out there. And so, I use OpenRouter as my primary interface with N in order to provide the actual AI words that get generated. If you don't have an OpenRouter account, I strongly recommend you create one and then add five bucks to it or something so that it can draw from that as you're creating your work. But then in order to get the [music] API key that we need, we go up here to the top and go to keys. And from here you want to select create an API key. Give it a name. We'll just call this test API. And you can leave the rest of this blank, then hit create. And then it'll give you this long string of numbers. Again, I don't mind you guys seeing this because I'm just going to delete it afterward. But just go ahead and copy that, then go back to N8N, and what we'll do is go ahead up here at the top right, select this little icon, select create credential again, >> [music] >> and search for Open Router. Once you've found Open Router, hit continue. And then all you have to do is paste that API key right there. And then hit save. And that's all you have to do. It's really simple. A lot more simple than getting your Google credentials set up. And the same is very much true for Anthropic or Open AI or Gemini and all of their credentials. All you have to do is just go find the right API key for those platforms, which is you can easily Google that and how to how to find those API keys. And then just paste them in here. I do find Open Router to be refreshingly simple though in setting this up.

All right. So, now that you hopefully have everything set up with N8N, we're going to create just a very simple automation to kind of show you how the steps work in relation to each other. From your N8N dashboard, you go to this one that says create workflow. And we'll right here where it says add first step, we're going to add our first step. Now, the two that I use the most are over here. It'll say trigger manually. The other one that I use a lot is on form submission. Sometimes I like to submit things via a form. And that's the one we're going to select for today's really brief automation. So, we'll select that. And in this form, there's a number of things that we can do, but most notably we want to give it a title. So, we'll say we're going to call this the book description info, right? You can give it a description if you want, but we don't need it. And then under form elements, I'm going to say add form element. And we'll give this a name, book description example, all right? And that's going to be the name of the field. This is going to be so there's under element type, you can select a number of things. So, is this an email that we're trying to capture? Is this a multiple choice option? In our case, we're just putting it as a text area, which will be a little box. And trust me, this looks really complicated, but it's really not once you kind of get to know it. We're going to toggle this that says required field, and that should be good there. Then we're going to add another one. So, this one will say add form element. We're going to call this about my book. And once again, for element type, we're going to select text area. We're also going to make this a required. Now, we've got that whole form submission set up. So, this is our trigger. This until we enter everything onto this form, this automation will not fire. If we want to look, just go ahead and select execute workflow, and it will pull up the form. So, as you can see, we've got a text box here and a text box here called book description example and about my book. So, what I'm going to do for this automation is we're going to actually go and find a book description example. Let's go to Amazon. I just picked a random book that was shown to me. So, this looks like cozy mystery probably. Yeah, cozy fantasy with kind of baking twist to it. Not a very long book description, all right? So, that that works for today's purposes. We're going to select this, and we're going to go to our form, which is right here, and put it in here. And about our book, we're going to enter in some information about our book. So, because this is a cozy fantasy in the book description example, I'm going to think of one. This is a cozy mystery about a dragon who is tired of people being upset at him, and he just wants to open a bakery where he sells hotcakes, all right? So, very simple. Obviously, if you have a book written already, you would put more information about your book in here. You could even create an automation that reads your book and gathers that information automatically, so you don't even need to put it here. But, since we're doing a very simple example here, this is all I'm going to put there. All I have to do now is hit submit trigger. So, the trigger has started. However, of course, there's nothing after this, right? Uh so, nothing happens, basically. But, I am going to teach you one really useful feature in N8N, which is the ability to pin information. So, if you right-click on this, you'll see an option that says pin. You click on that, it turns this purplish color. So, now that means that the information that we just submitted is locked in. So, I don't have to input that information again. And you can actually see what that information was down here in this section. You'll see, here's the book description example, and here's the about my book section here. So, that's the information, and it has been pinned, so we're not going to lose this. That's a very useful feature, all right?

Now, we're going to create our first AI agent. And what we'll do here is we'll click this little plus icon, and over here on the right, we'll select AI AI agent, all right? And then here, we're going to is where it says connected chat trigger node, we're going to select define below instead. And then from here, I don't think we need to change anything [music] else here. So, we're going to put our prompt in here, because what we want to do is we want to bring in the information that we just gave it through the trigger, and then output that into probably a Google Doc or something like that. So, here we're going to put our prompt. I'm just going to write this real quick on the spot. I want you [music] to take the book description above and do a line-by-line analysis [music] of what the book description is trying to do from a copywriting stand. All right, so that's all I'm going to put there, but we do want to pull in that information from the form. So, what I like to do is I like to use this technique called XML tags, where you put a word inside of these brackets like this. If you know any HTML, this will look kind of familiar. Uh we're going to call this book description example. And then I'm going to create another one with a little slash in front of it like this. So now we have I call this is essentially I call this an XML box. All right, this we've created a box and inside the box we're going to put information. And you don't really need to know like why I do it this way, but this is basically just a well-established prompt engineering technique to kind of help the AI to be able to understand what information is what and sort [music] through it. So we on the left here, we can actually see from our form, it actually tells us all of the information it has available to us so far. And since we pinned the information in that form, all of that information is here. So all I have to do is drag this one that says book description example and I'm going to put it right here. Um actually we did that wrong. So um going to open this up and then pull it right here. And it'll give us this little short code that you see in green. It'll look red if it's not able to access it or if you named it wrong or something like that. But this is essentially a placeholder for where the information is going to go. And you can actually see what the ultimate prompt is going to look like over here, uh as you can see, where you've got the book description example right here. So if we wanted to test this particular step, we could, except there's a problem and you can see that it's giving us an error here. That is because we don't have a large language model attached to this AI agent. So in order for us to do anything about that, we have to select this plus button here where it says chat model. Click on that and you can pull in anything from Anthropic, which does the Claude models, you can pull in Deep Seek, Google Gemini's models, Grok, Mistral, but the one I use the most is called Open Router because Open Router has access to most of the models. So I'm going to click on that and it'll give us a huge list of models. So I don't really particularly care which model we use, but I'm going to pick one that's rather inexpensive. So I'm going to go with Gemini 3.1 flashlight, so that it doesn't cost me much money. So now we have our first agent fully set up. Now I could execute this workflow, and it already has the information pinned for the first step, but now it's running this second step, right? And if we click down here at the bottom, you can actually see the output that it gave us. So, here it says, "This book description is a masterclass in cozy fantasy marketing. It uses a specific rhyme to establish character and motivation, etc., etc." And then I had asked it for a line-by-line analysis. So, the first line is the Dragon Diner Bookkeeper Wanted. Copywriting goal, clear genre signaling, and immediate hook. Analysis, short and punchy. It establishes the vibe, whimsical, business-focused, while identifying exactly what happened in the book. So, it goes through and it basically does this line-by-line analysis. This is important because we're now going to create a new AI agent next to this one. And rather than just clicking the plus button and creating a new AI agent, I sometimes find it's faster to select the one I've got and copy it by going control C and then pasting and putting it here. But, if we do that, we do need to make sure we're connecting it. So, we just grab this one right here and pull it over so that now it's connected to our first AI agent. And we have the model connected as well. And if we click on this, it'll be the same model that we used. If we wanted to use a different [music] model for this specific step, we could, but it is what it is. So, now I'm going to select this one, and we've got the same hook that we or the same prompt that we had before. So, now I want to change this. [music] So, I'm going to remove this prompt. And the context that I want to bring in is the description of our book that we put into our form, the about the book section, as well as the output from the previous step, because that previous step had a step-by-step analysis of what we wanted, okay? So, I'm going to say, "Um book description template." [music] And we'll do another {forward slash} book description template. And then we're going to create another XML box for about my book. And so, now we have these XML boxes kind of set up, but we need to make sure they have the correct information in them. So, in order to get the book description template, which is the output of the previous step. You can actually see that output here in the previous step right here. So, I can select this and just pull that over and now it has this little shortcode that shows you here when it actually shows you what will actually go to the to the AI. It has this entire thing in it. Now, to do the same for about my book, we go down to the form, which is located here on the left side. You can see that step. We're not going to grab the book description example because we already have the book description template from the previous step. We're going to grab about my book. I'll select this and drop it into that XML box, okay? Now, we just need to give it some instructions on what to do with this information. Given the above info about my book and the book description template, I want you to craft a high-converting book description that matches the template, but is about my book instead. All right, so that's just a brief prompt that I kind of created myself. You don't often need to overthink these prompts. You just need to make sure, if it's not doing what you're doing, to go in and adjust the prompt to do more what you're asking for, but often you you don't need something super fancy. So, that's all I'm going to put in there. And before I run this, I'm actually going to right-click and pin the second step first so that the data that we ran the last time we ran this is still there. Otherwise, it would run this step again, if that makes sense. And before we actually run this, go ahead and already just put another step in here. So, in this [music] case, we want it to put this information in a Google Doc. So, I've already gone ahead and created the document here just called my book description, all right? But, this could be anything you want. And up here at the top, you've got a URL. We're going to copy that cuz we're going to need it. Once you've got that URL copied, we're going to go back into N8N, click this little plus icon, and under search nodes, I'm just going to type in Google, and up here pops Google Docs. This is the one you want. And it will give you three options. The first is to create a document, get a document, or update a document. I've already created the document, so I I need to do that one. So, instead, we're going to select get a document first, and we're going to type in that URL right here. So, just go ahead and paste that URL right into this place where it says doc. Now, it will be able to fetch that particular doc. Then, I'm going to select a plus right next to it, and once again, type in Google. Once again, select Google Docs, and now we're going to say update a doc. And actually, you could do just this one. You don't have to do the first step, but generally, it's good to get the document first. If you're doing longer automations, that is a useful feature. But, I could just put the URL right in here, and that would work. But, and we can also we take that off, we can also pull the ID or URL from the previous step. So, over here on the left, you'll see it says content or document ID. In this case, we want to grab document ID and stick it right there. And then here, we have text. So, right here, this is the text that we're going to update this document with. And whatever this is, we want it to basically be the output of our previous step. So, I can't do that right now because I haven't executed the previous step, so let's do that now. So, I'm going to right click this step, and just this step, and say execute step, rather than executing the whole workflow. We're just executing this step. And it gave me some output, which you can actually read over here. And yep, this looks good. I might actually go into this prompt and modify it because it gave me some preamble. So, I'm going to add a line here that says, "Don't give me any preamble or explanation. Just give me the book description by itself." All right, so next time I run it, it will improve that particular aspect of it. And I do this all the time with my prompts. I'm constantly seeing what it gives me, and then tweaking the prompts to get more precise. All right, so now, if I run this thing all the way through, then it will go ahead and it'll run all of these steps, and then it will get the document, and it will update that document with our text. Actually, I'm going to let this one run again because I made a tweak to the prompt. But, since I have already run it, I can now go into update document. We'll go here to the section called text, and um we're going to make sure that whatever it updates the document with is the output of that second step. So, right here I can select output, and I'll just drag this over to text, and that's all you need to do. So, now you can save this, and we'll select execute workflow. Since these first two steps are pinned, it will just use the data that's already there right now, but it'll run this one again, and then run these two here, and by the end it should update our book description. So, now you can see it's all green and checked off, so that means it's completed. Let's check our document to make

Sure, it's there. And so it is. So, here is our book description nicely placed inside of our document. So, obviously this takes a little time to set up, but once it's done, this allows for a huge potential in what you're able to do. This is just a very simple example to kind of get you started with figuring out how to create these things, but I'm going to show you some much more advanced automations that do a whole lot more, and are really fun to play with. So, I'll get to that it later in the course.

But before we do anything more, I want to introduce you to one more tool. Because the problem with n8n is that it's really difficult to learn. As you can tell, like there are a lot of steps, it's very technical from everything I've shown you. And so, one of my big goals recently has been to define a way to get the power of these automations into something a little bit more simple, essentially combining what I like best about a tool like Claude and tool like n8n into one. The tool that I've come up with, that I've been developing now for quite a while, about half a year now, is called Story Hacker OS.

Now, I will walk you through all of the steps in Story Hacker OS, as well as Claude and n8n, but I just kind of want to show you a few things about Story Hacker OS, and why this is kind of my dream tool. Now, full disclosure, this is a tool that I've developed, so I'm obviously a little bit biased towards it, but I've really done my best to try and make this the best tool for writers that I can. Because most of the tools out there for writers don't have any kind of automated system, and I am a big believer in those automated systems. But then the automated systems also have a problem because it makes it difficult to kind of use AI to fine-tune things, just interact with the document like I could in Claude, for instance. So, this has been my answer to that as a way of kind of combining the best of both worlds.

So, to give you a little bit of a tour, you have a document here in the center, and over here you have a chatbot. And this chatbot works very similar to what you would find in Claude, where it has access to this document and it has that context, and it can give you suggestions and things like that. Down here it also gives you a bunch of other options for context. So, if you want to make sure it understands who your characters are, what your world-building's like, if you have an outline, you can pull all of that into this chatbot so it is aware. It's very similar to the projects feature in Claude in that respect. There are a whole bunch of different things that you can do inside of this. You can even give it personas. So, for instance, this one's just using the writing assistant persona, but you could have different types of personas, like maybe a character interaction persona, so you can interact with a particular character and talk to them and see is their voice correct and all of that. And then you have a bunch of different documents here that you can sort through, and all of these documents are put together inside of a project, like you can see here. Each project here acts like a separate book. We also have templates, which I will actually get to in the next module. But the main thing that kind of makes this distinct from all other writing-specific tools is this book builder and other things that we're adding that will be similar to this. These are my most powerful automations that I've created in n8n. I basically took those, which are super complicated, super difficult to set up and tailor to yourself, and would probably take you hours just to set up, and they're just here, and they just work. Uh so, all you have to do is come to this brain dump, for instance, and enter in your brain dump information here, everything you know about your story, and then hit start pipeline.

Now, I will show off every single one of of features in the remaining modules of this video, but I just kind of want to bring this up because we're going to be talking about it as my solution to try and combine the best of both worlds because Claude, it's great, it's simple, it's a good place for beginners to start, but it's also very limited. For instance, you only have access to to certain models. N8N, on the other hand, is much more powerful and much more customizable to your own process. It [music] also has issues in that it's a little less flexible and it also has a huge learning curve to get started. This allows you to have these automations here in a way that requires a lot less time and work. And if you want to fine-tune the outputs that those automations give you to give a little bit more flexibility than what you can get with N8N, at least over your output, you can come into a project and work with it here with your chatbot or you can, you know, you can select text and edit it here and there's just a lot you can do. So, this is my solution to that and it's the final tool that I want to introduce it to you.

If you want to get your hands on this tool, you can do so through my Storyteller AI membership, where it is available at no extra charge to the members of that group. It's the only way you can get it. I'm not selling this separately. I have not raised my price for this either, at least at the time that I'm recording this. People were already paying for the instruction and the access to me that you get inside of my membership. This was just added as an additional thing already on top of that. So, my membership looks something like this when you first join. There's a thriving community. In fact, my community is in the top six of all tech communities in terms of the engagement that it has. And over here in the classroom, we've got a bunch of different instructionary phases. And so, we walk you through the entire process in a way that teaches you what makes a good book so that you can use these tools effectively. And that's this phase project. You can also see there are recordings of live calls with me and a couple of other subject matter experts, as well as some super secret bonuses, which I will not talk about, but they are here. I also have a bunch of courses here from David Farland, and if you're not familiar with David Farland, he is an incredibly influential person. He unfortunately died a couple of years ago. But he's the guy who taught Brandon Sanderson and Stephanie Meyer and James Dashner and a whole lot of very successful authors. And I've since become good friends with his sons. As far as I know, I'm the only one that they've permitted to license their father's courses, so I'm able to include them inside of my membership. So all of this is available to you, plus Story Hacker OS, when you join.

All right, so if that is interesting to you, be sure to check out the link below this video, and I hope to see you there. But now that we've pretty much covered all of the tools that we're going to be using inside of this full course, let's move on to module three, where we're going to talk about what I think is the most overlooked part of this process. [music] Pretty much all of the other AI writing software tools out there ignore this step, and I think it's one of those steps that has really helped my work excel. So let's get into that now.

Welcome to module three, where we're going to talk about one of the aspects of AI writing that, as far as I know, originated with me on this channel. Most of the AI writing tools out there give you the tools to create your characters and plot and world building, but all of them miss one important step has to come first. Because you see, if AI isn't guided well, when you go to ask it for all of those assets, it will give you very generic suggestions. And this is where actual AI slop comes from, right? People who just went to the defaults that AI gave them. But something I realized is that if you give AI a solid framework to build on, ideally one that is specifically designed for whatever genre you're writing in, cuz not all genres are written the same. You can't use the Hero's Journey framework for a romance book, for example. And even a more romance specific framework like Romancing the Beat might not work for certain subgenres or of romance. Or the very least, those subgenres would have additional requirements. So, an [music] important first step to the AI writing process is not to plot your outline or start fleshing out your characters. It's actually to just establish the templates that you were going to follow. Because if you don't do that, you'll end up with generic AI slop.

Now, I first figured this out a long time ago, and so I spent quite a bit of time handcrafting the perfect 40-chapter template for a general book. And that ended up becoming this book right here called the Plot Module. This book came about because I found an as I was reading a lot of books about story structure, a lot of them had the same different beats. And some of them even told you the approximate number of scenes that you should be going for. Save the Cat, for instance, gave me 15 beats, but said that you should have roughly 40 scenes for a book. And I actually found that this number of 40 scenes or 40 chapters came up quite a bit, not just in screenwriting, but in books about structure for novels as well. And so I thought, well, okay, if there's 15 beats in the case of Save the Cat, and there's 40 scenes, what are happening in the other 25 scenes, right? So, I went to to study that whole thing and really went chapter by chapter trying to figure out what should if you had 40 scenes, like let's just cap it at 40, what would you put in each one? And the result of that became this book. And it's still today my best-selling book of all of them, fiction and nonfiction. Does very well for me. And that was the initial attempt at creating a template that could be really useful and specific for AI writing. I mean, it's useful for human writing as well, cuz it's nice to have a framework to follow. The problem, the only problem with this is that it it was a bit even this is a little too generic and doesn't fit every genre. But at the very least, this will probably teach you good story structure better than any other book, because it actually walks you through chapter by a like that. But because it's not that genre-specific, I came up with a different way that Well, actually, me and my community came up with a different way of getting a little bit more nuance in your templates. And that leads me to talk about the story hacking process.

So, to briefly go over this, this is an automation I made in n8n that story hacks a book. I'm not going to go into too much depth here, but I'm just trying to give you an idea. But, basically, what it does is these steps, it grabs a file. So, for instance, you can go online and find screenplays from, you know, thousands of films. You grab one of those, and then you kind of highlight where the scene breaks are. You do That is a preparatory step you have to do. You highlight the scene breaks and make sure that your heading for each scene is formatted in a specific way. And then you pull that document in here in with these two steps. And then assuming you formatted the document correctly, it will then essentially chop it up into those individual scenes. And then for each scene, it runs a summary prompt on it. Kind of see what's happening in the scene. Now, this is more than just a summary. If you check it out, there's a lot here. So, we're determining, let's say, the So, we have the summary, then we also have a list of characters, the setting, and anything a list of anything important to the setting, the conflict, the tropes, the scene intensity, the spice level, the violence level, and the swearing level. So, all of that gets calculated chapter by chapter or scene by scene for whatever book or screenplay that you are analyzing. And then once it's done that, it has that entire summary. And these last two steps do a deep analysis of that summary. So, it checks for like, what are the main tropes in this book? And what are the main themes of this book? And particularly, the second one here is my favorite. It'll actually go through and create a plot template from the scene-by-scene breakdown that you've got. So, rather than saying something like C-3PO and C-3PO and are caught in a battle on the Tantive IV, but instead of I say something like secondary characters are caught up in an epic battle that is beyond the scope of their existence. You know, it will say something more generic that could be applied to any story. So, that's the story hacking process. And what this is, it's very similar to if you're learning how to become an artist. One of the things that you it is recommended to do when you're learning how to become an artist is essentially to create a copy of an existing painting from an existing master. So, you copy their style and everything. And there's different levels to this. You can actually try to copy like an actual painting, which of course you shouldn't do unless it's like public domain. I mean, you should do it to learn, but you can't sell that, right? You could also try to create your own work in the same style as that person. And that's kind of what we're doing here is we're creating a work in the same style as someone else or at least using the same structure. In our case, thankfully, you can absolutely copyright a story that is based on a structure from another book or a movie as long as it's not copying actual characters and things like that. If you're just kind of sticking to the high-level approach that story had to structure, then you can absolutely do that. A good example of this is Eragon, which is beat for beat the exact same structure as Star Wars: A New Hope. So, that's the kind of thing that we're talking about here. It's not necessarily going to produce the biggest bestsellers of all time, but it will teach you a lot about how to create a good book and what makes a good story.

So, this is just one of the ways that we go about creating templates that can be used in the process of writing. And then, as I was going through this process, we actually found a way of sort of taking multiple of these that have been story hacked and sort of kit bashing them together. And what I found that when I was able to figure out how to do this is that if all of those books were, say, in the same genre and I went through this process to break them down scene by scene and figure out the tropes and create the plot template. Then I took that plot template and all of that other information and kitbashed it together to look at the trends and everything that these things had in common. I was able to create a genre guide for the genre as a whole that's based on multiple bestsellers in that genre. And those have become the basis for some of my genre guides which I have here inside of my membership. You can also buy these on Amazon. They're five bucks on Amazon, but you get them all at no extra cost inside of the membership. And these are like one of the biggest things that I have produced and they sell really well and get good reviews, too. So, I'm I'm really happy with these so far. Uh, but they are essentially a more refined genre-specific version of this book, my bestselling book. This one will teach you basic story structure. It's definitely a good foundation to start with. And if you're kind of stumped on what genre you want to be in, like this is just still a good structure to start with. But a lot of these will give you a specific structure for the specific genre that you are in and that can be super valuable. But if we look at these genre guides, we actually in my membership, we have multiple guides for everything from tropes to plot to >> [music] >> style, characters to world world building themes, and even a template for book descriptions for books in that genre. And so, I'm going to give you an idea uh if you don't have access to be able to analyze these books with AI like we've been doing in my membership, there is a way that you can create these templates for yourself without having to resort to somebody else's pre-made stuff like what I've got, right?

So, the way I would go about that is I would first go to a chatbot like Claude. Perplexity will work as well. And what I'm going to do is here in this plus sign, I'm going to select research. With Claude, you can only do this so often, all right? But what I'm going to do is turn that on just so it does a very thorough job of what I'm about to ask it. And I'm going to ask it something like, "Please give me a complete list of major and minor tropes in the genre of and let's just say uh cozy science fiction, okay? And I'm going to pick Sonnet, yeah, we'll go with Sonnet 4.6, but we're going to select the effort to high and go ahead and hit go on that. Oh, and it's telling me I've uh gone past my usage limit. So, in this case, I'm just going to turn off that research and we'll just go with general web search, but if you can, I would go with the research. Uh if you're using Perplexity, their deep research tends to be a little bit takes up less usage, so you get you can get several of those in. Uh but in this case, I'm just going to hit go with just general web search on. All right, and then here it goes. Cozy sci-fi is a subgenre defined by warmth, low stakes, found family, and a hopeful relationship with technology and community. Here's a thorough breakdown. And so, here we have the major tropes of community and belonging, gentle protagonist, uh benevolent technology, hopeful feature futures, nature, growth, and craft, etc. And then here's some minor tropes. All right, so this is good. And now I can say, "Now give me a sample chapter-by-chapter template to write a cozy science fiction." Now, this is not going to be as perfect as if you actually went and got a cozy science fiction and analyzed it. It's still going to be more specific to your genre and better to follow this than to just follow a generic plot. So, I'm just going to let that go. So, it's decided to give me 18 chapters for this. You could ask it to do more or less. I would probably go up to like 20, 25 at least, but at the same time, you know, this could be fine. So, chapter one, first impressions, open emotion, protagonist arriving, transferring, or waking up somewhere new. Establish their interiority, what they've left behind, what they're hoping for. First century immersion in the setting. One small unexpected kindness from a stranger. And on a note of cautious wonder, something beautiful or strange catches their eye. All right, And so then chapter two is the lay of the land, chapter three is first days, and so on and so forth. Here's where act two starts, and you've got yourself a template. So this is what I would do in the absence of a more thorough, more thought-out template. This is still a necessary step in my opinion. The reason for this is because if you don't do it, you're going to have something very generic. It's not going to match the genre, it's not going to have the tropes, and you need those things to be able to guide the brainstorming process which we're going to talk about in the next module in order to get that done. And I've just shown you this process for tropes and for a plot template, but you can just keep asking it for like what are the general themes, what are the common character archetypes, what are the common world-building elements that I need, you know? And it'll probably give you something like you need a ship or a space station or something. And so that's just the the general idea behind this whole process.

Now before I move on, I have tried to make this a lot easier in my own tool, Story Hacker OS. Over here on the left-hand side, we actually have a whole section called templates. And these templates um we've got a bunch of them in here so far. I have a list of over 200 that I'm working through to actually create these guides so that people can use them. They're useful whether you're using AI or whether you're just studying the genre yourself. Uh but for instance, we got like 12 or 13 different cozy uh genres here. So if we looked at this one for instance, that's cozy sci-fi. Uh here's a guide for characters, right? Here are the main characters that you'd see in this uh or character archetypes that you're likely to see in this genre. Here's the plot template, right? That's a little bit more thorough than what Claude gave us just now. Uh we've got one for world-building, one for themes, one for the style guide, how would you know what kind of style is the prose going to look like, one for the general tropes found in this genre, and one again for the book description. So we have these inside of the Story Hacker OS, and one of the cool things about this is that if we create a new project, um you can select the genre that you want. So, if we selected cozy sci-fi, now it says it's found seven genre guides, and we can say, "Okay, I I'm just going to call this cozy sci-fi one." And we can pick a we can pick a different name for it later. And you can also add your core idea and your target audience. This will be probably for We don't need to put that in there yet. So, and then you need to create a project. So, now I have this cozy sci-fi, and there's nothing here in a document, so we're just going to create a new document, call it brain dump, right? And categorize that as notes, and create. Okay, so now we have a brain dump document that we can now write in. But I want to call your attention over here to the right-hand side, where we have this chatbot. And there's a lot you can do with this, and I'm not going to get into everything right now, but the main thing I want to show you is that you have all of this as its context. And because we selected cozy sci-fi as the main genre of this book, you can actually see that it is brought in all seven of those documents into the context of this chat. Now, I don't necessarily need all of these for right now. I'm going to get rid of the blur, I'm going to get rid of the style guide, but I'm going to leave the themes, the tropes, the plot, the characters, and the world build. And so now I could say something to the effect of, "Give me ideas for a cozy sci-fi that fit your context." Or, you know, whatever you want. It'll just have that in the back of its mind, and here we go. And here are a bunch of ideas. So, I could go through. And because we've given it all this context, it can now give us a much more nuanced and specific AI response that won't be nearly as generic as what you would get if you just asked it out of the blue for ideas, right? This is what makes templates so powerful. It narrows things down, it gives the AI some structure to build on, which AI thrives with structure, and it allows you to have a much better chance of hitting all of the correct tropes and plot beats for the genre you selected because and that will let you find the reader who likes your stuff better and makes it more likely that you'll be able to actually build an audience and all of that. So, that is the importance of templates. That's the end of this module. In the next one, we're going to take what we've almost started here to the next level to figure out how to actually start putting together all of the pieces of your book and get started on actually building that story. So, let's dive in.

Welcome to module four where we talk about what is usually the first step in the writing process, [music] which is brainstorming. Now, of course, with AI writing, I make template creation the first step with brainstorming coming as the second, but you get the idea. Before we start this process, I want to impress on you the importance of establishing your genre and subgenre early on. You may have your kernel of an idea already, and you may have even fleshed out that idea a bit, but before you go any further, you need to figure out what specific genre that idea best fits under. Ideally, you want to niche down as much as possible in established genres that you know will sell because once again, we're interested in books that people actually want to read, not a personal book for yourself, not a book just for your kids to read, one that people and ideally a lot of people want to read because it's a fresh take on something they already enjoy. In other words, their favorite genres. As I mentioned earlier, we have over 200 genre guides either finished or in the works at Story Hacker, but I find that guides like that from anyone really are really just a starting point. The best way to become familiar with a genre is to become well-read in that genre. So, I recommend simply doing a lot of perusing, and that could be on Amazon, at bookstores, and in libraries. Read a lot of books and figure out what makes a difference between how those books are positioned online, how they're marketed, what kind of book cover elements do they have in common, et cetera. I found that most authors, and my earlier self included, tend to not niche down enough. You might know that you want to write a clean romance, for example, but don't realize that there are actually dozens of subgenres within that category. I found that simply spending a few hours browsing on Amazon can actually give you a good idea of what people are buying, and you could quickly figure out that maybe instead of just clean romance, a better niche might be clean Christian Amish small-town romance with an enemies-to-lovers trope. The nice thing about doing all that genre research is that it does half of the brainstorming process for you. You no longer have to come up with all of the elements because the reader expectations for that genre and those tropes already mandate a few things. It's now just your responsibility to fill in the rest of the gaps so that your book becomes a fresh take on that genre. Remember, we're not trying to be original here. No purely original book has ever sold widely at all, ever. What we want instead is fresh, a spin on something that readers are already familiar with and already enjoy. If you look at any of your favorite stories, you'll see they all fit neatly into genre categories, but the good ones usually have a fresh spin on things, which is what the rest of this brainstorming session is going to talk about, how to fill in those remaining gaps. And once again, I'm going to show you how to walk through my recommended process in Claude, and then and Story Hacker OS.

So, let's start with Claude here. Now, there are a couple of different ways that you could go about this, and in fact, the brainstorming process is probably the least precise of this entire course that I'm going to show you. Because as is the case with brainstorming, you kind of just got ideas coming from all over, and it could be simple enough to just go to a chatbot and say, "Hey, I want to brainstorm this thing." And then you just go back and forth until you have some stuff that you like. What I'm going to show you is a process, uh some prompts that will make the AI interact in such a way that brings out these ideas, and then also at the end of things, takes it and sort of funnels it into a specific format that is useful to be used in later steps. Because I think one of the bigger problems that authors have is that they have too many ideas or in the brainstorming process they've kind of got all this stuff all scattered everywhere and we need a process that happens at the end of the brainstorming process [music] to sort of take all those ideas and form them into a concrete plan. And that plan is what I call the story dossier, but we'll get there.

In Claude, what I would probably recommend you do is create a project. So on the left you go to projects and select new project and I would call this [music] something like novel brainstormer. Now I've already made one, so it's called novel brainstormer right here and importantly you need some instructions. So here you could edit this and add your own instructions. Here's my prompt for it and I actually have a document with this prompt here. If you want to pause the video and take a screenshot, you're welcome to. But essentially what this does is this says you are an expert story brainstormer. It's your job to collaborate with the user to brainstorm all the ingredients they need for a novel. I want you to do a mix of asking questions of the user to get their thoughts and to probe for ideas that they already had as well as to offer your own suggestions when necessary often providing multiple suggestions for the user to pick from. Now this is important because I think the a collaborative process in the brainstorming stage is absolutely crucial. AI can give you ideas, but generally speaking even when you have templates and stuff to to go off of not all of it's going to be super original. Some of it's going to be kind of generic or obvious and very often I will find that what it gives me I can say, well, I don't really like this. I will change this. I can get ahead of that process by having it ask me questions. Even though I'm brainstorming and I could just put all my ideas down to start with, I often don't understand, I don't know what I should write down in my giant brain dump until I'm asked certain questions. So I make sure that the beginning of this prompt asks me questions and offers suggestions so that I can work with that. By the end of your conversation, you should know all the major details of the story, including the genre, the style and tone, the scale of the novel, who the protagonist is, a list of all characters in the novel, a list of any world-building elements needed, and notes on what the inciting incident and climax of the story are. When you think you have all of these elements, ask the user if they want you to put together a full dossier on of their novel together. If they say no, continue to work with them to establish the remaining details until they're ready. If they say yes, create a full summary of the novel based on the conversation you've had. Include at the top of the dossier a logline that encapsulates the story overall, followed by a slightly larger synopsis with more details. Then make sure to have a brief list of all the characters, world-building elements, and the inciting incident and climax in bulleted lists with no more than one sentence for each element. Always output in plain text. I added that last sentence because sometimes Claude can get weird and output some weird stuff. All you have to do is copy this and put it into your instructions here. And now, if I say, "Let's brainstorm a cozy sci-fi together." It'll say, "Oh, I love this. Cozy sci-fi is such a wonderful space to work in." You know, maybe I should add something in the prompt about avoiding things like that, just intros like that, and just get to the point. When you say cozy, what does that mean to you? A few different flavors come to mind. We have small and domestic. We have a gentle adventure. We have community-focused. All right, let's go small and domestic. But then you can offer any info that you have. So, let's say, "Taking place on a space station orbiting Mars in a far future timeline where humans have colonized Mars." So, now it's asking me a few questions about the space station itself. And I could just keep going back and forth and back and forth. And what this does is it maybe thinks of questions that I hadn't even thought to ask myself, and it gets more details out of me than I would normally do. And sometimes it'll offer suggestions. And I could even say, "I don't know. What do you think?" And it'll give me ideas on I think it should look like. So, that's the novel brainstormer as a project.

Now, there is another way that we could do this cuz the last time I showed off this technique just as a brief uh preview of what we got coming. There's also uh projects here for novel characters, novel world building, novel outliner, and novel chapter writer. And there's one for each of these. I remember with the last time I kind of showed off a version of this process, someone asked if you couldn't just do it all in one project for one book. And there is a way to do this. I don't think it's as clean as doing it this way, but there is a way to do that. So, in this case, we would create a new project. In this case, I'll just call it cozy sci-fi one. We're actually going to leave the instructions blank, but eventually we'll have files and things to add in here, although not at this stage. And instead, we're going to go over here to customize and skills. Now, I've already created one called story brainstormer. But what you could do, there's a skill here called skill creator from Claude themselves, so you'll have this available to you. But basically, what this can do is you can give it the prompt that we just used in the project, and it'll create a skill that just uses that skill, does the same thing. So, I could create this copy this and and then come here to the plus sign, create a skill, create with Claude. So, I would probably say something like, "Here's a prompt that I use as a system prompt that I want to convert into a skill." And then you just paste that in there and hit go, and now it will run through the process of creating a skill. I'm going to pause this cuz I already created one of these, but now what I can do is if we go into our project called cozy sci-fi, instead of putting that prompt here in these instructions, I can instead do a forward slash to bring out the skills and select story brainstormer. Another way to access this is you go to this plus sign, go to skills, story brainstormer. And sometimes it'll even know when it should access that skill and it'll just pull it in. So now from here, I can just say, "I want to brainstorm a cozy sci-fi set on a space station orbiting Mars in a far future where Mars has been [music] colonized." And I hit go on that, and now it's reading the story brainstormer skill and we'll walk through the same process. So, [music] the nice thing about doing it this way instead of doing it as a project is that you can keep all of your stuff for one book in one project. I like doing it as a project by itself because I know that's going to work the same way every time. Skills I find can be really helpful, but also you have less control over them and their output. And so for that reason, I like doing things in a project cuz I know from the prompt that everything's going to happen cleanly the way I asked it to. So that's just two different ways to do this in Claude.

Now, as I mentioned, if I were to keep going down this conversation until it had all of the elements that it needed, it would create, as you saw from the prompt, a story dossier. And this is where I use an automation for myself. So you could do this in the chat like this and chats are actually perhaps in general better for the brainstorming process because you need something more flexible and versatile, but I actually find that creating the story dossier, uh you once you've got all that scattered brain dump information, is something that an automation is really good for. So here's the one that I created in N8N. As you can see, there's a lot going on here. And uh one thing I haven't even talked about is pulling in the templates as well. That's something we didn't do here for this, but might be a useful thing to do. If you have a template for cozy sci-fi, you should bring it into the project so that the AI can read some of that stuff and have that inform the suggestions that it gives you. For this automation, what I do is I first it submits a form. So, if I hit execute, it'll submit this form and I can input any brain dump I want. This could be anything that I've got. Now, the disadvantage of using an automation in this case, it's not going to go back and forth with me to probe me for ideas. Or for me that just ask you for ideas. That kind of has to be done first. Or if you just already have a solid amount of brain dump, you can just put it in here. Alternatively, if you don't really know what would be a good idea, and you just want the AI to come up with something that's good, this is a good way to do it because the automation does a whole number of checks to make sure that it's not being super generic. You could just say something simple like, well, let's just pull in our idea. I want to write a cozy sci-fi that takes [music] place on a space station orbiting Mars in the far future when Mars has been colonized. I'm going to hit submit on this, but I'm actually going to pause it real quick and pin that info because some of these trope templates and plot templates I need to make sure that they're pulling the right ones in. So, for that, I'm going to go to my membership. And if you've made your own templates like we talked about in the previous step, you can use those. But I'm going to go here. We're going to look up cozy sci-fi and I'm going to pull out all of these documents here. I'm going to grab the URL. So, here's the URL for the tropes list and I go to this one that says tropes document and paste that in. Okay, so now these five nodes in this automation will grab all of those templates for cozy sci-fi. So, now all I have to do is execute workflow and it will start to run through this entire process. So, what this does, it first it looks at the templates and identifies what genre we're in, and then it brainstorms five pitches. And the reason I have it do five is because if you just asked it to do one, AI would give you the most obvious answer. If you ask it to do five, it will give you a variety of answers, and it usually stretches itself a little bit to come up with something that's a little bit of a better hook. And I also have like a very specific prompted here including a hook rubric. This whole thing here is a hook rubric to see how good is the hook. So, we're actually going a few levels deeper than what we're able to do in Claude because we're doing multiple prompts that are strung together rather than just one prompt that we put [music] into the instructions or into our skill. Um so, it brainstorms five pitches and then I allow it to pick what it thinks is the best, which is usually a good one. Then it outputs that and just that so I can use it later in the automation. And then it runs through the first step in creating a story dossier. And so, what that looks like is like this it grabs all of the data that it needs including your brain dump and says, "A given the above premise, brain dump, genre tropes, outline template, character template, and world building template, I want you to create a complete story dossier that has a list of everything the author will need to fully flesh out the characters, world building, and outline for this premise." And so on and so forth. So, it goes and does that. And then, this is a again another advantage of doing an automation, we do a emotion check and a character check character name check. So, the emotion check I want to do be doubly sure that this story has like an emotional gut punch to it because books, fiction in particular, needs to make us feel things. That's kind of the point of literature. [music] This check, specifically on a rubric, goes through and checks if everything is looking good in this concept. And if not, it gives suggestions for improvement. The character name check looks at all of the names except the ones that the user inputted themselves. So, any names that were essentially created out of whole cloth from the story dossier prompt. And actually checks against a list of AI names to see are any of these names like really generic cliché AI names. And then, if so, it changes them. And then from there, actually, it it doesn't change them at this step. It uh gives you suggestions on what to change it to. And then it does a a rewrite uh [music] with that feedback in mind. Then I have it do a second or another round of checks. So, in this case, a logic check. And the whole idea behind this logic check is to look for any inconsistencies, so things like plot holes or character motivations that don't make sense, you know, that kind of thing. It looks through those and just tries to [music] think about it logically. Like, could this be feasible within the premise of the genre and all of that. And then it does a second rewrite. What happens because of this automation is that we've already spent a several passes here improving the dossier before you even look at it. So that there is I hopefully a lot less for you to do once you see the final result. And once it's done the second rewrite, it updates a Google Doc and you're good to go. There's a lot to this. It takes a good deal of setting up. As you've seen earlier in this course, there's a whole lot of setup that goes into NDD, which is why I've built these functionalities directly into Story Hacker OS as well. And I don't want this to feel like a sales video. I can see how it kind of would feel that way at some point, but I'm just really excited for what we've got here. Uh so, first of all, there's a couple of different ways that you could do this. You can go here to Book Builder, and this automation right here is the exact same automation as you see here. The only difference is you don't have to go through all of that crazy setup and uh making sure all your documents are in order and all of that. All you have to do is go here, and I would select right here. So, and then you can just dump your brain dump right here. Then you select your genre, in our case we'd do cozy sci-fi, and you can see it's automatically pulling in the correct templates. So, we would just say our little thing about I want to write a story set in a space station orbiting Mars at a time in the far [music] future when Mars has been colonized. All right, so that's our idea. And then we could go ahead and say start pipeline. And automatically, it will go through the same steps. So it identifies the genre. All right, so we've got cozy sci-fi. And then it goes through and now you can see it's brainstorming our five pitches. And if you only have a nugget of a story idea and you haven't fleshed it out a lot and you don't really want to go through the whole process. Like this is the best way to do it is through a story dossier like this. It will flesh out everything and chances are it'll be a pretty good hook. So something decent to go with. But if you do have your own ideas and you want to have that back and forth with this whole system, there is another way you can create this inside

of Story Hacker. So, I'm going to go ahead and stop this process and leave. Then we'll find our cozy sci-fi one project that we developed in the last module. And then over here on the right-hand side, I've created a persona called brainstorming assistant.

In Story Hacker, we have this concept called personas. And right now, there's or you can just see writing assistant and brainstorming assistant. Writing assistant is just sort of generic. I'm going to help you type stuff and it's the default that you'll see here. But if you select brainstorming assistant, now you essentially have that same prompt that we were using in Claude. Although I've actually enhanced it just a little bit. Plus, you automatically get all of that genre context included here in the context down here. That's awesome.

So, from here, we can just start brainstorming our ideas here and it will be able to guide us down that path the same way Claude could. And we can have that back and forth. And then as we like the ideas that it gives us, we can copy and paste them into our brain dump here and then run a dossier automation on it if we want. Or we can actually generate a dossier inside of the chat. The only, I think, downside to generating the dossier inside of the chat as opposed to running an automation on it is the fact that you don't get the logic check and the emotion check and all of those things. So, you would have to do those things yourself essentially. You'd have to go through, change all the names if they're a little bit too AI cliche, that sort of thing.

So, that is the brainstorming process in a nutshell. I want to go over a couple of things to round us out here because I know, again, brainstorming can be one of those things that's just very nebulous. I've tried to put as much structure to the process as possible here, but this is definitely the least structured part of the process compared to what's coming. I've actually included a number of prompts that I want to show you guys, uh, for additional brainstorming methods that you can use to give you ideas. Uh, you can use any one of these prompts in any chatbot, and I find these to be super useful. And they all use different methods of brainstorming to kind of enhance and unlock your mind a little bit.

So, first, we have high concept pitches. This is kind of a basic, generic brainstorming. "Give me a number of high concept pitches for best-selling insert your genre here story with a unique twist, interesting, intriguing characters, and gripping emotional stakes," or "Give me a certain number of ideas for characters that are part of a best-selling insert your genre story that are well fleshed-out, have strengths and weaknesses, and undergo conflict throughout the course of the story. Briefly describe their character arc." Because I usually find that most people's high concepts have to do with either the plot or the character. I have a prompt for each of those.

Then, there's the logline prompt. So, this one goes, "Give me 20 loglines for a genre story in the style recommended by Blake Snyder that includes the following elements: the protagonist or main character, the context or setup of the story, what the main character wants or is trying to achieve, the antagonist or main obstacle facing the protagonist, uh, the main conflict or problem that drives the story, and an ironic hook or twist that makes the concept intriguing. It should be 25 to 30 words to concisely capture the essence of a story." And loglines are an excellent way to make sure you have a good story. If you can't describe your story and your hook in a concise logline like this, you probably need to work on your premise a little bit.

All right, then I have a prompt here that's useful if you already have the initial concept in mind. So, you can say, "I like to write a genre novel about insert your idea here. Please help me expand on this idea by providing potential details about interesting protagonists, antagonists, side characters, settings, plot twists, and subplots. Make a list of 100 possibilities." So, this is just meant to be like a giant brainstorming session where you just like think of everything. Then you can kind of like pick and choose what you like from there.

Uh, then we have the what if game, which I is one of my favorites. "I'd like you to create a list of what if statements related to your ordinary thing." So, in this case, you want to think of like an ordinary thing and give it a what if. So, what if, for example, your tree in your front yard, uh, suddenly actually started to sprout money? So, money was literally growing on trees, you know? You take an ordinary thing like a tree in your front yard and give it some fantastical what if statement. Yeah, I can help you brainstorm those.

Then, this one's a first line prompt. A lot of authors, like, uh, I know Dean Koontz does this, is they'll just start with an intriguing first line, not really knowing anything about the plot, just like, "Oh, that's an interesting first line." And in this case, you can say, "Give me a list of whatever number of potential first lines for a genre novel. The line should include at least one character, include some kind of conflict, and should be quick, engaging, and action-oriented to hook the reader."

Then, here's one of my favorites, and there's actually this is a two-part prompt here. There's finding new stories. There's two ways you could do this. Um, you could do it with this one, "Using the following news story, brainstorm X number of ideas for a genre book." And then you paste a news story here. Uh, I actually almost decided to pursue, like, to try and create a newsletter, uh, like a Substack or something like that, where every day it would auto-generate a like a fantasy story or something that's based on a news story from the previous day. I didn't end up doing that, but it was a cool thought experiment that I ran through. Cuz you can actually get some pretty interesting ideas when you adapt a news story to whatever genre that you're doing.

And then the other way you could do this is to "Come up with X number of news article teasers covering unusual events, crimes, disasters, or discoveries that could drive the plot of a insert your genre story." So, this is more like in-universe news stories, stuff that's actually happening in your story. Like coming up with a number of those. That could be really useful, particularly for certain genres like thriller, mystery, suspense, horror, any of those. It'll work for fantasy and science fiction as well.

Then you have job titles. "Give me a list of interesting professions that one might find in a insert a setting or genre setting." And then, so, this is a two-part prompt. So, after you've got that list, "Brainstorm a list of plot, character, setting, and theme ideas for insert your genre book where the protagonist insert occupation here." This could be really useful. A lot of people like to learn about interesting and unique occupations. I feel like I see this in a number of genres, but particularly romance, I think I see it a lot as long as it doesn't interfere with the tropes. There's usually, you know, there could be some interesting profession that, you know, might not be the most obvious one.

This one's just for fun, but can be really hilarious. "Give me X number of ridiculous would you rather scenario questions related to your genre book about your concept." This is just a great way to kind of throw out some weird and wacky ideas, some of which can actually give you genuine ideas that you could use.

Uh, then we have the this meets that brainstorming prompt. So, "Brainstorm X number of book ideas using a plausible mashup of insert two or three things here." So, what's a plausible mashup of blank, blank, and blank, right? And you could pick like Harry Potter mixed with, I don't know, 1950s housewife mixed with insert some other like random thing that doesn't seem like it should go together, and then ask it for those ideas, and it will give you pretty good plausible ideas. And the more unrelated the things are when you're matching them together, the more likely you're going to get really good results from AI because again, AI will naturally go to the most obvious answer. But if you give it a restraint like the story must have to do with these two unrelated things, it suddenly will give you a very original answer, which is awesome.

Then there's the social issue. And if you're one of those people that likes to write about something that's important to you, this is a good prompt for that. "I'd like to write a book involving the social issue or slash value slash theme of insert your issue here. Please brainstorm X number of ideas for a genre book that can incorporate this issue in a way that is meaningful yet subtle. Make sure the concept is not too preachy and fully explores the issue from more multiple angles."

And finally, I have a summarizing it all prompt. Assuming you've gone through this brainstorming process and your your thoughts are just spread out everywhere, it can be really useful to have a prompt like this, which says if you're not going through like the dossier automation and all of that, you could have something like "I'd like you to create a short pitch for a story using all of the information below. Sum it up using this framework. My story is about blank who must blank in order to blank." I got this from James Scott Bell, who's one of my favorite teachers on writing. This is just a good way to sort of succinctly tell somebody what your story is about. And if it doesn't sound interesting from my story is about blank who must blank in order to blank, that doesn't sound interesting put in that concise of a manner. Once again, you need need to kind of work on it until it does. But this is just a good way of kind of summarizing your story in as little space as possible.

All right. So, hopefully by the time you run through this process, whether you're using Claude or N N or Story Hacker OS, you should have a decently summarized version of your book that kind of briefly lists out everything that you need for the book. However, in order to actually write this book, we need to flesh out certain of these elements. And so that's what we're going to start getting into in the next module. So, let's go to that.

Welcome to module five. Where in module, we're talking about taking everything that we brainstormed [music] in the previous step along with the story dossier you hopefully created and flesh out all of the pieces we need to construct our story. Specifically, we're talking about character and world-building. Now, these may seem very different from each other, but the process of using AI to flesh them out is actually very similar. So, you can also do them in any order, either character or world-building first. So, I put them in the same module for the purposes of this course. I'm going to start with character.

So, like before, we're going to be starting in Claude and showing you how I would do this inside of Claude. Now, there of course, as with brainstorming, there are two ways to do this in Claude. Uh, one of the things you'll find, just as a side here, is that there are many ways to do all of these things. And it's important to kind of get a sense of your own experience with these tools so that you can know what works for you. But, I'm just going to show you the two ways to do this in Claude.

So, the prompt that we're going to use here is this character project prompt. You can go ahead and screenshot this if you need to. That's the prompt right there. I'm going to copy this and we're going to go into a second project and you'll want to create a new project and then put that prompt in the instructions. Okay, now I've already done one right here. So, you would just come here to the instructions, paste your prompt in there, and then save instructions, and so on.

So, the way this prompt starts is it says, "Your job is to take any story dossier or brain dump information that the user gives you and create a fleshed out character sheet for all mentioned characters." And then it asks to generate the following including a physical description, their primary role in the story, their various personality profiles, their core motivation, brief explanation of their background before the story starts, an interesting quirk or hobby, and dialogue style. And then I say, "Only include the asked for character details. Do not add any preamble commentary or anything other than what I've asked for above." So, that's the overall prompt. So, basically, all you have to do is give it your story dossier and it will generate the or flesh out the characters for you.

Now, the other way to do this is if we take the same prompt, we can create a Claude skill for this. So, let's go to customize and then go to skills, select create skills, create with Claude, and say I want to create a skill based on the system prompt that I used to create and flesh out character profiles. [music] And paste that in and go ahead and hit go. All right, and here it has fleshed out our character profile skill. All you have to do now is just say save skill. And now if you go to customize, you will see it included in your list of skills right here. So, what this allows you to do is instead of having a separate project for fleshing out characters, you can do it all inside of one project with one story.

Now, to some this might seem more efficient. I do find the skills to be a little bit touch and go sometimes, like they're not always as precise. Uh, the way I do it with a project means I will get the exact same type of result every single time. And you don't necessarily get that with skills. Skills, they tend to think for themselves a little bit more, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but if you want a specific thing, a specific format, sometimes it can be a little bit off. But regardless, I could take what we brainstormed [music] here so far, have it flesh out of the characters, and everything would be okay.

So, I happen to have a dossier here for a cozy sci-fi and that I'm going to be using for all of these projects. So, what I could do is I could just do a forward slash and then type in character, and there's our character skill, and say I want to flesh out the characters from this dossier. And then I can paste in the dossier that I've got so far, hit go, and here it is fleshing out our characters right there. Now, while that's going, let me show you what you could do in a project. So, now all I have to do is go to our novel characters project, type in our dossier. Here's the dossier, and it already knows what to do with this because it's set in the system instructions. So, all I have to do is hit go and let it go. And there it is, flushing out the characters as well. So, uh, it's just two different ways to do it.

Now, let's take a look at some other alternatives uh starting with n8n and how I would do this in n8n because the problem with Claude, of course, is that we're only using one skill or one prompt to create these fully fleshed-out characters. What if there's more steps we want to do in between that would actually flesh these characters out even further or refine what it gives us or checks for uh logic errors and stuff like that? Well, we can do that with an automation. And what we have here is the automation I've created for characters. And uh, in this case, what it does is it grabs the dossier. It also grabs various templates. Already, we're kind of giving it more than what we had in Claude because we're giving it certain templates so that it can actually get the right archetypes and all of that. Then it grabs a blank sheet where it's going to put all of this character info. It condenses the tropes so that it doesn't take up as much context, and it finds the list of all character names. This is an important step in this automation because it'll then parse those names out and start a loop for each character. What this does is it uh, you know, in Claude, when we're talking about what Claude does, it's doing this all in one go for all of these characters. But, that's not actually that efficient because it's not devoting a certain amount of its brain power to just one character at a time. What we have here is the ability to do that. Uh, so, we get even more efficiently fleshed-out characters. So, it parses through the names, it starts a loop for each one, then it runs this expand character prompt, which is similar to the one that we have inside of Claude. But, then it does a logic check. And this is a what I consider a very important step. Now, you could, of course, create like a logic check skill or something like that, but having it in an automation I find is just easier cuz you don't even have to call it up and say, "Hey, run this logic check on our characters." It just does it automatically. And what this logic check does is it just makes sure that everything sort of makes sense. Like, does this character motivation make sense given the character's background? Does it make sense given the plot that we've got here? Is there anything that just doesn't fit with the character's motivation or their arc or some part of their story that just actually doesn't make sense, that sort of thing. Once it's done that logic check, it does a rewrite incorporating the feedback that it got and then continues on with the loop for each character. Something I also add in here is once it's got that list of characters, I'll have this step which will look at each character and their relationship with each other character and create a relationship map. And from that relationship map, it is able to kind of get a sense of how characters relate to each other, which is important later on when we're writing the story and we have two characters interacting with each other. How are they going to talk to each other and all of that? That's important to include.

Now, if we're looking at the Story Hacker OS, there's a couple of things that we can do here. So, I had previously generated this story.dossier for our cozy sci-fi inside of Story Hacker OS and over here on the side, we in our chat, I have created a character assistant persona which allows us to It's basically a version, maybe slightly more advanced version of what we were doing in Claude. It'll do that here but with the enhanced ability to bring in all of the context down here in the bottom right uh which includes a cozy sci-fi characters template. From here, I can just say like, "Flesh out all the characters." Or I could say, "Flesh out this specific character." So, we have Daria Osei. Flesh out that character, etc. We have that if you want to get a little bit more hands-on and don't want the whole automated process. But then I've also built into this tool the dossier to characters automation. So, if I select that and then we select our project which in this case is just called Cozy Sci-Fi 1. It will automatically find the story dossier in there. And if you don't have it in there, you probably should create one, but that's in there. And you could if you have more than one dossier, you could like select from a list. Uh, it automatically pulls in all the genre templates, and then you can add any additional author notes here that will be passed to the AI during the character generation. And then from here, you can just say generate characters, and you can see it's starting to go through the process. So here it's made of all the characters uh that were listed in that story dossier, and it's started the expansion step for Daria Osei. And you'll also notice as it's going through this automation, the same as with my N8N automations, I have it have a selection of sliders here. This is what I like to do to kind of get a sense for their baseline when it comes to certain things. Like how stressed or calm are they? What's their fear to courage ratio? And it goes from -10 to +10. Uh, so a -10 would be super stressed, and a +10 would be like so calm that they never get stressed about anything, right? And it gives these sliders as a way get adding a little bit more depth to their character. And later on when it's actually writing the text, it will adjust those sliders depending on the scene. So you might be in a more stressful scene, so their stress and calm levels would actually go down. This is just establishing what their baseline is, which is a really helpful feature to kind of get a little bit more of a realistic fleshed out feeling character.

So, while this continues on, we're going to go ahead and move on to the next step, which is world building. Now, the prompt for world building looks something like this. I'll go ahead and pause a different so you can read some of it, and take screenshots if you want. "When you are given a story dossier or brain dump information, I want you to create a fleshed out list of all important setting and world building elements needed specifically for this book. Make sure each world building element is labeled as one of the following categories." And then I have a list of world building categories here. So, we have high-level worldbuilding, settings and locations, objects and artifacts, magic systems and technology, groups and races, gods and deities, geography and nature, population and politics, culture, history and lore, religion and beliefs, and languages.

One of the big misconceptions about worldbuilding is that worldbuilding is all about fantasy or science fiction. And that's just not true. For instance, setting and locations is an important one regardless of what genre you're writing in. And a lot of people don't call that worldbuilding at that point, they just call it setting. But, you also need to in pretty much every genre, you also need to worry about like objects and artifacts or groups and races or geography or politics, culture, history. All of these things are useful to have. And you might have to research it if it's something that takes place in a contemporary setting or in a historical setting. Or you might need to make it up if you're doing fantasy or science fiction. But, regardless, you do need to have a lot of these details kind of filled in. Even like I find, let's say you're writing a cozy mystery. A cozy mystery is all about the small town. I would even sort of map out what this town looks like and where all the different shops, where does everybody live? That's the sort of thing we want to be establishing here with the worldbuilding. So, regardless of whether it's fantasy or science fiction, we're still needing to do this.

All right, now here's the second part of the prompt here. "Do not use a category if it doesn't apply to the book or series. If there aren't elements in the dossier that apply to that category, make sure to flesh out all of the worldbuilding details that a writer might need to write the story. Each worldbuilding element should feel fully fleshed out, not just set dressing. Each worldbuilding element should have at least three to four sentences describing it. Make these details specific. Only include the asked for worldbuilding details. Do not add any preamble commentary or anything other than what I've asked for above." So, that is the prompt.

From here, we can take it and create a project. So, I've already created one here called novel worldbuilding and that prompt is injected right there. And we basically follow the exact same steps. We take the dossier, we paste it in here, and it'll flush out the world building. Additionally, you can go to customize, create a skill that is all about world building using that prompt, and then you could use that skill inside of your story. But, obviously, I just walked you through that whole process with characters. We don't necessarily need to go through that again.

I will show you my world building automation in N8N. This one functions almost identically to the character one. So, it goes through, grabs the information, grabs the templates, uh, makes a list of all of the different things that need to be fleshed out from a setting perspective uh and world building's perspective, and then runs a loop on each one. And this I think, you know, it's important to run the loop one at a time so the AI is able to think about one at a time. [music] And from there, it expands on the world building. This prompt here for this one is very similar to what we had for charac- for Claude, [music] what we put in the Claude. Uh, it adds that to a document, then it does a logic check on that to see how does it fit in with the rest of the world, especially everything else that we've already established. And then it does a rewrite of the element and adds that to our final doc. So, this is our automation, the advanced one that I've created for N8N. And of course, we have a version of that inside of Story Hacker as well.

Now, you before I actually show you the automation, I have also created a persona in the chat here on the right hand side anytime you're doing this. There is a world building assistant here, which functions very similar to lead to what you see in Claude. So, really, it's Story Hacker OS gives you both options to do it like [music] as an automation or to just do it in a little bit more hands-on way using this world building assistant. Yeah, that's So, that's how that works. But, let's go to the automation. Just click on dossier to world building. We'll select our project, which is Cozy Sci-Fi 1. It automatically detects our story dossier in there. It draws in all of the genre templates that it needs, and you have a place to add additional notes if you want. And from here, we would just click generate world building. And as you can see, it's going through and starting its work on the first world building element, which is our way station Kepler-9, which is, you know, the main setting of this story. So, it's going through and fleshing that whole thing out. Then it'll do a logic check just like the other one for characters, and uh, basically runs through the exact same steps but for world building instead of for characters. So, it goes through that process, then it does the logic check. Here is a list of all the things that it has found to improve, and then it does a rewrite on that thing to make sure it's a little bit more in line with stuff. And then it moves on to the next world building element, which in this case is called the Dust Storm Orange Common Room, and runs through the exact same process. Now it's going through the logic check, etc. And from there it'll go on into the rewrite. And that's the process. So, I'll just let those continue to run. But that pretty much takes us to the end [music] of this module. As you can tell, the two processes were pretty similar, and once again, you don't have to start with characters, you can start with a world building first if you want. They both sort of run in parallel to each other. Uh, but the next step is my personal favorite, so let's get into that next.

Welcome to module 6, which is my personal favorite part of the process, where you get to see all of the different pieces that we've been collecting all get assembled together into a cohesive plot. I am, of course, talking about the plotting or outlining phase. Now, I want to pause here a little bit to talk about the spectrum of writers when it comes to outlining versus what we call discovery writers. The On one hand, you'll have a hardcore discovery writer. This person does not like outlining at all, and just wants to kind of write the book and discover it as she goes. On the other hand, you have the hardcore outliner, which is more what I am, and the hardcore outliner really needs to have everything established before they get started.

Now, I will say because AI has a tendency to go for the most generic option when you don't give it a lot of structure, I do think that AI and people that use AI are going to be more skewed towards the side of outlining. But, that doesn't have to be the case. If I were more discovery writing this plot, I would probably move on to the next step, which we'll talk about in the next module, which is all about writing the prose, and I would give it instructions on what to write on that first chapter. And if you're a pure discovery writer, you might not have anything else planned beyond that first chapter. You'll just give it the summary of your first chapter, let it write the thing, and then you get to the editing process, and then you move on, write out what you want in the next chapter, give that to the AI, and so on. So, you're kind of building your outline as you go.

The process I'm going to show you will build your outline all at once, but even with that, you run into some danger with letting AI do too much work here, because I find that for me, the most creative part of this whole process is the outlining process. So, I will spend a lot of time going through the outline. And I will, because AI has gotten a lot better at outlining in the last like year, I will often start with an outline that AI gives me, but I might cut huge chunks of it and start rewriting it myself. I will always have a whole lot of feedback. Usually, I'll flesh things out a little bit more, so that I end up with a longer outline, and I will even go and flesh out the next couple of chapters even more when I'm about to write the prose for those chapters using AI, because I find that as I'm going through and writing each chapter with AI, which we get into in the next module, I find that sometimes I get ideas, I get sort of into that flow state, think, "Oh, we need to add this to the outline for the next chapter." So, for me, the outline is probably the most malleable of all of these things. And so, I'll kind of show you what a finished outline looks like and what to do with that. But, let's first start with Claude and what we do with Claude.

So, as before, there are two ways to do this. We could put our prompt inside of a project that's specifically designed to help you outline books, and we've got that here. And the prompt that we have here is this one. "Using the story dossier, character sheet, world-building sheet, and plot template, generate a fully fleshed-out outline for the story. Make sure to use the outline template. Get into that in a second. To inform you on the kinds of things that should happen in the chapters you are outlining. The summary for each chapter should have specific details rather than vague allusions to what should happen. Write it as though you are going to hand it off to a ghostwriter to write the first draft. Make sure you follow the template extremely carefully. Only include the asked for outline details. Do not add any preamble commentary or anything other than what I've asked for above." All right. So, this one's a relatively short one, but there is an important element here that is not included in this prompt, and that is the outline template.

So, let's talk a little bit about that for a minute. So, I've already gone over how to create your own templates, and if you have those, you can absolutely use those. If you've bought my book The Plot Module, you can use a version of this that has uh that built into as a template. That'll work in a pinch for most genres, although I probably wouldn't use it for romance. But, in my membership, I've actually gone through and created templates for a lot of different genres, and there are many more on the way. There will be over 200 by the time I'm finished. In my membership, you can find this where where it says here "Phase 6 Genre." You click on that, and there are a bunch of genres here that you can go through. I even have instructions also about like why genre is important, genres versus tropes, how to research a genre, tools for genre research, and introducing these story hacks here. So, in this case, we're doing a cozy sci-fi, and here are all my templates for a cozy sci-fi. The plot template is the one that we want here. So, I would just select this because I've already created this template, so I have no need to create a new one. And just copy this.

Now, if we go into Claude in our project here, I'm going to delete this plot template that I have in had in here before, and we're going to pull in this template. So, I'm going to say add text from add text content. We'll call this cozy sci-fi template, and paste in what we've got there, and then say add context. And once again, if you want these templates, I do sell each of these books for $5 on Amazon, but it's much more cost-effective to actually come here into the group and get them because they're all here at no extra charge. If you add it up, like 200 * 5, right? Like that's $1,000. That's over $1,000 that you'd have to pay on Amazon to get all of these templates, and here you can just get them right here. And plus, the ones you get on Amazon are like the book version, so you would have to like take screenshots, get the prompt extracted from that, whereas I just give you the docs right here that have everything in markdown, so it's easy for the AI to read. If you want to check this out, be sure to go to the link that I will have down below. Here is the about page that you'll see when you get there, and it has a list of everything you get inside of the group. Among other things, of course, you get Story Hacker OS, which I'll show off what that does for outlining in a minute. Yeah, it's there's just a lot of stuff here. People tell me all the time they come here for the tools or the genre guides or whatever it is, and they stay for the community because we really, truly have one of the best communities on all of the school platform. Like we're literally in the top, I think we're ranked number six in the tech category, which is an extremely competitive category, and that's for engagement, not for like profit or anything like that. Any questions that you have, we will answer them for you inside of the group. I make a point of being in there every single day, make sure I'm answering as many questions as possible, but very often, the questions are all answered before I can get to them. And I go through everything every day. People are super engaged, super supportive, and it's just a fantastic place to be if you are pro-AI and want a safe space for that.

Now, in order to make this work for Claude, we need to bring in all of our contacts that we fleshed out so far. All of this will be needed to create our novel outline. So, I've copied what I've got for characters. I'm going to say add text context characters. We'll say cozy sci-fi characters. Paste in all of that context. Put that in there. And then we'll do the same for world building. All cozy sci-fi world building. Paste in everything we've got so far. And then we'll do the same with our story dossier because that does have some info that it needs for plot. Paste that in and now we have all of our context here. So, now all I have to do is say basically please outline all chapters. I could also say outline chapters 1 through 3 or 1 through 10 if I wanted to. But, we'll just say all chapters. And as you can see it's going through and actually generating this whole outline. So, I'm going to pause this um cuz I don't necessarily want it to use up all my credits right now. Um, but, let me show you the version of this that we have here in an end.

So, this is my outline generator. And once again, we're doing multiple steps here. So, with Claude, when you're working with Claude it's always just one step at a time that you're doing because you're going in a chat interface, right? This way we'll do multiple steps for you and you don't have to check in between each step. You just get the final output and then you can work uh flesh that out further on your own merits and all of that. So, the way this automation works is it starts by pulling in the templates that we want. So, not just a plot template, but I also have it pull in like what's the themes, what's the tropes. And then it also pulls in those documents we had earlier including the story dossier, the character sheet, and the world building sheet. It creates a new document where all of the outline info will go. It summarizes the tropes. It writes a the full outline all at once. And then does an emotional check. And once again, like the other checks that we've done, this is kind of just to make sure that the outline has a good emotional gut punch to it that it's not just a series of events. That it that people will actually care about, and then it does a rewrite after that.

Then, I have it put what we call sliders, plot sliders. These are very similar to the character sliders that I showed up earlier, except these are for plot elements. So, we have things like tension, and here is a rubric of what complete stillness, mild friction, moderate pressure, clear and present danger, maximum immediate threat, what those all look like. And so, it'll give us a number between 1 and 10. Dread, what does that look like? And emotional intimacy. So, this is how close the reader feels to the interior world of the viewpoint character. So, not necessarily like relationship intimacy, but emotional. Then, we have relationship tension. So, if there's two characters, not necessarily in a romantic relationship, any kind of relationship, if there's tension there, what does that look like? Pacing energy, humor, because some scenes require higher levels of humor or less. And those are our plot rubrics, or our rubric for the plot sliders. And so, what it does is it basically analyzes each chapter that it just went through and applies a rubric. From there, it does another logic check, just checking to make sure everything makes sense, that it doesn't see any plot holes and whatnot. And then, it does a second rewrite and adds the final document to a uh, to an outline doc. So, that is everything that we've got there so far. It's a really excellent automation, and by the time it goes through this whole thing, I've got something that's really significant that is already way ahead of what Claude could give me in one shot. Usually, there's still stuff that I need to work with it on and add my own particular flavor and taste to it. And often, as I mentioned, outlining is my favorite part of the process. So, I often have a lot to say at this outlining stage. Cuz if you don't get the outline right, then the rest of the book will suffer as a result. So, we need to spend some time at the stage.

So, once again, going to Story Hacker OS to see what I've built into this tool, I have created an outline assistant in the chat here. So, what this does is it allows you to flesh out an outline, can do an outline in one shot, it can do just a portion of the outline, it can like if you used an automation for an outline, but you cut a couple of the chapters, it can fill in those chapters that you cut, etc. And plus it also as always has access to all of those templates that are built into Story Hacker OS. So, you have that option there. But, of course, we want to look at the Book Builder automation. So, we've already done at this point brain dump to dossier, dossier to characters, dossier to world now it's time for the outline generator. So, inside of this outline generator automation, you what you do is you select your project. In this case, we'll select Cozy Sci-Fi 1. It automatically finds your story dossier, your character list, your world building list, and all your genre templates that you're using for that project. So, all you have to do is hit generate outline. And then it'll actually start walking through all of the different steps of the outline. Once that's finished, it'll look something like this inside of my project. And now I've got my entire list of world building elements, my entire list of characters. I can modify these to my heart's content if I want. And of course, we can do the same with our outline. So, what I would do at this point is carefully go through this outline and make sure everything is as I want it to be. If we read through this, "Daria arrives at Waystation Kepler-9 expecting a rust bucket she can catalog and sell before her lunch break ends only to find Isidro tending tomato vines in a repurposed cargo bay. When she notices a misalignment in the irrigation pump, a mechanical issue that will cause catastrophe failure, she instinctively fixes it using techniques from her grandmother's manual before Agnes, the station's AI, blocks her departure with a holographic display of knitting. The station smells of damp earth and ozone and every surface tells the story of a place stubbornly kept alive by people who never got the memo that they were supposed to leave." It gives us then the viewpoint character for this scene, the spice level, which in this case is one out of 10, violence level also one out of 10, and swearing level is a two out out 10. Then it gives us those sliders, so we have tension, dread, emotional intimacy, relationship tension, pacing energy, and humor. And then we move on to the next chapter. So, we would then go through and modify this. And regardless of whether you're using Claude, N8N, or Story Hacker OS, you would still need to go through and make sure this is all good. I would say there are a few things in here that I'd want to clarify about the characters that it just sort of skips over, which is fine, but you know, that we we would want to actually go through and fix that. And you can actually use our outline assistant here inside of the chat window to improve something. So, I could say, "Chapter 1, I'd like to rewrite the chapter 1 outline section because I feel it is still too vague what is going on. Let's do more to introduce the characters and situation and explain [music] it well for the author who will be writing this later." All right, so I could say that, and we've got our outline assistant persona selected. just say send, and it's already got the outline in its context here, and now it's just going to rewrite that chapter 1, hopefully with my edits added in. You can also edit this manually, of course. And now I could just copy this, select my initial chapter, and paste it in, and there it goes. So, now I have this more fleshed out version here. You can continue this review for the entire thing.

So, that is essentially how I would do my outlining for using AI. As I said, outlining is my favorite part, so I spend the most time on this myself, but I still will usually do a first pass [music] with one of these tools, whether it's Claude or N8N or Story Hacker OS, to fully flesh things out first, so that it's already 80% of the way there by the time I get to look at it. But then we come to the biggest step yet, and this is one of the ones that perhaps is the most controversial. So, let's get into that next and take a look at what we can do to actually write with AI.

Module 7 is all about what most people consider to be the most important step, which is the actual writing. But, I find that this part, when using AI, is actually kind of routine and takes the shortest amount of time. Though, we will spend a good amount of time analyzing the output in the next module. This step is, of course, the writing of the actual prose of your book. I typically go back and forth between writing prose and editing prose, which will be our next module. So, even though you'll see my processes for generating prose with AI, keep in mind that I'm not doing so for the entire book all at once. Additionally, this is the step where a lot of people get a little hesitant. There are a lot of fears and

There's unease around using AI to actually write the prose of the book. So, let me hopefully help with some of those fears.

[music]

First of all, you don't actually have to use AI for this step. Trust me. A lot of people will tell you that you do if you want to keep up with the world that we're going into, but I strongly disagree on this point. I am very much of the opinion that you should use AI for those areas of your creative process that you enjoy the least, and you should focus more on those areas that bring you the most joy. That is the best marriage of technology with human creativity is to let the technology take care of what is drudgework for you, so you can focus more on what is enjoyable for you. That way, not only does it make the whole process [music] more joyful for yourself, but I think that will also lead to a much better product at the end of this whole process.

And [music] once again, the writing process is multiple steps. It's not just one thing. We've literally spent probably hours at this point going through this whole process, and we're only now getting to the actual writing part. Writing has always been a multi-step process, so there's a chance that at least one of those steps is one you don't enjoy that much. Use AI for that. Figure out which step of the process is your favorite, and do that part yourself.

The second concern I want to address is the idea of AI slop. Remember, it's only slop if it's bad. Human slop absolutely exists as well. In this case, AI helps with prose writing a ton, but effort is still required. This is about working smarter and harder, not just harder. Also, another concern, Amazon actually has no problem with AI-written text as long as the quality is good. They care more about the user experience, which you should too, but you do have to disclose the use of AI to Amazon. They're the only people that I recommend you do disclose this to. To anybody worried that Amazon's going to de-list your book just because they used AI, Amazon is actually very pro-AI. They are one of the top investors in Claude, which we have been using for this whole video. The only reason I think that they are asking people to disclose if AI was used is to perhaps comply with, say, EU laws that come into effect in in the future. Uh cuz EU tends to a little bit more strict about this stuff. If there are any kind of laws in the future, Amazon would be able to say, "Here, here is what has been disclosed to us." But right now, they do not disclose to other people if you disclose to them that you used AI writing. There's really not any issues with it. What they do care about is quality. So, if you have a book that is low quality, whether you used AI or not, then you might need to worry a little bit about the status of your account and all of that. You don't want to look like a scammer, and what we're doing here, if you do it right in the way I'm telling you, you will not be a scammer. You're not going to be someone that's taking advantage of the system by just throwing hundreds of like slop books at Amazon to try and make a quick buck. That's the kind of thing that will get you banned, but if you continue to try and make this whole thing high quality and actually put in effort into this process and work smarter and harder, then you're not going to have any issues.

Lastly, [music] I want to talk about public disclosure of AI use. I get this question a lot, "Should I disclose?" If you do your job correctly and you're and you're doing >> [music] >> good prompts and good editing afterwards, people will not actually be able to tell that you used AI, especially as AI gets better. I also like to say, would a Adobe Photoshop artist have to disclose that they used Photoshop? Because AI is essentially Photoshop for writing, which we've never actually had a Photoshop level innovation in the writing space before, so it's naturally jarring that we do now. That's one of the reasons why authors are so upset. But Photoshop was also ridiculed in its day, but now no one thinks anything of it. It's just another way of creating art. The traditional way and the new way are both excellent ways of doing the job, so you just pick the one you prefer the most, whether that's Photoshop or traditional art. And the same is true of writing. This is a different and new and innovative way to get your stories on paper so people could read them. But the old way is just as valid. And once again, if you do your job correctly, you won't have any issues with quality. [music] And you'll hear this a lot, both from me and from other YouTubers in this space, that the AI right now is the worst it will ever be. So best to learn how to use it now, so you'll be ahead of the curve when it gets truly amazing.

So enough on this little soapbox tangent, [music] let's actually get into what to do if you do want to use AI to generate your prose. So going back to my list of prompts here, this is the prompt that we're going to put into our Claude project. Now this one's a little longer than before, so I'll pause here to see this screenshot this first part, which says, "When a user asks you to write a specific chapter, given your context, your task is to write the entire chapter based on the information provided in the outline, the provided character sheet, world building sheet, and story dossier. And cover it thoroughly from deep point of view, writing the scene as if it was written by a best-selling novelist, and not rushing through the scene. Be sure to ask the user how many words they want to have in this chapter, then write that number of words." And I had a few typos there, so be sure to take a screenshot again now. Pay special care to show deep point of view and showing not telling in order to fully flesh out the scene without skipping over important details. The reader should feel that they are fully immersed in the scene, seeing the events through the lens of the viewpoint character, rather than being told what happened. Always keep the following rules in mind. And then I give it a list of various rules. Most of them around like mixing short and punchy sentences with long descriptive ones, the show don't tell principle, convey events and story through dialogue if possible, put dialogue on its own paragraph to separate scene and action, you know, a bunch of different things like that, reduce the use of metaphors, write in a clear and direct and concise style, etc. Pause right here so you can take a picture or a screenshot of this second page here cuz it is a little bit of a longer prompt.

But all you have to do is go into your project and create a new project if you don't have one already. I have one called the novel chapter writer, which has that prompt already built into it here. Then all you need to do is pull in your outline, your world building sheet, and your character sheet. And then if you're writing a second or third chapter, I also like to put the previous chapter, only the previous chapter, not the whole thing. If you do the whole thing, you're going to be giving it way too much context, and that'll water down your prompt and make the whole process a little bit less efficient. But you can do that and then start writing your chapter one here. So I've got an example here that you can see. All I had to do was say write chapter one, and then I could move on to the next one say write chapter two, etc. And then from here you would be able to put that first chapter here as your previous chapter of context, and then move on to write chapter two, etc. You could of course also create a Claude skill using this prompt that we just injected into the the project. I've shown you that process already, so I'm going to skip it right now.

Let's just move straight into the automation because it's one of my most complex and advanced ones that I've created to this point. I'm actually really proud of this automation because there are additional steps here that don't make sense to do in Claude, but if you're doing it as an automation, it makes sense and this will actually improve the quality of your chapter significantly. So, let's just briefly run through what this automation does. First, I bring in a pro style sheet and this is something that you could add here into your cloud project as well. I haven't talked about creating style sheets, but I have whole videos devoted to creating a style sheet. You could bring in simply examples of your writing and do it that way, but we bring that in, we bring in the character sheet, the world building sheet and the outline. We create a new blank document where this book is going to go and then this step sorts through all of the chapters in the outline, creates a list of each one and then it starts going through a loop to go through all of those chapters and write them one at a time. Before it does that, it grabs the previous 2,000 words. Now, of course, if you're writing chapter one, you don't have any previous words, so this is moot, but if you're writing chapter two, this is where it's getting the previous chapter text from. So, it will always have the previous 2,000 words as an example of what you're writing and what you want it to look like. And then, we zoom out just a little bit, all of these steps that you see right here are all devoted to creating one thing, which is a scene brief. And I used to do this in one step, but what I wanted to do is to think more carefully about each step. So, I separated it all into multiple steps so that I could actually more accurately think through everything it needs and create the scene brief so that when it goes to write the first draft, that scene brief is able to guide it in a much more efficient way.

So, we start with these three steps here, which are the plot selector, the character selector and the world building selector. And all these do is they look through the like, okay, we're going to write chapter one here. Let's look through all of the elements that are going to be needed for writing chapter one. And so, it looks through, it grabs the plot of that chapter from the outline. It grabs the characters, only the characters that are showing up in that scene. It grabs the world building elements that are relevant to that scene, so it's only grabbing those. And I'm using really cheap models here so that this is not using a lot of context. And even though this adds extra steps, this is actually going to save us tokens. And then I ask it to estimate the word count here in a two-step process. Basically, all that happens here is that estimates the word count and then multiplies it by 1.5 because usually it needs to be a little bit higher than it thinks it does. And then we run into these three steps, which is taking what we selected from the plot, the characters, and the world building, and it fleshes them out a little bit more and makes it appropriate for the scene. So, this plot scene brief will flesh out everything. It'll give me a bunch of beats of the scene and blocking. Blocking is a really underrated thing when it comes to writing with AI. The concept of blocking is that figuring out where in the the physical space are all your characters and objects and things and kind of determining that because AI doesn't often do this naturally. It'll just sort of have what we call it the floating head phenomenon where these characters are just sort of existing in the scene, but we're not really given a whole lot of context of where they are in the scene, which can help ground it a little bit more. So, it does that and establishes blocking. It also establishes the character scene brief. So, what this does is it takes all of the characters that were selected that are going to be relevant for this scene and it adjusts them as needed. I've already mentioned the sliders earlier in this course. The sliders like are they calm or are they stressed? This will adjust those sliders depending on the scene and what's going on in the scene. So, if it's a really stressful scene, it might adjust the sliders to be more stressful. If it's more of a relaxing scene, then it might make them a little bit more calm. And so on for all of the the sliders. It'll also adjust things like what are they wearing and other things that might be relevant to that scene. Like let's say your character loses an arm halfway through the book. If that's the case, then we don't want them to be described as having both arms for all of the chapters that exist after that. So, this kind of goes through and finds all of those things and adjust them to make sure that everything works for those characters. And then this final step in this process, it does the exact same thing but for the world building instead of the characters. And then we run our first chronology check. What this does is it goes through and establishes that, "Hey, looks at the scene brief. It looks at everything that's been generated here." And it compares that to the overall outline and says, "Are there any issues with chronology here? Are we like introducing clues that shouldn't be revealed yet?" That sort of thing. And then it does a rewrite of the scene brief from all of that info that it gives us. And then we finally, after all of that, move on to writing the first draft. And ironically, with all of those steps that we had to create the the scene brief, we really only need this one to write the first draft. It'll take that scene brief and write the whole thing. And then I have it take that and look at the last 20,000 words. And from there it'll do a second chronology check, where basically it's looking at everything that was written previously, or at least the last 20,000 words, and make sure there is no major chronology issues from those previous chapters to this one. It'll also do a style check, so this will compare your style guide against the what was written in the first draft, which by the way we bring in that style guide at to give it advice on how to write the first draft. But this just does a double check of that style to make sure that everything's good there. it does, from that all of the data that it collects from that, it does a uh another rewrite and adds that chapter to your document. And from that, that's the end of this automation. So, it's a very involved automation, and it does this for every chapter, and it can sometimes take hours to go through the whole thing. And I wouldn't actually go through the whole thing. I would do one or two or three chapters at a time at most, and then go back to your outline, make sure that the next couple of chapters are are good and have what you want, and then you can let it go for the next few chapters and just continue that cycle until you've finished the whole book.

So, what does this look like inside of Story Hacker OS? If we move on to that. Now, unlike the other steps, I do not have a prose writing persona in my list of personas because of the complexity of this whole process with the automation and everything. You can, of course, inside uh whatever document you're in, you can just do a control K and describe what you want and it'll do that. And as long as you've got your style guide in your context, it should be able to see that style guide as it's writing. So, you can just tell it what to generate to move on, you know, do like two, three, 400 words at a time and kind of go one piece at a time like that if you wanted to. Going to our automation, we have now this last automation. We've gone through all the others. Now, we just have this one that says chapter generator. If I click on this and select our project, which is Cozy Sci-Fi 1 in this case, it will go through and make sure it's got your full story outline, which I've got here. It's got the all characters doc and the all world building doc. And from here, uh you can also select a POV like first, third-person limited, or third-person omniscient and the past tense, past or present. And then it'll give you a list of chapters and it's pulling this from your outline. So, you do need to make sure that they are present in your outline and that they're formatted as headers. And right now it's got all of them selected. So, if I wanted to, I could write the entire book all at once, just like I could if I were using the N8N automation. But once again, I do not recommend this. So, I'm going to deselect all and just select, let's say, the first two or so. Actually, I'll just going to do one for now uh for the demonstration. And then you've got your genre templates that it's pulling in and author notes. So, all I have to do now is say generate one chapter. And now you can see it is now going through each of the steps in this process. So, it went through and extracted what it needs for the plot. This is just from the outline verbatim. It'll flesh it out later. And it's pulling in the characters that are needed for this specific scene. Now it's moved on to doing the world build selecting the world building from the scene. Grabs the important things here from like the way station Kepler 9 and needs to know for the scene and so on and so forth. So it'll continue down this list. A lot of these are the exact same steps that you find in the NNN automation but just made a little bit easier here and it'll continue to run through that.

Once this is totally finished, we can move on to the next module which is a lot of other people's favorite. It's not my personal favorite but I do enjoy it more than most of the other steps on this other than the outlining. So let's go through into that module next.

Welcome to module 8 where we're talking all about the editing process. Editing is where things often get fun and for many people it's the far more creative part of the writing process. I personally don't enjoy it as much as the outlining stage but I know a lot of writers will spend most [music] of their time in the editing stage to really perfect that book. Even authors who don't use AI, in fact, especially authors that don't use AI uh spend a lot of time in the editing. Now traditionally there have been approximately three types of editing. Some people say four but they split hairs and I like to keep things simple. The first is developmental editing. This is the kind of editing where you will, especially if you have a developmental editor, they'll actually go through your entire book and look at it from a structural standpoint. They'll look at character arcs. They'll look at making sure everything is like logically consistent within the book. Make sure that you don't need any additional scenes here and there or maybe you need to cut a few scenes here or there because they don't really serve the overall plot. Regardless, that's what a developmental editor does. Quick tip, if you hire a developmental editor, I recommend doing so before you've written the book while you're in the outlining stage because first of all, it will cost a whole lot less for them to go through your outline and give you advice there than it will to have them go through your entire book. But, I digress. The next type is called line editing, and this is editing that takes place on a more sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph basis. [music] Where we're actually looking at the structure of the sentence and the paragraph, and actually going through and trying to make improvements there. Funny enough, this is very similar to what we will be doing with the AI-generated text. The third type of editing is proofreading. A lot of people will also throw in copyediting here. I find that there's not a good definition of like where line editing ends and where copywriting or proofreading begin. So, for me, it's easier to differentiate between line editing and proofreading. But, proofreading is essentially just going through and making those more technical, grammatical, or spelling changes to make sure that there's nothing actually like grammatically wrong with your book.

AI is really good at a lot of things, and it can actually save you a lot of time in the edit. For instance, proofreading is something AI is extremely good at. And that alone could save you hundreds of dollars on a proofreader. And it already does a decent job at line editing compared to the average human. Or at least, what it writes is not too bad compared to the average human. Though, it still has a ways to go before it's the same as a skilled human, especially a skilled human that has had a line edit of their work. But, while AI-written books are already a step above what you might get if you wrote the book yourself, especially if you're a beginner, writing with AI does introduce some new problems that come with ones that it solves. And I'm talking, of course, of those AI-isms, those repetitive words or phrases that AI tends to introduce while it's writing, because of the way it's trained. Now, don't get me wrong, even though this is a new problem that didn't exist before, I still think AI saves you a lot of time overall. In fact, I don't think it, I know it. And eventually, these models will improve so that these issues are no longer as big of a problem. But, for now, we do have to deal with these AI-isms. So, here's is of the top 10 AI-isms so you can look out for them.

The first is the contrastive hook. This is where you say, "It's not X, it's Y." It's a neat little rhythm where the text negates one or two things and then reframes them creating a slick but overproduced slogan-like intro. The second is a rhetorical question with an instant answer. The writing poses a question as a fake hook like, "What does this really mean?" and then immediately answers it instead of letting the question genuinely drive exploration. The third is the triple emphasis lists, things like faster, smarter, better. Ideas are constantly packaged into a three-part list for cadence, even when the content doesn't naturally fall into threes. The fourth is overused AI words. You've probably heard of delve or leverage or holistic or testament. You'll hear a lot of these things. We've got big lists of them that you can find all over the internet. The prose leans heavily on a small set of smart-sounding abstractions that show up far more often in machine-generated text than in normal human writing. Number five is inflated stakes for mundane topics. So, everyday subjects get framed as sweeping paradigm shifts making small points sound like civilizational turning points. Going along that is number six with grand abstract metaphors. So, things like the tapestry of or the landscape of or the a journey through. Abstract discussions are draped in clichéd metaphorical language that sounds lyrical but rarely adds concrete meaning. The seventh is generic importance adjectives. Things like significant, impactful, or key. These claims signal importance with vague, overused adjectives instead of precise [music] descriptors or measurable details. Number eight is bland, high-level generalizations. So, this could be like the writing hovers at the summary level and avoids specific numbers, names, locations, or sensory detail. So, the prose feels kind of floaty and ungrounded. You'll also see this with this is why I prompt so heavily to try and get it into a show-don't-tell state. Otherwise, it can feel very lofty and very much like we're just telling instead of showing. Number nine, you'll also see repetitive sentence templates and rephrasing. Though, the same few sentence shapes and phrases can reoccur restating the same idea in slightly different words instead of advancing the thought itself. This is how you can get really wordy AI output. Number 10 is overly neat and bow-tied conclusions. This is an ending recap everything and lands on a polished inspirational line that reads more like a generic slogan than a natural closing thought. And you'll see this at the end of chapters as well, but this is a particularly bad problem in things like academic writing.

So, with that out of the way, let's now take a look at some AI writing so I can give you an idea of what it actually looks like when I'm reviewing and editing text. So, I'm going to do this here in Story Hacker OS. It doesn't matter where your prose came from. In our last module, we generated this first chapter of our cozy sci-fi. All I have to do is just save this to project and that gets saved to our project and now we can go to that project and start editing it. So, here it is in all of its glory. So, when I'm going through and editing this, I usually just read through it. Sometimes I find it helpful to read it aloud or to get some kind of screen reader that can read through it for me. It's actually good to have a sort of robotic screen reader because anything that's a little off will will seem extra off if it's being read by something a little more robotic. I'm just going to read this aloud, of course, for you so we can kind of get a sense of what I would change. All right. The docking tube cycled with a wheeze that sounded like a heavy smoker trying to clear a chest infection. Right away, we've got a kind of overly dramatic metaphor here. So, we can cut most of this. I would say the docking tube cycled and Daria O'Shea stepped through. We need a comma there. The hatch with her tablet held in front of her chest like a breastplate. Again, we have another metaphor. I'll leave this one, because it kind of gives the impression that she's feeling very protective of herself, that she's nervous. So, I will leave that one there. It's fine to have metaphors, but AI does tend to overuse them. So, if you see them, I'd cut out like probably 50 to 80% of them. She had expected the standard hiss of pressure equalization, the clean click of magnetic seals engaging. Instead, the heavy pressure door ground shut behind her with a shuddering jolt and a hydraulic squeal that made her flinch so hard she nearly dropped her tablet. I actually think this is okay. There's maybe a little bit of fluff with how it's describing the hiss of pressure equalization, clean click of magnetic seals disengaging. In fact, yeah, let's just trim that just a little bit. So, I'm going to say she had expected the standard hiss of pressure equalization and we can remove clean and the click of magnetic seals disengaging. So, that's doesn't do much there, but it does kind of change the how the clauses are go one to the other. So, I think that's fine. Instead, heavy pressure door ground shut. Okay, yeah, that sentence is fine. "Bloody hell," she muttered. This is a genre decision, but given that this is a cozy sci-fi, I actually think we should remove the curse word here, because like you could totally have that word in this book, but this is literally the second paragraph. I think it would give the wrong impression. So, this is again one of those human pieces of judgment. It's not really a problem with the prose. It's just I don't think this is appropriate for the genre. I'm just going to say she muttered a short curse and clapped a hand over her ear. The sound had sawed through her composure like a rusty blade. Okay, this is a very AI-like sentence, another metaphor in there. And I don't think we need it. I think we can cut it entirely. It was the kind of sound She muttered short clapped a hand over her ears. It was the kind of sound that usually preceded a very expensive insurance claim. That one we can keep. A shimmer of amber light materialized at eye level. Dario jerked backward, her shoulder blades hitting the sealed door, and found herself staring at a holographic wireframe figure. That sentence is fine. There is a lot of description here, but it this the first time we're seeing this character appear, so I think that's fine. The figure had proportions of a grandmother and was actively knitting. Interesting. So, th- this is a good hook here for people who are just being introduced to the story. Her projected hands moved in a steady rhythm, a half-finished piece of lace trailing from the needles. Yeah, that's all fine. So, this might seem like I'm changing a lot with these, but like this whole sentence I think is totally this whole paragraph I think is fine. "Welcome to Waystation Kepler-9," the figure said, her voice carrying the unbothered cadence of someone who hadn't felt a spike in blood in blood pressure in a decade. Okay, that sentence needs work. Unbothered cadence, uh first of all, she doesn't have blood pressure. This is an AI figure, so we need to change that one entirely. Now, I would manually fix this normally, but I just want to show off a feature that I do have here. I can select this AI edit, and I'll say something like leave the dialogue, but make the rest of this paragraph more concise. And so now it'll show you what it changed. So, "Welcome to Waystation Kepler-9," the figure said, her voice calm and unhurried. "I do apologize for Gerald or Gerald. He gets excited when we have visitors." All right, so I would just say that's good, and now we've got that sentence there. It's a bit a little trimmed. It just says her voice was calm and unhurried, which I might even remove that. Like we could just say the figure said, but I'm okay with that cuz this at least gets the same point across that it was trying to get earlier, but this time it just says her voice is calm and unhurried. Daria lowered her hand, her fingers subconsciously tapping the 153624 firing order of a straight-six engine against her thigh. It was a nervous habit she'd never quite managed to kill. "Gerald?" The airlock. Oh, and actually there's I would call that a grammatical error there. Let's put a period there where it should be a question mark. The airlock, the hologram gestured over her shoulder with a translucent knitting needle. I love that it's still remembering what she looks like and it's kind of incorporating that into the blocking. He's been doing that for years. I keep telling him it's unprofessional, but he's convinced it adds character. He's very set in his ways for a series 4 pressure seal. All right, I love it. Good stuff. Daria stared at her then at the door which looked like it'd been held together by sheer stubbornness and luck. This feels like an AI-ism here to So I would just say we'll say by duct tape and luck. Then back at the hologram. Uh so anyway, you'll get the sense of what I'm doing here. Obviously, if I were editing this myself and not explaining the whole process, it would take me a lot less time to go through this. Uh I can usually get through a chapter like this. This is about a 2,000 words chapter. I can get through this in uh maybe 15 minutes of uh dedicated work which is still enormously quick time which is still a furiously fast pace of writing. Back in the day when I was writing traditionally, I was lucky to get 2,000 words in an hour. And that was just the first draft. I'd still have to go through and edit it again later. So this whole process makes the whole thing a lot easier. And so when you're doing this, you want to make sure you're looking for those AI-isms that we kind of discussed and that you've seen me catch a couple of them. You also want to look out for any chronological issues, things that don't make sense, things that aren't consistent with your character, and stuff like that. I do my best with the automations to make sure it already checks for that, but it's always going to miss some things. But at least it catches a good portion of them so that you don't have to worry about those.

So the next steps after this would be to simply apply the same process to all of the remaining chapters of your book. And the way I like to do this is I kind of go back and forth between generating the prose, modifying the outline, and then generating the next chapter, and then editing that chapter, then going through and modifying the outlining again, generating, editing, etc. So what I would do, like if I got through this entire chapter one, I'm like, "Okay, this all looks good. I like it." I would then switch over to the outline and just briefly read through what it's saying here for chapter two cuz I'm going to write chapter two next. And after I've just edited chapter one, usually I'm like immersed in the story at this point. So, I can often when looking at the outline for chapter two, catch a few things that like, oh, I want to make sure this is in there. So, I'll I'll add a few sentences to kind of like clarify things or expand on things or what have you, correct something. And I might do that for chapter two. Maybe if I'm writing more than one chapter at once, I'll for chapter three or four as well. And then I'll go to our book builder. I'll select chapter generator. You'll have to select reset here. Reset. Select our project again. Make sure it's got all of our documents, which it does. And then I would select chapter two and three or however many chapters I want to do on this next round. Don't select chapter one again cuz we already wrote that and edited it. But now we can go ahead and write chapter two. And funny enough, if you do it this way, when it's writing chapter two, it will actually be pulling in chapter one into its context to understand like how to continue off from that chapter. And this is important because if you've done a lot of editing to that chapter, it should write the next chapter a little bit better because it's able to read what it thinks it wrote in the previous chapter, uh which is actually just your edited version of it. This is why I go one chapter or two chapters at a time rather than trying to write the whole book at once is because when it's able to read what my edited version of the text looks like, it creates better output. It's less likely to have continuity errors and so forth. So, that's why I do it that way rather than trying to create the whole thing at once, which is going to have a slew of problems that you're going to have to correct manually as you go on. So, that is the editing process. I hope this has been an informative module for you. It's the one that you will probably be spending some of the most time on cuz you got to do this for the whole book, but it's still like four or five times faster than if if were to write the book the traditional way. So, have fun with this, enjoy it. It's a creative process. Enjoy that creative process. The next module is going to cover the packaging and everything you have to do to get this thing ready to actually post online and start hopefully getting sales. Let's move into that next.

Module nine is all about the packaging, which comes down to two primary elements, which are your book cover and your book formatting. Book covers, I'm not going to talk about too much in this course as I could make an entire additional full course video just like this one on just that topic. Instead, I want to give you a word of warning when it comes to covers. Book covers are incredibly important. If you have a bad book cover, it doesn't matter how good your book is, it will not sell. Let me repeat that. A bad book cover leads to bad sales. The most important thing that you do with your book cover is make sure that it matches the genre that you are writing it. And of course, once again, genre is key here. Because of that, I actually don't recommend that most authors, especially if you're just starting out, use AI to create your book covers. The only exception to this might be for a reader magnet or some kind of book that you're planning on giving away for free. Instead, I actually recommend hiring an artist for this until you understand what you're doing a lot more. Now, why would I recommend this especially on a channel where I talk so much about AI? Well, primarily not because of AI skill in art, because you can absolutely get a stunning cover that does everything you need with AI, but it's not so much about the quality of the art as it is the understanding of the genre. An experienced designer will understand what appeals to a reader better than you do when it comes to the visuals. So, I generally have two recommendations, which I will link to below this video. Both of which are actually from the same parent company. For those on a budget, I recommend get covers, which you can see right here. It's incredibly affordable and you might actually spend less using them than if you were to use AI given the subscriptions that you may or may not need to create a cover with AI. The other one is called Miblart and they are essentially the more premium big sister to Get Covers. It's the same parent company, but Miblart is on another level when it comes to their quality and they are what I personally use for my covers these days. So when it comes to packaging your book up and making it look good, I recommend using one of them to make a good first impression with your reader as as they likely know your genre's cover conventions better than you do. So that's book covers.

Next, let's talk about formatting. There are many ways you can format using writing tools like Microsoft Word or Scrivener, but they are extremely limited and take a long time to get everything right and you have to repeat the process for every single book. There are a lot of considerations that you have to learn when doing it this way. I instead use a tool like Atticus or Vellum. These by the way, I don't have affiliate links for these. I just think they're good tools. They are both tools that you only have to pay for once because they have lifetime deals and they are both excellent at what they do. Vellum is a little bit more expensive and it's only available on Mac. So if you want something available via Windows or Linux, aka a cloud-based program, then Atticus is the way to go. That's the one I will be demonstrating in this video. So this is your dashboard in Atticus. This is what mine looks like right now. You can see I've got a couple of my books here including some of the genre guides I've been working on. But basically all you have to do is come here and either say start a new book if you want to essentially start from scratch and maybe copy and paste each chapter in there or I would probably upload the book first. You just click on this, you upload a docs file. So you will need to make sure your book is contained in that docs file before you put it in here. Give it a book title, the author, and a project which I usually just select as my series name. And of course you can change all of this later so it doesn't matter a whole lot what you put here. Once you are inside of the book view for Atticus, it'll look something like this if you've uploaded everything correctly and you may have to spend some time playing around with the number of chapters and everything cuz sometimes when you upload a book, it doesn't get everything right uh right away. So, you may have to split some chapters, merge some chapters, you know, just clean it up a little bit. And then you can also add front matter. So, it comes with a number of copyright templates, for instance. It comes with templates for like a dedication. You can add full-page images in here if you want. I've got some of my maps. You can also So, you'll notice here I have a map for the print version, which is vertical or yeah, vertical, and a map for the ebook version, which is horizontal, because it just kind of works better on the page that way if if we have it vertical for the print version. I've got a note here uh just telling people where they can get this bonus book for free, and then it automatically generates the table of contents based on everything I've got here, and then we move right into chapter one. So, I would just scroll through this, make sure the formatting all looks good, and you might see some breaks. Now, I don't have one in this chapter, but you can add a scene break. It'll look something like this, and when you actually look at this break in the previewer, as you can see here, you can see I've got a scene break inserted into the scene, and uh you can change the style of what that looks like and everything. It's very helpful. So, you go through all your chapters, and at the end, you can add back matter. So, I have like an author's note. I have an about the author. Uh one of the nice things about this is this is actually a master page, which means this content that you see here is included on other books. And if I change it here for this one, I can apply the changes to all of the other books that use the same template, which is a real time-saver if you're updating a bunch of books. You don't have to copy and paste this template into each one. You can just change it in one place, and it'll change across all of them. I also have uh again, another ad for my uh this is what we call the reader magnet to get people onto my email list. I have a sample chapter of the next book and another like also buy from me. This is the part that will take you the most time in the formatting process is just making sure your chapters are okay, making sure you have front and back matter. Some of the things I recommend in your front and back matter are an advertisement for your email list and maybe you can give away some kind of free book there. Uh you also want things like a copyright and maybe an also buy page and stuff like that. But it really like there isn't a whole hard science about any of this. There's lots you can do there. So, I would maybe go look at some other ebooks on Amazon in the genre that you're doing and see what are they doing for their front and back matter. And then try to do something similar for yours.

But in Atticus, up here at the top, there's the writing tab that we've been on and over here is the formatting tab. If we click on that, there are a bunch of templates that are pre-baked in to Atticus. And all you have to do is just click on any one of these and if it's one you like, you're essentially done with the formatting process. But most of the time you'll need to create your own and then just use that for other books. And the nice thing is, once you've created one formatting theme for your book, you can use it for every book in that series and everything will remain consistent. So, it requires just a little bit of setup on your first try. After that, it's just it's incredibly easy. So, this is a format that I created for my uh for this particular book. So, you can see it's got like this header. It's a very simple format, but you've got the header and like the first sentence is capitalized and so on. And on the right-hand side here, you can see that there are you can preview what it would look like in various devices. And the one I use the most to preview is the print one because this is where you can run into the most issues with formatting functionality. So, this is what it would look like. If I scroll through the pages, you'll see there's like a larger margin on this side than there is on this side. And if I go to the next page, now that larger margin is on the right side. This is what we call a gutter margin, and it's something that you need on any print book. Something that's very difficult to figure out if you're using a tool like Word, but it is automatically generated inside of Atticus or Vellum if you're using Vellum, because that gutter margin means the inner part of the inner margin that is closest to the spine must always be larger than the margin on the facing

The edge. That has to flip-flop depending on which page you're at, whether it's on the left side of the page or the right side of the page. And that's something that Atticus does very, very easily.

So, let's actually look at all of the different things you can change with each of these themes so you can see just how customizable this is, cuz it really is amazing. So, I would just go here and say edit, or you can also say duplicate. And on here at the left, you have all of these different things that you can modify: Chapter heading, paragraph, subheading, scene break, notes, print layout, typography, header, footer, and trim sizes.

And chapter heading is pretty obvious. So, over here on the right, you can see the chapter heading here. I could select a different font. Say there, you can see it's now a different font. In this [music] case, I think I should select a stencil decorative. You can align it to the left, right, center. You can choose a style. So, right here I have chapter title and chapter subtitle selected. I don't have a subtitle on this page, but if I did, it would show. You can also have chapter number, so you can actually have like a second here. It's duplicated, so it says chapter 26 and then chapter 26. But let's say you just wanted it to say chapter 26, and then you have a separate title for the chapter, you know, reflects the content of that chapter. Or I could actually change this chapter number to instead of saying chapter one and chapter two, I could just have it give the number or spell out the number or say chapter and then spell out the number. I don't need that for so I can uncheck that.

You can also have images, and this is really handy for a lot of different genres. You can have an image, and this is where you choose where the image is placed. It could be behind all of the text if you wanted something like a more decorative background. It can be inserted above any of these different chapter titles or subtitles. So, lots of things you can do there. You can have individual chapter images for every chapter if you wanted. With AI, it's not that hard to do and can really make a a difference. So, think most people have read the Harry Potter books. Those Harry Potter books have a little just like pencil drawing for each chapter. So, you could do something like that. You can also change the percentage with the those images and everything.

Next is paragraphs. So, you'll notice here in my preview that this first line has a larger letter here. So, that's what these do. Has a drop cap and it leads in small caps. You can also have first sentence formatting before every scene.

Going to subheading, this isn't really relevant for fiction authors, but for nonfiction, you might have headings within your chapter, in which case you can format all of those individually. And here's where we can talk about the scene break. So, I already showed you what my scene break looked, but you can actually change what each scene break looks like right here in the this list of images. So, here are a couple of scene breaks images that are built into Atticus, and you can also just create your own if you want. So, those are some options there.

You have notes. So, this is one of the great things that Atticus does, particularly if you're into nonfiction, is that you can add footnotes [music] or endnotes at the end of your book. This is something that is incredibly hard to format yourself, and Atticus just does it automatically. I promise I'm not like I have no affiliate link or this is not sponsored by Atticus. I just use it a lot. The only other tool that is kind of like reliably do footnotes and endnotes is Adobe InDesign, and that one has a huge learning curve for it.

Print layout, this is where you the gutter margin is established. So, if you didn't want that gutter margin, you could actually replace this number for whatever reason. Uh you can also select what happens with widows and orphans uh or versus a balanced spread uh page spread versus a hybrid. Uh this just has to do with like if you have a paragraph at the end of your page that has just like it goes to the next line and has a single word, it can kind of like make the flow of the page look bad. So, having that [music] established can be really useful.

Typography, so here's you can select the actual font. This is for print only because ebooks depend on the font that's used in the e-reader that the user is using. For the print version, you can select what the font is of the book and the size of that font. So, you can even do large print if you wanted to increase the size of everything and this line spacing as well. In fact, there is a large print button here that if you just select this, it will automatically put you at all of the legal settings cuz there's actual like recommended settings for what large print should look like. So, that's kind of cool. And now I'm going to have to like bring this back down. Okay.

Then there's the the header and footer which can vary. So, you might want a like a title and chapter or in the center or on the sides or it could be author and title in the center on the sides or in the case of these first four, you have the page number on the top. Here you could have the page number at the bottom, you know, you just whatever you want there. You can also select the header and footer font.

And then finally, but definitely not least here is the trim size. So, when you're creating a paperback book, the trim size matters a lot because cuz Amazon has specific settings for each trim size. This is the actual size of your physical book. I usually like to leave it at 5 in by 8 in. 6 by 9 is another standard that's typically the standard that you'll see for like your average hard cover book is a 6 by 9. I like things a little smaller myself, so I keep it at 5 by 8, but they have all of these templates, and each of these are supported by there's KDP, Ingram Spark, and Lulu. So, if you see these colors, that'll show you that they're supported by those companies. Typically, you want to select one with this yellow orange-ish square here, because those are the ones that Amazon allows. So, those are the ones I would worry about.

So, once you've done that, you can save it. I'm not going to, cuz I made some changes here, and I want to keep the template that I had. I'll just go ahead and discard that, but you can see like once you've gone through and created a theme that you like, you can just reuse that theme as many times as you want. Maybe create some alternatives. So, like for that instance, in this one, I created one that was essentially the same, but with large print. So, it had all my same settings, but was designed for a large print for that particular series. And I also created this one, which is also the same, but has a dyslexic friendly font on it, so I could create print books that were designed for people with dyslexia. Stuff like that. Very really helpful information here, and definitely a tool that I recommend if you want to save yourself a whole lot of time. It is a one-time price. I'm not going to tell you what the price is, cuz it could change based on when you're seeing this video, but it is a one-time lifetime deal, and definitely worth it, in my opinion, especially if you plan on doing this publishing thing for a while.

Once you have everything you want, all you have to do is just say export PDF and export EPUB, and you now have the files that you need to upload to Amazon, or virtually any of the other self-publishing platforms, in order to actually publish your book. Combine that with your book cover, and you are set to go for our next module, which will cover the publishing process. Well, let's get into that next.

Well done, you've made it to module 10, the last in this full course to go from zero to a fully published book. In this module, we're covering the self-publishing process. Now, we're not going to get into the marketing of your book in this course, because that could be another multi-hour full course in itself. We're just talking about how and where to get yourself published and set up for success in those areas.

>> [music] >> And when it comes to self-publishing, there really is only one major player in the room, love them or hate them, and that is Amazon. Amazon currently controls about 85% of the book market for ebooks, especially when you take into account Kindle Unlimited, which is where you will likely make your most amount of money. So, the majority of this course will be focused on showing you the publishing process on Amazon because if you're not on Amazon, there's a decent chance you won't make a lot of money.

Additionally, at a point in the process, I'll show you how to enroll your book in KDP Select, which makes sure that your book is in the Kindle Unlimited program. This means that your ebook, and just your ebook, must be exclusive to Amazon's platform, which no one really likes, but it is the still the best option for most books in most genres, as the number of readers on Kindle Unlimited, or KU as it's called, are enough to be the majority of your revenue, especially for certain genres like romance. Like, if you're writing romance, it's like not even a question. You should be in KU.

But, if you don't have exclusivity to Amazon, there are a few other platforms to be aware of. Besides Amazon, there are four major marketplaces: Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Google Play Books. If you go through Amazon's uploading process, you'll find it very similar on these other platforms, so I won't show them to you here. But, like I said, you can only do this if your ebook is not exclusive to Amazon. And it can also be a lot of work to do all of that uploading, especially later on when you inevitably need to update small things and like 20 plus books and have to do the whole uploading process again, which is why I usually recommend you pick an aggregator instead because they can not only get you into those four big ones, but into dozens of smaller ones as well, including all of the different library apps. The two best aggregators currently on the market that I know of are PublishDrive and Draft2Digital. They both have different pricing structures, and for most authors, I find Draft2Digital to be the best one with the lowest fees overall. But, for authors who are making a lot of money from just a handful of books, so like each book is making a whole lot of money, PublishDrive's pricing structure might actually make more sense for you.

Now, I generally recommend that newer authors just stick to Amazon until you feel like you've mastered the game, aka you are making a decent income from Amazon alone. Only then will you have the skills and the knowledge to know if it makes sense to go wide on all of these other platforms.

Another more advanced form of publishing that once again, I only recommend that you do after you're making a decent income on Amazon is this concept of selling direct. This is where you sell your books directly on your own store. There are a bunch of major advantages to this. For one, you get to keep 95% of the revenue instead of 70% or less. You also get all of the emails from your buyers, which is easily the best way to build your email list and is something that none of the other retailers do. And you get to control the entire process from how your landing page looks to how you choose to deliver your book. Want to include some bonus digital goodies with your ebook? You can do that. Want to bundle ebook and audio? You can do that, too.

But, there are major downsides to selling direct, as well. The big one is that you pretty much have to use ads to drive people to your platform, otherwise no one will see it. So, not only do you need to master the art of writing and publishing, but you also need to have mastered the art of advertising and marketing. Plus, it's nearly impossible to make this model work with only a few books. You need a fairly large catalog to make selling direct make sense. I'd say a minimum of about 12 books is what you should aim for, personally. And that is why I recommend mastering the process on Amazon first, then potentially moving to a selling direct model only after you've gained experience and a large backlist, as well. But, it can be quite profitable if all of those stars align.

So, with all of that out of the way, let's go through the entire process to upload your book to Amazon, including the generation of all the materials like your book description and keywords. Let's start there.

So, in this uploading process, you will need to have a book description. And you might need to actually do this before you get to this stage because you need to put your book description usually on the back of your book, which will happen at the book cover stage. But, regardless, we're going to cover it here. And I since we've been doing a cozy sci-fi for the examples in this course, I decided to look up a cozy sci-fi to use as a template for a book description. Generally, the book descriptions, while there are a couple of aspects of conventional wisdom when writing these things, they do vary from genre to genre. It is a good thing to try and find a really good best-selling book in that genre, especially if it's indie. Uh the traditional publishing books don't quite put the same amount of effort into it as an indie publisher might. So, find a high-performing indie book like this one is. You can see it's got lots of reviews. And then you can walk through this process to create a template, cuz you know I like templates, to write a book description for your book.

So, all you'd have to do is we'll come to this, and I'm going to just copy this book description, and we're going to go into Claude for this. And here I'm going to say, "I want you to do an analysis of this book description from a copywriting perspective, analyzing it sentence by sentence to see what it is doing." So, I just put that in there, then paste the book description in, and then let it go. And while that analysis is going on, I'm going to step into Story Hacker OS and grab our book synopsis that we created. In fact, we can just grab the entire uh story dossier. And because this has the general pitch of what our book is about. And uh we're going to get back into Claude here. So, here it's done the sentence by sentence analysis. So, buckle up, it's going to be a smooth ride. This is the hook line, set apart at the top, and it's a small joke that announces the entire value proposition. Buckle up primes you for thrills, then smooth ride yanks the rug. So on, and it'll do that for every sentence. And say, "Okay, now that you've done that analysis, I want you to write a similar book description using the same template for a book with this plot." And now I just paste in our story dossier, which we should have created earlier in the process, and let it go. And now we'll see it write a high-converting book description. And then here is our book description. It looks a little lengthy to me, but you could always change that. And here it is, using a similar format. Two weeks, catalog the junk, sign the forms, sell it to salvage. What could possibly go right? Hello, I'm Daria O'Shea, and for 11 years I've approved other people's fresh starts from a cubicle the color of old mustard. So when a relative I'd met exactly twice died and left me a 30-year-old orbital monitoring station, I had a plan. Spend a fortnight cataloging the rest, sign transfer deed 88 Delta, and sell the whole bucket to Apex salvage before my lunch break ended. I did not plan on the squatters. So already it's using a very similar format to this one that we had here. Very, but not like copying it, as you can see. Cuz this one starts out, buckle up, it's going to be a smooth ride. Howdy friend, I'm Rusty and so is my big rig's engine. When the old girl finally gave up the ghost in the middle of nowhere, I wasn't expecting to get a tow from an alien mothership, but the next thing I knew, me and my buddy Mike were halfway across the galaxy in an oversized hubcap full of the weirdest space creatures you ever did see. So you can see it's using a very similar tone with what we have here. I would say this probably is a two a little bit too long, so I might ask it to shorten it a little bit. So it's maybe like cut two paragraphs from that. But overall, this is good and we can use this. So that's asset number one that we need to develop before we start the publishing process.

The other asset that we haven't covered yet is the keywords. So keywords are interesting. If we go to Amazon and you look at this, you know, this search bar up here, and we type in cozy sci-fi, you will see usually there's some suggestions that come up. Okay, so here we are like cozy short mystery, cozy sci-fi, cozy series, cozy supernatural, cozy spicy romance, slice of life fantasy. All of these things pop up. These are keywords that people are actually putting into Amazon. Now, I'm seeing a few more cuz I'm using a plugin called AMZ Suggestion Expander or something like that. And so it's giving me a few more to look at. But that's one place you can go to see what keywords are there. Now, if you've done a lot of genre research, you would may know a lot of your cozy your keywords already. And a common practice for fiction, especially, is to put one or more of your keywords in the subtitle. As you can see this one did here. It put the word cozy, it put low stakes, it put slice of life sci-fi adventure. So this clearly is aiming towards that cozy slice of life genre. And so these are might be if you look through other books in this genre, you might find a couple of keywords that are like, yeah, that should probably be included either in the subtitle or in your designated keyword slots. Amazon gives you seven keyword slots. And there are various strategies for them, but we're not going to worry too much about like all the fancy strategies because a lot of them also require paid tools.

I will show you one of those. It's called Publisher Rocket. You can do a keyword search here. So if we do cozy sci-fi and select go get 'em rocket, it will give us a couple of matching related keywords. We can see how viable they all are. They all have good competition scores, but it doesn't look like a ton of people are searching for them. This is a very niche genre, so I'm not surprised by that. But another thing you can do in Publisher Rocket that I find really helpful is that you can grab the ASIN number for any particular book. So we're going to grab the one here from its product details. You can also get it in the URL. If we copy that and then go into Publisher Rocket, we can actually do a reverse ASIN lookup and see what keywords is this book ranking for. So I'm going to paste that in there, say go get 'em rocket. And here it gives me some of the keywords that this one is ranking for. Now, obviously it's going to rank for its name and its author name, but then here are some others that we can look at like low stress space, interesting. Space fantasy adventure, no stress book. So, now I can see like, oh, maybe no stress is actually a keyword I want to target. No stress sci-fi, science fiction and fantasy no romance, interesting. Low stress fantasy, space adventure SF book series. So, this is a great place to mine keywords for your book. So, I would probably pick something like low no stress book or no stress space, no stress sci-fi, etc. and try to incorporate some of those into the uploading process.

Once you've got a list of at least like seven or eight keywords, it's time to actually start uploading your book onto Amazon. So, let's go look at that now.

Now, to get started here, you go to create new title or series, say click create ebook, and you'll come to this page here that'll be all blank with nothing in it. And you can see some things like this is where the book description goes, this is where those keywords go. I'm going to actually show you a one that is all filled out. This is my book how to write urban fantasy. So, you start with language, of course, select whatever language your book is in. I assume most of you will be putting that in English. Then you want to add your book title and your book subtitle. In this case, because this is a nonfiction, I put my book my main keyword in the title, but if you didn't put it in the title, you would want to put it in the subtitle. And if you're doing fiction, definitely I recommend putting the genre that the specific subgenre that your book is in in the subtitle. It makes it really easy for readers to identify what type of what type of book you have.

Then you can add a series. So, you these you have to kind of create separately and then tie them in here. So, if your book is book one of the series, you can add that in here. If your book is a second or third edition, you can add an edition number here. For most people, that's not going to be relevant. And then of course, your author name or your pen name here. So, if you're using a pen name, use that. If you're using your main author name, use that as well. You can also add additional contributors here if you so desire. They include but editor or another author. So, if you do a co-authored book, you can put that author there. Can add editor or like forward by or like your book cover designer, you can put it in here. If you're translating a book, you can put a translator. All of those additional contributors can be tracked here. If you're just writing a book yourself, you don't need to put anything here really unless you really love your book cover editor or your book cover designer or your editor or something like that, you can put their names in here. Get their permission first though.

And then here is where you put your book description. So, in this case, if I if we were doing a brand new book, I would just come here to this book description that we generated, copy it and put it into here. The only thing I would pay ask you to pay attention to is the formatting. So, you do have a basic formatting options here. The only one that I would definitely make sure you do is make sure your opening line is a heading. So, that will show up as bigger. And you can't really see it in this preview that we have here, but if you notice here, it says when I've got this text selected, it says normal here. But when I select this header, it says heading four. That's what you want to select. So, make sure your header is a heading four and then make sure any parts that need to be bolded or italicized or set into bullet points like I have here, which is more common with non-fiction, those can all be formatted here. You just want it to look nice and not look like it's all just huge chunks of paragraphs all kind of squished together. That's what you want to avoid. Uh you want it to be relatively like pleasing to the eye for the person who is going to read that book description.

All right, the next section is the publishing rights section. For most of you, you'd select I own the copyright and I hold the necessary publishing rights. We could talk a lot about copyright regarding AI, uh but as long as you've put in human effort, you do hold the copyright to what you've created. If you're republishing a public domain work or something, you can select that. Keep in mind, this only applies if you were like literally copying and pasting huge chunks of a public domain work into what you're producing here. Like if you produce the entirety of Pride and Prejudice exactly as it was, and maybe just added your own little commentary or something like that, that would be a public domain book that you would want to select this. If you are writing, let's say Pride and Prejudice fan fiction, or a derivative work that's clearly inspired, might have the same characters, but is a new book, that is your book. That is not public domain. It is based on derivative from a public domain source, which means it's legal for you to do that, but at the same time you would not select public domain here.

Next, you want to go through primary audience. This is where you mention if you have any sexually explicit images or a title. So, this could be this is really only relevant if you write erotica or something like that. Or does the book's [music] title contain sexually explicit language? So, this is only for the cover or the title. If you have spicy scenes within your book, you don't have to disclose that here. That's just something separate. You can also add the reading age here. This is important if you're doing like children's books or teen books, but unless you're doing that, I would leave these alone. I never fill these out.

Select your primary marketplace, which for me is amazon.com, but you have .co.uk, .ca, you know, .de, all of these are available to you depending on what region you're in. And then you select your categories. So, with Amazon, you were allowed to select three categories. And back in the day, there's like a whole bunch of like almost quasi scammy advice on how to game the system with categories. And [music] I won't get into what that all looked like, but it led to a whole bunch of people putting their books in categories that they didn't really belong in, just so they could get more visibility in those, you know, lower competition categories. These days, that doesn't really work. And one of the reasons Amazon made it so that you can only select three categories is to kind of force you to select the most important categories. So, you're not selecting like, okay, three relevant categories and then seven categories that aren't really relevant, but you could maybe have a chance of being a best seller in that category. You can only pick three now. And what I would strongly recommend is that you pick the three most relevant to your book. Do not worry about trying to game the system and try and get a low competition category. There are tools out there, even Publisher Rocket, which I just showed you, that will kind of show you which categories are growing, which ones are low competition, and that's fine information earlier when you're doing the research process for your genre. If you want to find a genre that you know is going to have good growth or be low competition, you should do that before you start this process. Once your book is published, I find that it's most important that you pick the most relevant categories for your book, [music] and just leave it at that. So, to do that, you just go to edit your categories, and because I already have three here, I would have to like go through these different categories and subcategories to find the ones that are most applicable to me, but this is where you do that.

And then finally, for this page, you can add in your keywords such as they are. And once again, when you're doing research ahead of writing the book, you can, you know, find a genre, find keywords that are really good, that are people are looking for, but after the fact, you want to make sure that your keywords are just relevant to the book. I would put your most important keyword, which is usually the subgenre that you're in, in your subtitle, and then the rest of these can be like variations of that, or it could be like strong female lead, or anything to do with your protagonist, or your world, or anything like that. So, you can put those in there. And then you move on to the next stage.

Well, I should also point out that you have the option to set your book for pre-order. Uh if you're doing this for the first time, obviously, in my case, this is a form like I published this book already, but you can select when it goes out. Like, is it going to go out the day you hit publish, or is it going to go out in the future? You can select that there.

So, from there, you would go to the next stage, which is Kindle eBook content. So, we just established Kindle eBook details, and there's a content page and a pricing page. So, for the content page, you upload your manuscript here, and you can select whether you want digital rights management for that, which in most cases I select no. Then you upload the book cover that you have for your eBook, cuz we're only doing the eBook right now, and you upload that file here.

And then we get to the AI-generated content section. And this is where you actually disclose where whether you use AI or not. And I strongly suggest you be honest with this section, because this not being honest is against Amazon's terms of services. They do not ban you for using AI. They're not going to penalize you for using AI, but they will penalize you for being dishonest and going against their terms of service. So, make sure to be honest in this section. So, for this, this is a a short guide that I created on the genre, and it was heavily written by AI, and then I went through, did extensive editing, and there are elements of the book cover that were AI-generated. Not everything. In fact, I did actually pay a designer to do this particular cover. I just manipulated it a little bit and added some things that were AI-generated. So, I put for the text, you have the four options: You have some sections with minimal or no editing, some sections with extensive editing, entire work with minimal or no editing, or entire work with extensive editing. So, just pick whichever is most relevant, and then you can also put the tools that you used in this process. Same goes for images, you have the same options: One or few or many with minimal or no editing or extensive editing, and >> [music] >> you also put the tools that you used there. And you can also do this for translations. So, if you were translating a book from one language to another using AI, you'd want to put that here as well. Or if there's no AI involved whatsoever, just select no. Keep in mind that your designers, depending on who you get, may be using AI in some of their elements, and so you want to make sure you know from them whether there was AI used in your cover or not.

All right, and then you can do the Kindle preview, which will just give you a brief preview to look at what it might look like for the user on a particular device. Uh you can have tablet, phone, or a Kindle e-reader, and I just kind of flip through the first few pages of this just to make sure everything looks okay, and it does, so I'll hit back.

Then you can put in your ISBN and publisher if needed. I never recommend people use ISBNs because they're insanely expensive, and you don't actually need them. Uh I could do a whole video on that perhaps in the future, but basically, you don't actually need an ISBN to publish your book anywhere you want to publish that book. There's very very little advantage that you get from having an ISBN, and nothing no monetary advantage whatsoever.

All right, and then there's access accessibility features. This one was added recently. If you're adding images into your book, it's good to have things like their alt tags, which describes the image, which you can do in a tool like Atticus, and then you can select, you know, what you've done there with those alternate text and images descriptions and all of that.

Once you've gone through all of that, that's the bulk of what you have to do. The last thing to select is the pricing, and let's go to that next.

And here is where you will have the option of KDP Select enrollment. This is how you get your book into Kindle Unlimited or KU. It's a free 90-day program offered to Kindle ebooks. It allows you to run discounts in promotions like Kindle Unlimited. To enter the Kindle Storyteller contest, your book needs to be enrolled in KDP Select. So, there are advantages besides just Kindle Unlimited to having your book enrolled here, and you can enroll it here at this stage if you want, but do remember that means your ebook will need to remain exclusive to Amazon. It cannot be available on other ebook websites. You could do whatever you want with your print books. Those can still go to other websites if you want, but for ebook, it has to remain exclusive to Amazon.

Next is territories. I just always select all territories. And then the primary marketplace, again, select whichever one is most relevant to you. And then you have pricing, royalty, and distribution. So, there are two options here. You can get the 35% royalty or the 70% royalty. And you might ask, why would anybody want to have the 35% royalty? Um most of the time you don't, but there are limits to what you can do at the 70% royalty. The big one is that you need to have a book that is priced between $2.99 and $9.99, uh at least with the US pricing. I don't know exactly what it might be for other markets. So, it needs to be within that window, or you have to use 35. So, if you went and wanted to sell a book for $20, you'd have to use the 35% royalty rate, which would actually be the same amount of money coming to you as if you sold it for $10 at the 70% rate. Generally speaking, the most you want to charge for a book is 70 uh is $9.99 because that is the most you can get at the 70% range here. You could always sell a book for $100 and get 350 from that and get $35 from that sale at the 35% price, but it's just easier to stick to the 70 whenever possible. The only exception that I see authors regularly do is if they want to do a sale on their book and sell it for, say, $0.99, in which case 35% is what you would have to select. Sometimes that's worth it if it's, say, in a series. So, let's say you have a long series, like eight books or more. You can put your first one at $0.99, and you're only making $0.35 for that book for every sale, but maybe a lot of those people, you'll get more people buying it at that price, and then they'll go on to read the full series, which you can have at a higher price.

In this case, I keep this book at $4.99. What price you select for your book should depend on what your competition is doing. So, look through other books in your genre. What is a common price for them? And just go with something like that. Usually, something around $4.99 is about the average. Although, if you write non-fiction, $9.99 is pretty common as well.

Once you do that, you go ahead and make sure that you go through all of the other prices, make sure they look good. The only ones that I really tend to manually do, because it'll do an automatic conversion, I usually like to set the prices for the British pound and the euro at the same that I put it in dollars, just so it looks nice, so it's not like a random number like $4.32 or something like that. Uh but the rest I just let the automatic conversion go, and then you just hit publish. And congratulations, you have published your first book on Amazon. The next step is marketing, which uh as I mentioned is not going to be in this video.

And also, I want to say congratulations for getting through this entire full course video. That was a whole lot to process. I hope it was useful for you. You feel free to go back and review it as often as needed, because obviously, there's a lot to this process. But I want to congratulate you, because not too many people are going to be getting through this entire thing and actually doing the work and going through the process. So, once again, I just wanted to put in one final plug for my community. If you want more access to me and a community of like-minded people to share thoughts with and to get questions answered, as well as my Story Hacker OS software, which I've featured a few times throughout this video, go ahead and check out the first link in the description down below, and I will see you in the next video.