How to Write a GOOD Book with AI in 2025 (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

We have a problem now that AI is here. It seems like anybody with a computer and internet access can write a book. While some people think that writing with AI is just as simple as pushing a button, it really isn't that simple. Honestly, most books turn out terrible if you do that. But that's only if you don't understand the basics of what makes a good book, as well as good prompting techniques in order to get the AI to write like a bestselling author.

In this video, I'm going to show you how to write a good book using AI in 2025. If you're new here, my name is Jason Hamilton. I'm the nerdy novelist. I've been a self-published author for over eight years now, and three of those years I actually worked at Kindlepreneur, one of the largest resources to learn about self-publishing, writing, and marketing your books. I've written about 20 titles to my name, and I built this channel because I saw a lot of AI Bros out there talking about how to write a book with AI. It was very clear to me as an experienced author that none of them had ever written a book in their life.

So in this video, I'm going to walk you through all of the steps to write a good book with AI, both fiction and non-fiction, because they actually follow a very similar process. We're going to cover the tools that you're going to need. We're going to talk about two different methods: one for discovery writers and one for outliners. I'll walk you through all of the steps in that process.

Let's start by talking about the tools that you would need to actually write a good book with AI. My general recommendation for tools is to have one specialized tool that is specifically geared to write long-form fiction or non-fiction, and then complement that with one chatbot. I'll get into what those are in a second, but they are the simplest interface. They're not as adaptable, but sometimes having simple is better. So combining a more specialized tool with a chatbot is a really good idea.

Now, the most common chatbots out there are ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. There are others as well, but those are likely going to be the three that you want because they house the most powerful models. You don't have to have all three; you can just choose one. But with the one that you choose, I would go for the $20 tier in order to get a little bit more use out of the AI and to realize that you are making an investment in your author business. Sometimes having a little money that you're spending can be extremely motivating to actually use that money wisely and get writing.

My personal favorite out of the bunch is Claude, but really both ChatGPT and Gemini have made some impressive strides lately that have upgraded their models significantly. I find all three of them really to be sufficient. The purpose of having a chatbot at your disposal is to have a catchall for everything that's not directly related to writing long-form fiction.

You're going to find in your writing journey that you're going to have a lot of use cases that just don't quite fit into a specialized tool. The specialized tools can be amazing at helping you write the book, but let's say you just wanted to brainstorm ideas, develop a character, or brainstorm some world-building ideas. Whatever you can think of, sometimes those things don't fit neatly into a specialized tool. So having a chatbot that's more versatile, albeit simpler, is a good idea.

For the specialized tools, there are three that generally take the top tier in the writing world: PseudoWrite, Raptor Write, and Novel Crafter. PseudoWrite is good for fiction; I wouldn't really use it for non-fiction, and honestly, it's not my favorite of the bunch. But it does have a specialized large language model that is actually really good at the fiction writing process, so I wouldn't discount it entirely. I'll be sure to do a more detailed comparison later on.

Then we have Raptor Write. The great thing about Raptor Write is that it is free for the software. You still have to pay through an API through OpenAI in order to get your AI-written words, but that is usually not a very expensive process. The great thing about Raptor Write is that it's very simple. People that are just starting out with AI might prefer Raptor Write to start with because it is a very simple process. It'll teach you the basics of writing with AI. It might also be a better option for discovery writers who don't want all of the bells and whistles; they just kind of want to focus on the next part of their story and not have to worry about everything else.

Then there's Novel Crafter. Now, Novel Crafter is my personal favorite of the bunch. It's kind of the Adobe Photoshop of these specialized tools because it can do a huge amount of things, not just for writing fiction or non-fiction. I know people that are using it to write tabletop game campaigns for things like Dungeons and Dragons. Of the bunch, it's definitely the most versatile tool, which is why I like it. However, it is a little bit more complicated and takes a little bit more of a learning curve to get into it.

It does also have a small expense in addition to the AI words that you're going to be pulling in through an API, just like Raptor Write. It also has a small monthly expense on top of that, but it's usually not that expensive compared to other tools like PseudoWrite or even compared to the chatbots, which are all $20 a month. Generally speaking, you're probably going to be spending less than $20 a month using Novel Crafter.

For demonstration purposes in this video, I'm going to be using a combination of Novel Crafter with ChatGPT since ChatGPT is the most well-known tool. But keep in mind that you could do a similar process to what I'm going to be showing you with any of the chatbots and with any of the specialized tools that I've mentioned.

So with that, let's get to Method One on how to write a book with AI. This first method of writing is actually the simplest and one of the easiest to get started with, so you might want to try it to get started. For this method, I'm only going to be using one tool: Novel Crafter. Although you could use a chatbot for this as well, I find Novel Crafter makes this process relatively simple. Other tools, particularly Raptor Write, are very suited for this mode of writing as well, and so you could absolutely use those tools as well.

I'm just going to show it off for you here in Novel Crafter. In Novel Crafter, you want to go here to create a novel and just put in the title of your book here and your author pen name. I'm just going to actually call this "Discovery Writing Demonstration" and hit "Create Novel." It puts you into the Novel Crafter interface here.

Now, this is not going to be a full tutorial on Novel Crafter; I have other videos that you can check out that do exactly that. But I am going to show you a few things, just a few tiny things to set up before you get started. The first thing I would actually do is create a single character who's going to be your protagonist, and I'll show you why this is important in a second.

To do that, over here, we make sure we have "Codec" selected, which it is by default, and select "New Entry Character." We can name this character whatever we want. I'm just going to call her Candace, and we'll just say Candace is the protagonist. She is a police detective in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, and that's all I'm going to put in there right now. You could put a lot more information if you want, but I really want to keep this as simple as possible.

So that's all I'm going to put in there right now, just so it knows who this character Candace is and why she's important. We're going to just click out of that and go to this gear icon up here. Once you've clicked on that, you'll see these options at the top that say "Metadata," "Writing," "Collaboration," and "Export." You want to select the one that says "Writing," and we're going to select our point of view here.

So let's say we actually want this to be first-person point of view from Candace's perspective. We'd hit "First Person" and then we'd select the character. This is why we created the character, so we could select her here as the point of view character. We'll also want to specify whether this should be in past tense or present tense. Those are usually the two tenses that you're going to be using in writing a novel. Past tense is the most common, but just so you can kind of see what this looks like, I'm going to select present tense just for fun.

That's all you need to do. So now we've selected the tense of the story and we've selected the point of view. This is why having a specialist tool can be really useful for you, as it allows you to bake into your prompts things like this: the tense and the point of view. Otherwise, you would have to include that in your prompts. If I were doing this in ChatGPT, I would have to specify every time I prompted it. Every time I created a new chapter or something, I'd have to specify this is in present tense, this is the first point of view from this character's perspective, and you just have to include that information all the time.

Now, I don't really need to because I've selected it here in the settings. While it's technically possible to do everything that I'm doing inside of a chatbot, it's just more work. That's why having a specialist tool really smooths out that process and makes it really easy to get going.

Now, up here at the top, we have the "Plan," "Write," "Chat," and "Review." For this method of writing, we don't need any of these except for "Write." So we're going to go to "Write" and say "Add Initial Scene." All you have to do to get started in Novel Crafter is to do a forward slash, and it will give you the option of a scene beat or continue writing or a codex edition. Really, the only one that I use regularly is this one called "Scene Beat."

From here, you can say, "Candace walks into the police office and slumps down in her chair. Someone can tell something is wrong and asks her what the matter is, and she replies that the coffee machine is broken." Okay, so just a standard opening moment for this character. Then you see this button here called "Generate Prose." If we click on that, it actually gives us a whole bunch of different prompts that we can use.

In fact, I think by default there's only one here for this particular type of writing, and that is "General Purpose." All of these others that you see here I've created myself. So before I actually go to writing this, I'll show you a little bit of how this is done. Down here in the bottom left, there's a button called "Prompts." From here, you can select the defaults. All of these that say "System" are defaults; they can't be changed. But you'll see I have a lot more here besides the system prompts, and that's because I like to change the prompts sometimes.

The general purpose prompt gives you options for all of these different models that you see here. Any of these can be used. There are actually more models than this, but these are certainly ones that you could start with. Then also, you can go here to "Instructions," and this is the actual prompt that it's running. Some of this is going to look a little bit overwhelming. This is why Novel Crafter is such a powerful tool because it gives you a lot more creative freedom.

But it basically just gives information about the characters that we already put into this character here for Candace. It pulls that in, gives it some style information, and gives it information about the story so far, if there is any, which there isn't in our case. This section looks at the previous words written, and then this section here gives it the actual instructions.

So first of all, it pulls in the scene POV, which we specified, and it says continue the story and write about 400 words for the following instructions. Then it pulls in what we already wrote in the scene beat section and gives it a few more instructions and then runs the prompt. So if I wanted to run that prompt, I would just come here to "Generate Prose," "General Purpose," and then it would give me a list of models that I could choose from.

Here, we could select, for instance, 3.5 Sonet, which I consider to be one of the better ones, and hit "Go." It's created the first little bit of our story. Now remember, this prompt is asking for only 400 words. So if you wanted it to write a longer section based on what you put in there, you could just modify that prompt. In this case, since it's the system prompt, you would have to duplicate it and then modify that prompt and then use that one.

But I like this, so I'm going to hit "Apply." This is the most important part of the entire writing process using this method. First of all, let's read a little bit here. It says, "The fluorescent lights flicker as I drag my feet across the precinct floor, making my way to my desk." So already you can tell this is written in present tense. It said "flicker" instead of "flickered," and it's in first-person point of view.

"My shoulders slump forward as I drop into my chair, the worn leather squeaking in protest. The stack of case files on my desk blurs together; everything blurs together without my morning fuel. Officer Martinez glanced up from his computer screen, his bushy eyebrows furrowing. 'Looking rough there, Detective. World ending or something?' I let my forehead thud against the desk. 'Worse. Coffee machine's dead.' Actually, I like some of the dialogue that we've gotten here. 'No way, the one in the break room?' 'Yep, won't even turn on. But that thing's ancient; been here longer than both of us combined.'"

So there are actually some gems in here. But this is the important thing to remember as we're going through this process: we want to go through a validation process. Because if we were to just come on to the next beat, we'd create another scene beat. I would write out what happens, and it would continue. It would continue, but this time it would actually look at what it's written previously and continue on from there.

If we have imperfect text here or text that does not match the story as we want it to be, it will continue off of imperfect background text. So we want to actually go through this and make sure it's all up to our standards, both in terms of is it covering the story correctly, as well as is the prose good enough for us? Like, does it sound good?

For instance, I read this paragraph here: "The fluorescent lights flicker as I drag my feet across the precinct floor, making my way to my desk. My shoulders slump forward as I drop into my chair, the worn leather squeaking in protest." I could maybe enhance this a little bit to say, "nearly falling out of it as the force of my descent strains its suspension."

Then we could go to a new paragraph and say, "Everything was old here. I try to focus on the stack of case files on my desk, but they all blur together. Everything blurs together without my morning fuel." Yeah, I'm not sure I like this sentence. I think you could actually just leave it off. A lot of working with AI is trimming it in places where it's not doing a good job or adding little bits of usually more character moments, thoughts that they're going through, deep point of view, that kind of thing.

But assuming you've gone through all of this and you're happy with the results, the next step is to write your next scene beat. So we could say, "Martinez says he knows of a new coffee shop that just opened in a nearby town. It's only a 10-minute drive instead of 20. Candace likes this idea and decides to go visit. She says she'll be back in 30 minutes and to tell the Chief if he asks."

Okay, so then we just go to "General Purpose" and use the same model again that we've been using. "Martinez perks up, snapping his fingers. 'Oh wait, I forgot to tell you. New place just opened in Cedar Grove, right off the highway.' 'Cedar Grove? I left my hat. That's what, 10 minutes away, if that? Next to the old hardware store.'"

It's really adding in a lot of detail here that I didn't put in my prompt, which I love. Some of that's not going to be what you're envisioning, but this could be actually a good way to discover interesting things. And that is the name of this method: this is the discovery writing method. This is how you actually go through and write a book piece by piece without doing any of the prep work or anything. If you just want to get right into things, you can.

Now, let me show you how to do this for non-fiction. We're going to start again. Instead of deleting it, I'm going to put my own name in there: Jason. I'm going to say Jason is the writer of this non-fiction book. It's part memoir and part self-improvement book. So I'm really only just establishing myself as the writer of the words that are going to be coming out of this.

We're going to go back to the settings and just make sure that I'm listed here as the character. We're going to put this in past tense now but leave it at first person because I am the actual person writing these words. From here, we're going to start a non-fiction book about food addiction, which is something that I work with a little bit. So we'll just say something like, "Talk about how I was lost in the addiction, eating myself to death. Talk about how it feels like I'm out of control and that nothing, not even fullness, can stop me from eating."

Okay, this is how I would start a non-fiction book: really get started into the worst moment imaginable. Talk about the problem and really hammer home before I then talk about the solution. So from here, I would just go and select the same prompt or a different prompt that you may have created, and I'll use 3.5 Sonet again.

"I stared at the empty pizza box on my coffee table, my stomach stretched and aching. The grease-stained cardboard mocked me, a silent witness to another night of mindless consumption. Three hours ago, I'd promised myself I would only eat two slices. Now the whole pie was gone, along with half a bag of chips and a pint of ice cream."

And it goes on. So yeah, this is good from a memoir point of view, a good way to start a non-fiction book. If we were to start a new chapter, we could call this chapter "The Solution." Let's say we wanted to write less from a memoir type of point of view and more from like, "Here are the actual solutions that we wanted to go with."

I could just put in a scene beat and say, "Walk through the steps to overcoming food addiction, which are..." and then I would put in bullet points: "Get clear on what you are eating every day. Avoid sugar or refined flour, as these are the most triggering. Write down what you will eat the day before," etc. I could go on and on.

But from here, I'll just say "Generate Prose." In this case, we're not necessarily doing it from a memoir point of view; we're giving it actual information. Okay, so actually what it was giving me was still in the kind of narrative point of view. So I had to modify my prompt here to make it so it's a little bit more information-focused.

So now the prompt says, "Now stop writing from a narrative memoir point of view and talk to the reader. Walk them through the steps to overcome food addiction, which are 1, 2, 3. Make sure to use headings for each. Speak directly to the reader." From here, now I can go through and write these words, and it'll be a little bit better.

All right, it still gave me a little bit of an introduction here that was still in the narrative format. I could easily validate this and edit that out, but it does get to it here. It says, "Get clear on your daily food intake. Listen, you can't fix what you don't acknowledge. Pull out your phone right now and write down everything you ate today. Everything. Those three M&Ms from your co-worker's desk? Write them down. A handful of chips you grabbed while cooking? Include them," and so forth.

You could also create a prompt that's specifically designed to write non-fiction. I actually have a prompt like that that I've created. It's basically a copy of the general purpose system prompt that I've modified for non-fiction specifically. So there's a lot of flexibility here. You can definitely do non-fiction inside of Novel Crafter. Novel Crafter is really more of a tool for long-form books or any kind of writing really in a long format.

But again, this is the simple way to do it. This is the way to go: just one step at a time and writing it just by the seat of your pants. Now, let's talk now about the other way of doing this, which is to plan everything out ahead of time using a method that I call the fractal technique.

For this, we're actually going to go to ChatGPT. This is ChatGPT's basic interface. As you can tell, there's a lot less going on in ChatGPT than Novel Crafter, and that's in part a good thing because it makes things really simple and easy. Some people will tell you not to use chatbots like this because they're almost too simple and easy, and you lose a little bit of that flexibility and the control that you can have.

I think that you should be taking a best-of-both-worlds approach, which is why I recommend one chatbot and one specialized tool. Sometimes you do want more fine-tuned control over everything, and sometimes you just need something simple that makes it quicker and easier to do. So I think having access to one chatbot and one specialized tool is the best way to go.

So here in ChatGPT, we're going to start doing this fractal technique, which is to start small and to build from there. I'm going to do this in two different chats: one for fiction, one for non-fiction. But it's essentially the same process. So we'll start here by using this standard brainstorming prompt where I'm going to ask it for a mythical urban fantasy story, and it's going to give me a bunch of ideas.

By the way, if you are interested in this prompt that I just used, I have all of the prompts that I use regularly in a spreadsheet. You can get that for free by going to the link down below and signing up for my email list. You'll not only get my prompts, but you'll get an outlining template that I have, which I'll explain in a second.

Anyway, we've got a whole bunch of ideas. Once again, the validation process is important, and you need to go through these ideas and carefully select the one that you want. Assuming you don't already have an idea for your book, which may be the case, you might not need to do this step.

Let's say we like this one right here: "A private investigator who can see the future must stop a prophecy from destroying New York, but every clue reveals she might be the cause of the city's doom." That's actually not a bad beginner prompt for a story, so we can go ahead and select that.

The next step, of course, is to populate this world a little bit. You want to make sure we have the characters down, the world-building, a lot of that stuff needs to be finalized before we can start on the outline. Now, if you want to see what the AI would come up with, you can just go with the outline step anyway.

But sometimes I like to say, "Okay, let's go with number one: brainstorm three characters, three important world-building elements, and the climax of the story." I usually like to include the climax of the story because I want to know where the story is going, and that will actually help the AI to build a better outline later because it already knows where the outline is going.

With this little prompt, you can go ahead and say, "Okay, here's our main character: Cassidy Lane, Eli Crane, detective, Maria Voss," giving us some world-building elements here related to the story, and it gives us the climax.

Once again, you're going to want to go through and really validate this and make sure it's up to your storytelling standards. Some of this is going to be overly generic and not actually really interesting, so you want to go through and check that.

Assuming you've edited all of this, you're going to want to take the edited version and include it here and say, "Here is my edited version," and then move on to the next step. But just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to use this exactly as it gave it to me. Just keep in mind you're probably going to want to validate it further to make the quality even higher; otherwise, you're going to be left with a very poor quality book.

All right, this next prompt is a very long one, and the reason is because I'm going to give it a massive outline template. I find the outline templates help to get it structured, although this stage is going to require quite a bit of validation. So let me show you what I mean.

This is my 40-chapter plot module, and this document that you're looking at right now is another one that you can get for free when you sign up for my email list, so definitely go check that out below. I'm just going to take this entire outline template. As you can see here, it's very long; it's for 40 chapters, 41 actually.

I'm going to say, "Using the following outline template, create a full outline for this book." Then I usually like to have something in there that says, "The summary for each chapter should have specific details rather than vague illusions to what should happen. Write it as though you were going to hand it off to a ghostwriter to write the first draft."

Then I just put in the entire template that I just copied. It's actually done something that ChatGPT does specifically, which is to create a canvas where you can actually modify this a little bit more to your liking, which is a useful feature.

So now we've got the outline for Act One, with the prologue being the opening image here: "The city of New York is shrouded in dark, ominous clouds. Time fractures ripple through the skyline like glass shards. A shadowy figure, Eli Crane, stands on a rooftop watching his buildings flicker between existence and non-existence. He whispers, 'Only destruction can save us now.' The skyline collapses into chaos."

Okay, this sounds like more like the kind of thing that you would see in a dream sequence, so maybe we would add that in. We can put the chapter ends with Cassidy waking up from a nightmare, right? Something like that.

Then the next chapter starts with "The Unusual Day: A grimy Brooklyn office. Cassidy Lane, a private investigator in her 30s with a haunted look, reviews a case file while trying to ignore flashes of the future in her mind. Her visions are chaotic and unclear," and so forth.

It goes through the entire thing. Now, this is definitely something where you would want to validate this. As you can see, for some reason, the summary of each chapter got really small by the end of the thing, and it didn't actually finish it. So we could ask it, "Please continue with Act 2B and Act 3."

Now, if you wanted, you could actually just go one chapter at a time. I actually like to do this because I enjoy the outlining process the most. I usually write my own outlines and only consult AI if I am stuck on a particular chapter and I want to brainstorm ideas for what should happen just in the next chapter.

I'm not trying to do the whole chapter at once. Usually, when you try to do the whole chapter at once, it kind of messes a whole lot of things up. So what I might do is I'll have a separate document, and I'll try to get it to write the entire outline, but then I'll just pick and choose the elements that I like the most, then feed that back into the AI and say, "Here's what I've got for the outline so far. Can you fill in the gaps?"

Then it does that, and then I pick and choose from that which parts I like the most, and so on. There are a lot of different ways that you can go about it. The point is we are developing our outline at this stage.

From here, you could stay inside ChatGPT for the rest of this, but I would actually recommend that at this point, or earlier potentially if you want, we move over into Novel Crafter or Raptor or whatever tool you're using for the remaining section.

Let's say this is our prologue. From here, we can go to Novel Crafter, and I'm going to show you a feature I didn't show you before, which is the "Plan" section. In the "Plan" section, we can say, "Okay, this is the prologue, and this is the chapter one." You keep on going for the full chapters that you've got there.

Now from ChatGPT, you can copy over what you've got here and put that summary in the prologue. Grab what we've got for chapter one and put that into chapter one. Now Novel Crafter is going to be able to look at this and understand what's going to happen broadly in the entire chapter.

Another thing you might want to do at this point is put in your characters. For instance, we have these characters that the AI came up with for Cassidy Lane, so we would just come over here, create a character named Cassidy Lane, and put information that the AI gave us. If you validated, make sure to put anything you have in there as well.

I will often write these myself because there are specific things I want the AI to know. I want it to know, like, what does she look like? I want it to know what her dialogue and speech patterns are because those affect the way it writes. But just for now, for demonstration purposes, we'll just use what it gave us.

Then we would go through and make more characters for these other characters that it invented here, as well as maybe some of these world-building elements. For instance, here, if you select "New Entry," you can create other things besides characters. You've got location, objects, lore, etc. So some of those world-building elements might go into lore or into locations, whatever the case may be.

The point is you just want to fill this out with all of this information. Now, you have to be careful with this because a lot of authors can get stuck at this stage trying to make all of their elements perfect so that the AI knows everything it needs to know about their books. The fact of the matter is you don't actually need the AI to know everything about your books. All it needs to know is what happens next, and that is something that you are ultimately responsible for forming.

It doesn't necessarily need to know all of your world-building all of the time; it just needs to know the small section that happens next. So now that we've filled out Novel Crafter, the next part is to do similar to what we just did in the discovery writing phase. You create a scene beat, and then you write what should happen in the next section of the text.

Now, you might have no idea what should happen in the next scene, and so you can go back to ChatGPT here, copy in the text of the first chapter, and say, "Please break this down into..." and you can give it a number. I usually go between 12 and 20, so we'll say right in the middle, we'll do 15 steps for this scene to break it down into more specific details about what happens in the scene, something along those lines.

There are a number of ways that you can structure that, but then you just paste in the text for the outline, and it's going through and actually giving me the 15-step breakdown of the scene. I'm not actually sure I like this establishing shot, but we can maybe take both of these and just copy them into Novel Crafter.

So once again, we are moving from something small to something a little bit bigger, just to kind of flesh things out one step at a time. This is what we call the scene beat stage. Some people have different names for it. I think actually the word scene beat is maybe a little misleading, but it's essentially just a more detailed summary of the scene.

I'm only taking a few bits of it for this next stage, although you could put all of the scene breakdown in there and just ask it to write a really long scene. But I like to do it in smaller chunks. Let me show you how this works. So we'll just use the general standard prompt that we have here and use the 3.5 Sonet like we've been doing before.

I'm not saying you have to do it that way, but those are probably my favorite ways to go, and it'll write the beginning of the scene. It's actually writing from my perspective again because I forgot to remove myself as a character. But it actually created some interesting prose as a result.

It says, "As I document these extraordinary events, I must emphasize that what occurred in New York City on September 15th, 2023, defied all conventional explanation. From my vantage point at the observation deck of the Empire State Building, I witnessed the transformation of our city's familiar skyline that challenged the very foundations of reality."

Not perfect, but interesting because it's writing from the perspective of someone documenting it almost in a non-fiction perspective. So that was a little happy accident there, which you will find happens a lot with AI. It went through and wrote the whole scene.

The next step would be to take the next couple of beats, whether you write them yourself or whether you use what AI gave you, and you continue on in the format until the chapter is complete. Once again, you want to go through that validation process to make sure everything is up to snuff. You want to do this at the earlier brainstorming and outlining phases because if you don't do that, then you're essentially building a book on a flawed foundation.

You want to do it at the prose level too because otherwise, it's going to sound a little bit like AI writing, which to people like myself who have been working with AI for a long time is really easy to spot. You want to make sure you add your own little human touch in there, add some character moments, and make sure that everything looks good.

I also know people that will actually write a very rough draft of the story with just a little bit of dialogue, a little bit of description, but not a whole lot. They will give that to the AI and ask it to expand it with more description to improve the writing, and that is often a good way to go as well.

But regardless of whatever tool or technique that you use, the point is this does take a little bit more time than I think a lot of people think. I think a lot of people think it's just you push a button and out pops a book, but really that's not the case. In order to do this right, you have to be really thinking through all of the ideas. You have to be validating the results.

It's still very much your vision too because I imagine most of you already have ideas of what you want to do. Going through this process with your own ideas rather than just a random idea pulled out of ChatGPT, like I did in this demonstration, is going to make it even more like it's your baby.

Now I'm going to briefly walk you through the non-fiction process. It's basically the same thing but a little bit different. I already know the topic of this book. It's going to be a memoir/self-improvement book about struggles with food addiction. So I'm going to actually jump straight to the outlining phase and say, "I want to write a book about food addiction. It would be part memoir, part self-help book. Please give me a list of possible chapter topics."

So instead of trying to outline this from a fiction perspective, we're just asking for a list of topics that should be included in this book. In that sense, it's a very easier process in a lot of ways. It gives me a whole bunch of things: memoir-focused chapters. Okay, I like that to kind of go through my own story.

I might even want to layer these so that I'm alternating between a memoir-focused chapter and a self-help-focused chapter. I've seen books written that way. Then we have the self-help-focused chapters: understanding food addiction, identifying your triggers, etc., and going through that.

I could say, "Okay, this is really great," or it might give me some ideas like, "Oh, actually we should have a chapter about this." I might go through some of these chapters and say, "Well, that chapter actually doesn't fit." So once again, you go through the validation process and then break it down into the next step, which is to, instead of creating scene beats for a chapter, we're creating a more detailed outline of a given chapter.

For instance, let's say we wanted to flesh out this chapter right here. I would say, "Flesh out this chapter to include more specific information about what should be included in the chapter." So here we go. The chapter is about understanding food addiction: what it is and how it affects the brain.

Introduction to defining food addiction, clarifying what food addiction is, explaining that food addiction is characterized by compulsive consumption of certain foods, types of foods involved, etc. Sugar, salt, fat, processed carbohydrates—yep, that's all true.

Now, the validation process for non-fiction is slightly different in the sense that you're going to have to fact-check everything. That's the biggest thing that you're going to have to deal with when writing non-fiction: make sure that everything you say is accurate.

Now, you could provide the facts yourself. You can say, "Here are the statistics about food addiction," and include those in your prompts so that the AI gets it right. That's a great way to go about it. Or you can use a tool like Perplexity as a research tool to find all of that information that you need.

The nice thing about Perplexity is it will give you sources so you can fact-check everything right there inside of its own ecosystem. I haven't talked about Perplexity yet because I don't use it too often for writing types of work, but it can be a fantastic research tool. I actually use it more than Google.

So for instance, if I wanted to have a list of statistics about food addiction, I could just ask it, "Give me a detailed list of statistics about food addiction," and then I hit go. It gives me a very detailed list, looks up some sources. Now, some of these sources might not be good sources, so you do need to make sure you go through them, but it gives me a bunch of things here: "14% of adults and 12% of children in the United States meet criteria for food addiction. The global prevalence of ultra-processed food addiction is estimated at 14% of adults and 15% of youth. One in eight Americans over 50, etc."

Risk factors: women age 50 to 64. You know, all of this stuff. This is great information and great research that I could use in my non-fiction book. This is kind of essentially the same step as fleshing out your characters in your world-building in fiction, but in the case of non-fiction, you're just assembling research information, and Perplexity is a great tool to do that.

Once you have all of this stuff, you can go back to your chapter outlines, make sure they are accurate, make sure they have all the correct information, and then you move on to writing the prose. That process is pretty much exactly the same as what I've shown you so far, so I'm not going to go over it again.

The final step for both fiction and non-fiction is that you just continue this process until you have fleshed out the entire book. It's still going to take a long time, but the best thing about writing with AI is not necessarily the time it saves you. It does save you some time, but really the best thing about it is that it saves you headache.

Now you're not having to hold all of this information in your head. You're not having to make tiny micro-decisions about every single sentence that you write. That's one of the things that burned me out about writing: there's so much that goes into it. This allows you to kind of have a second brain to work with you to help you create that initial draft and allow you to edit it and validate it instead of coming up with it all yourself, which can be a real mind-saver and one of the reasons why I enjoy working with AI so much.

But that's not to say that you have to be using AI for every step of the process. Like I've shown you, as I've already mentioned, outlining is my favorite part, so I tend to do that myself. This is where I think AI can shine. I think you should use it to lift up your weaknesses and augment your strengths.

What I mean by this is if you get joy out of writing the first draft of your book, then by all means, continue writing the first draft of your book. But I think you will find that AI can help you at every step of the writing process because writing is not just putting down that first draft. It is brainstorming, it is character development, it is writing, it is revising, it is more revising, it is marketing.

There are all kinds of different pieces of the process, and I'm sure at some point one of those parts of the process is something that is not enjoyable for you. That's where you should really embrace AI to help you out and then spend more time doing the things that you actually love to do. That's a great way for AI to allow you to play to your own strengths and to help lift up your weaknesses.

Now, we've covered a lot in this video, but one thing we didn't really cover is the basics of AI and just how AI works. If you want to know more about this, I did do a video recently about that that you can check out. You'll have that foundational expertise that can really help your writing shine. So go check that out, and I will see you in the next video.