SPS 230 Using AI / ChatGPT To Write & Publish Your Book with Jonathan Green

He's a celebrity ghost writer and an artificial intelligence expert who lives on a tropical island in the South Pacific and he's turned being fired and a blizzard into a thriving online business over the last decade or so . Really excited for this interview , we're going to dive into all things AI , chat , GPT . Can you use it for writing ?

Can you use it for which parts of the book process ? A lot of stuff to unpack and talk about that . I think people are going to be really interested in Jonathan , welcome .

I was like I'm so bad at dating , no one's ever going to love me . I thought blogs were private . I was like this is just a diary on a computer . Then one day I looked and I was really really well known for writing about my dating misadventures just like all the craziness that happened to me . Then , from there , I started writing books .

Someone reached out to me and said would you write a book for us ? I was like sure , that's amazing to me . I wrote this book , really successful , and I said , oh my gosh , this is possible . From there I just smiled . Every time I say I'm not going to write any more books , I just start blogging like crazy . I realized I just love doing it .

It's like my favorite thing to do . I love doing it . I love when someone hears my story . It's why I can't stop myself .

They said we hired another writer for less money . We're launching in four days . We have nothing . Can you write a book in four days ? I was like well , price is going to be doubled . Let's do it , because I was able to deliver that and it's a big success . There's the two key components . I've known some great writers that take a really long time .

If you can only write a book up for years , well , it's really hard to build a catalog . But my skill is the intersection of speed and quality . That's just how I crank out books . I'm always trying to be faster because I want to tell so many stories . That's a big part of my journey .

I can't teach you about ChatGPT if you don't know which part is me and which part is ChatGPT .

While I was watching a movie I was like this is amazing , because ChatGPT never makes a grammatical mistake and it never misspells . I do both of those things a lot . It's just amazing . For that part , the perfect grammar part is just such a game changer .

I've made a strict rule for myself that I only do one round of rewrites in one final edit because it's very easy to keep perfecting it . You could spend 10 years changing word here , changing word there , no matter how many times you send it to an editor . Do everything . There's going to be a spelling . It's just inevitable .

The other lesson I learned is I put it in the back of every one of my books . If you find a typo , here's a link to a form on my website so you can tell me here instead of in a one-star review . That has been a game changer in the one-star review world , because I don't need a one-star review to tell me that I misspelled a word .

That really has changed it for me . Those are the two biggest things is make it easy for people to tell you made a mistake and then just accept that it's going to happen and it's okay .

Right , I just upload the new version to Amazon , to the other bookstores , and now no one else after you has to see that mistake . And after a couple of years people stopped finding mistakes in a book , but sometimes one of my books . After like four years someone found another mistake . I was like how did this get past ? Tens of thousands of people .

But it lets people fix the problem because it can be really devastating to get like a one star view . This person misspelled one word and it's not what we want for our book . So it helps the person to feel involved , helps me to create a better book and helps me avoid those nightmare one star grammar reviews Super smart , super smart .

So you've got the first four milestones , which are the more writing method , which is my map , outline , rough draft editing , right . Then you move into self editing , professional editing , cover design , formatting , launch , big picture , those kind of eight milestones of the process , right ? Where do you see chat , gpt or AI being most helpful in the overall process ?

So , for example , I don't write a lot of fiction . I wish I did . I only read fiction , I only write nonfiction . Let's say I wanted to write a science fiction story with you .

I would say , hey , chat , gbt , me and Chandler want to write a science fiction story . Give us three ideas to choose from . If we like one of them , now we've got our idea . If we don't like one , I say give me three more . And then I'll say great , who's the main character ? And it's really like a choose your own adventure .

So if there's something I like or don't like , I change . I go oh , change the name to this , change this to that . Who's the antagonist , who's the love interest , who are the other characters in the book ? I'll have it . Write me a character sheet for each character .

And it's very important to be interactive , because if you just keep hitting enter , enter , enter , it will start to get crazy and give you really bad responses . But if you're reading it and being interactive , then it's really fun because you are reading a book and making the decisions . So you're like the director and it's a very fun experience .

I grew up reading choose your own adventure books . That's how my mom tricked me into being a big reader . So you get to choose which of the three you like , which characters you like . Then I'll say and this is the important part , give me a 24 chapter outline of the book and tell me what happens to each chapter .

Then each chapter , I'll go give me the seven scenes from chapter one , the seven scenes from chapter two . So when I go to writing , I have chat gbt write , because it can only write about five or 600 words at a time .

So I'll say , hey , write the right chapter one , scene one , this right chapter one , scene two , this and I can get 160,000 where a book takes a couple of hours because it's writing it . That's pretty good . And I'm long the way because I've read a lot of books . I know what I like and don't like . So for fiction , that's really the entire process .

You can go into genres that you don't normally do . You can have an adventure and it really , really requires you to pay attention , because if you just let chat gbt write , it will start to drift where it forgets the initial prompt , it will change the characters in the book and things like that .

So the more you restrict it and say , oh , just follow this genre . And also , chat gbt is very wise , like it knows who you are . So I was looking it up because I said tell me Chandler's writing style . And it said Chandler Bolts writing style can be described as straightforward , practical and engaging .

His books are often filled with actual advice and step by step strategies reflecting his experience as an entrepreneur , educator , and it goes on about your conversational , easy to understand manner . So because it's read your book , now when you're writing your next book , you can say , oh , right , in my style , and so we'll actually edit and sound like you .

When I was editing my new book , I told it to be me and we kind of got into a fight because I was like two me's in one room , right , you got in this conversation . I was like , hey , stop rewriting it , I already wrote it . You're not a better writer than me . Like it's a very crazy thing to happen but it's kind of fun .

But once it knows your style and your language and the type of anecdotes , it's so much easier because you don't have to feed it a sample so it can actually edit into your style and kind of maintain the way you write .

So we're kind of diving into the writing part of this process and then I think we'll we'll progress and we'll kind of touch on a couple of things in there Reading chat , gpt , to create character worksheets , scenes , to create kind of the outline and to start to get into the writing so a lot of the mind mapping , the outlining in the rough draft , kind of first

three parts of the more writing method . So can you talk to me about ? So are you just , is all of this happening in chat GPT ? Is it happening in ? Are there other AI tools that you like ? And are you kind of prompting and then replying in that ? How does that process work ?

So that's my first part is creating the guide rails , and the second part of the process is really just being interactive . So for a beginner , the best advice I can give you is to ask this question chat GPT , I want to do X , what information do you need for me ?

So , for example , if someone's like I'm trying to figure out who my ideal reader is , that's a tough question for a new author , right ? We all hear that , oh , who are you writing for ? Who's your ideal customer ? I don't know , I'm a beginner . But I can say to chat GPT , I want to write a science fiction book .

How do I figure out who my ideal customer is , my ideal reader , what information do you need from me ? And then it will ask you seven questions in one row and I'll say ask me one at a time . I can't do seven at once . Just give me one at a time and you'll have this conversation and it elicits from you Amazing stuff .

So whatever you're trying to do , always start with a question . Chat GPT . I want to do this . What information do you need from me ? And it removes the problem . The classic computer problem is garbage in , garbage out .

So what I want you to do right now is go to self publishingcom forward slash schedule book a publishing consultation with one of the experts on my team . We'll talk about your goals for your book , your dreams , your challenges , your next steps and we'll start putting together a plan .

All right , so go to self publishingcom forward , slash schedule book a call with the team . Let's see how we can help with your book . It's time to implement .

What would be the two or three steps that you would take to do that ?

And part of doing this is so that if chat GPT drifts like it introduces a character not from the character sheets , I can go wait , wait , who is this ? Because I can see if they start doing things out of character , I can see that they're doing the wrong thing .

Then , once I have all the character sheets , I'll go great , give me a 24 page , give me a 24 chapter outline with two love subplots and increasing anticipation I think that's what I say Something like increasing intensity , so that the book has like building towards something .

And then it will give me the 24 chapter , like a paragraph at each chapter , and I read those to go I like this , I don't like that , I want more of this , I want less of that . So at this point I'm just reviewing the outline and going these are parts I like . Change this .

Once I have an outline I like , I then ask it for details as much as I need . So I usually break down each chapter into five to seven scenes and that allows me to . Then I know I can go to the writing phase , because that I've been small in a part . If you just say , chat , gpt , write a book , start with chapter one , it will drift very quickly .

But if you do it this way , just like mind mapping towards your book , then it stays on track and you have the outline to test against . You Go , this scene doesn't match this outline . You know it's off track . You can put it back on track .

Or how would I get ChatGPT to create the outline for the topic I already have ? Sure ?

If you're having fun , you're doing it .

Either it could be , I guess , be an outline that I've created myself and I want to get chat GPT's help writing the rough draft , or I use chat GPT to create the outline . How do I then take that outline and go from outline to rough draft using the help of chat GPT ?

say here's the outline for my book and copy and paste the whole thing into it and say be ready . Then I'll say I want to break each chapter down into the smallest parts possible . Chat GPT only writes a response that's five to 600 words . So if I ask it for something that's a thousand words , it's not going to do it . It might drift .

So the more you break it into smaller pieces and this can be where it really helps you Some people , if you really struggle with dialogue , it can really help you . That go , hey , I need the dialogue for this scene . One thing it won't do is write the naughty bits into romantic novels , which I found out and my wife was like , well , what's the point ?

So that's her favorite part of those books . But it won't do that . So that's one of its few rules . But it will do everything leading up to and after that . So it can really help you with helping with dialogue , which is hard if it's the first time , or it can really help you to make something interesting Because you can go .

Here's the four bullet points I want to happen in this chapter Help me make it interesting , help me kind of craft it so you can provide the bones and it will really help you with wherever you're strong , you can stay strong , and wherever you're like this is outside my comfort zone , really help me and it will help you in that way so you don't have to have

it write everything . There's just several ways to do it , to see it as a partner .

Is that assumption true , or are there other tools that you like and that you've seen work well ?

Maybe the Google or the Facebook versions will surpass it with their next versions , but right now it's just the best place to start . I do think that there's going to be new AIs constantly , but the idea or the way you communicate is consistent whether you're using Palm or Llama or whatever they name the next AI .

The structure will work the same , but for now , absolutely . I think chat GPT is the best place to start .

Jasper is kind of like they've removed a lot of the power to make it simpler , but it just it doesn't need to be . You don't need all that because you can't get the results you want .

Every time I write an article in Jasper , I go I can't publish this , whereas I can put something out of chat GPT that I can send out and it passes every AI test and someone reads it goes . This is good . That's really just affordable . The free version is fine and the maximum version of chat GPT is only $20 a month .

It's very affordable compared to any other AI tools Got it .

What that means is I'll say and I'll say chat GPT , who are the 10 best editors of all time ? And it will list 10 , like James Patterson's editor and a couple of other ones , and I'll say you know what I like ? This editors number seven . So I'll say chat GPT . I'll start a new conversation chat GPT , you are now this person right and edit in their style .

So what that does is it limits him to just one style . I know it's not him . It limits chat GPT just this one style . So you have guide rails and you can then have it work through the book and say read this whole book and do a structural edit . So you can't copy and paste your whole book into chat GPT .

You can't put in a PDF , upload it to Google Drive and then share that language at GPT and it will read the whole book . I actually had it read a book that I'm writing for a ghost writing client and it took some pretty heavy shots of me . I was like this is the early rough draft chat GPT .

But it pointed out some really important things that were structural issues that we're now fixing in the rough draft phase and that could be very helpful for big picture . You can say also is there anything characters do that are inconsistent ?

Like you know , sometimes you're writing a book and the characters eye color change or sometimes the character walks off the movie and you go where did the character go ? Chat GPT can check those things in the first phase . Then when I'm doing the final phase , the final edit , I haven't set to which editor style I want .

So , for example , I say this is for American English , not British English . This is the age of my audience . Make sure that I don't . And I want to write for this reading age . I'll say I want to write for ninth grade level or tenth grade level or whatever level I'm targeting .

And that creates those rails In case I sometimes use a word that's too big and not everyone knows and people will get lost , and then I have it just go through and I copy and paste 500 words at a time my way through the whole book . That's exactly how I edited chat GP profits .

I ran the way the whole thing through and it's not going to make any misspellings , it's not going to make any grammatical errors . So it kind of removes those two really common mistakes and the only thing is when you have the wrong word in place . It won't catch that all the time , but most of the time it will . Got it , okay .

It seems like the key limitation is how much that it can edit at once . So you shared , kind of like the Google Drive link to a PDF so that it can scan the whole book and that sort of thing . I guess that would be helpful for big picture edits .

When it comes to line by line or chapter by chapter edits , how do you navigate that with , obviously , the length of a book being probably 30 to 60,000 words and the length of a prompt being , you know , 600 words max or something at a time ?

You do it with an editing software , whether it's Grammarly or providing a tools I've used for a long time . It's going to take two days With chatGPD over here . You just have to keep checking it to make sure that it's not drifting . Sometimes we'll do is chain , like hey , I really don't like this , I'm going to do a dramatic rewrite .

I have to be watching like no , no , just fix Grammar and stuff . I already know it's got the structure I want . This is where I got into a lot of disagreements with any of my last book , because it was in my personality . It was like no , jonathan , I'm a better writer than you . I was like no , I'm a better writer than you .

I had to make it just edit , not do rewrites . That's why you always have to be watching . But as long as you're doing that , you can edit so much faster than any other method Because you're doing one small section at a time . If it messes up , you can stop it right then .

And one of the things that I'll do is tell it to start and stop with a specific emoji , like if it's editing , I'll have it do like the golden feather emoji . And if I see those disappear , I know it's starting to drift . So I put those markers in place so that before there's a mistake I'll go oh , the golden feathers aren't there . I know I need to .

Sometimes I have to take my edit prompt and start a new conversation to reset the AI ,

but those little tricks will help me to catch it early .

This is completely changed . So it's not it's small drift . It's usually something really zany that completely changes the topic . So as long as you're reading it , you'll notice like in a fiction book it would just start writing about a completely different topic . The character names will suddenly change and it'll be about a completely different genre .

So if you're watching it's easy to catch it .

I send it to early readers to catch things that I miss , but with this round it was the least messages I got from people about things that were off Most of the mistakes were . I accidentally put the same chapter in the book twice in a row , like a small formatting error , like that . It was the biggest issue people caught .

So it's a really , really amazing editor because it doesn't make misspellings , it doesn't do grammatical errors and it's very much analytical in that way . Whereas I , you know if my fingers slip , I'll type a word wrong . It never does that . So even if you have other , like structural issues , you just know . At least the book has no grammatical errors .

Actually , someone messaged me was like wow , who'd you hire to do a cover design ? I was like , oh , I guess it's doing a good job of people actually sending that message . And what's beautiful about it is that it never gets mad at you . Most of us , if we've worked with a logo designer or a cover designer , right , we go , no , change it again .

And they go why didn't you like the last one ? Right , and you finally accept the one before that he gets too confrontational . You can just say do it again , do it again , do it again . And so I wanted a very specific picture that like would pop from the page . I wanted like a bright aqua that would work well in black and white and color .

And once I knew that color , I look up the hex code . I can go just keep doing it , Just make sure this color is there . And I think I did 500 images in like 30 minutes . I just said , do it again until I found the one that I absolutely loved . And they're constantly adding new features .

They have this new feature called uncrop , so you can zoom out and it does the board around it , and you keep doing zoom outs until you go , oh , this is perfect . And then from there , once you have the cover image , the rest of it kind of just falls together . I just did it in Canva from its simple template .

Now , because of that and I can be , and I was like doing other books in the series I can say do this again , but make the hacker wearing red , make the fire behind her purple and doing these other colors . And now all the other covers are designed for like the next seven books in the series .

So you can get really granular and because there's no risk of hurting someone's feelings , you can just go no , do this , do that , do this , do that . And it really lets you be free . So it's just an accelerator for your idea and you can say I'm not sure what I want , Just keep drawing stuff , and then I'll start to see something I like .

I can upload that to Mid Journey and use the Describe prompt . I'll say describe this image to me and it will give me four answers . I just say make all four . That's actually part of the process of making my cover . I uploaded a stock photo of a woman in a cafe to see what words it wanted to use to describe her positioning .

Then it makes four versions from its four answers . One of them looked crazy , it was completely wrong . And then one of them looked really amazing and go . I'm going to use these words . So it gives me just like with ChatGP , mid Journey will just give me the words I want to use because it knows thousands of artists .

There's so many artists out there , it's impossible to know every name and every style , and this just lets it tell you , oh , this is a woman sitting in a cafe , this style , this language , this body position . And then I copy and paste that and say make it a cartoon with , like this element . It's like a cyberpunk hacker cartoon . I think is what I said .

It's creating something totally different , but in a similar vein . It's giving you four options and then you can either double click on one and start generating around a specific idea or say , hey , give me totally new options .

I either changed the person or the art style and I can build from there . So it gives you a great starting point from any image you like .

That's a skill set I don't have and I don't want to develop a skill set , because you can just keep getting revisions until it gets exactly what you want . If you just want to change minor things , it can really do that now , and then you can use an image upscaler If it's too low resolution , like I need to do for the paperback .

There's a bunch of free ones online . You just drop it in and it just gives you a higher resolution version , so you can get as big a size as you want now .

I know , like with fiction and romance there's so much with like body position and it's you hire someone to like use those generators to move the body around like a puppet . You don't have to do that anymore . You can just say this is the pose I want and just have it . Keep doing it until you're happy .

But anything that has to do with text or like book cover design , that's outside of skill set . It's just a painter Got it .

I don't tend to put images on the back cover of my book , so I just use the same template I've been using for a long time and I just replace the text . But those are the two ways you can do it . And it really just think of it as a painter . That can't spell . Just think of it that way .

It could do anything you want as far as artistic design , but it can't do anything . It can't do anything as far as positioning or text . That's its weakness for now . In the future they may fix that , but it can't do it for now .

You don't need a fancy one , but it can't do the formatting thing because there's rules about how it's programmed so it can't do certain characters , like if you tell it to do something in italics , it's not allowed to . So it has these like structure rules that come from the way the software is programmed that it doesn't allow it to format .

But yeah , you can just take it , have someone format it or use a formatting software and then it can get it the way . So that's one thing it can't do yet as well . So there are limitations with these tools .

My first book , my mom offered me $20 to not have to review it and I was like , OK , no more friends and family . That was a rough one for me . So you can say I want this person to review my book , help me write an email to ask them to review this book , and it will help you with that stuff .

Or you can say help me design a strategy to get the first 10 reviews . What are the best places to do it ? And it can really help you with those things . It's really great about writing the book description . So it will write my book description in HTML .

I just tell it here's the HTML that Amazon allows Write a book description and it will write one that I can copy and paste . It looks amazing that for many authors , that's another hurdle . So once you get that in place , it can help you with writing emails for viewers , designing review campaigns , designing ads , coming up with ideas .

Sometimes it comes up with like ideas you wouldn't have think of , but what are ? What are some ways I can get more traffic to my book and it will come up with things like oh , you can go on a book tour or you can go on a podcast tour , and sometimes our ideas that I forgot about that .

So it does help you as well with that idea part of the process , because it wants its book to succeed as well , so it's on your team .

Have you had any success with using AI to pick keywords or categories or anything like that ?

Because of that , it's not updated because you have to pull all of Amazon's database every day to keep up . So it's not great about that , but it's pretty good . I have said hey , here's a book . What are some categories ? I'll say this is a topic of my book . What are some categories people might be searching and that want to read this book ?

And sometimes it does come in categories I haven't thought of . The problem is that half the time they're gone , amazon's erased those categories , but the other half of the time it's a really good pick . Got it With keywords .

When I'm looking for keywords , what I'll do is like research , like a word bubble of all the keywords in my category the words appearing in books , my category and I'll say here's all the words .

Please write seven keywords that are limited to 50 characters each and don't reuse any words , and it will give me them and does that really well , which I'm not good at doing myself because it's like moving puzzle pieces , but it's great for that .

I'll say what are keywords , what are people who are reading these books looking for , what are things I can do to catch this traffic , and then it will help me either writing the ad like the ad copy for a book by that , or just the keyword targeting for an Amazon ad . It will help with both .

If you're doing Outreaching , specific Podcast , it can actually write an email that matches their style . Because I always get that question like oh , if you listen to three of our episodes , what's your favorite episode ? And I wish I had that much time . I don't listen to every podcast , every show . I try , but it's such a tough question .

So it helps you answer that and it kind of fills in those things . So it's really good for that . It's really good as well . If you go , will I be a good fit for this show ? This is what the show is about , because sometimes I'm not the right fit and I don't want to go on a show and be the wrong fit .

Like I got invited to speak at the Working Moms event and I was like why not a working mom ? So I don't think I'm the right fit for that audience . So when it's something that's a little more subtle , then chat at GBT helped me catch that .

And also , if you struggle to be interesting or not sure , or which of my best stories is the best fit Like , we have different things we can talk about . Right , we're experts more than one thing . What's the best thing that I like to talk about that fits this show and that will help you do a better match as well , so you write a better pitch .

It's more like can you get picked up ?

What would be kind of your parting piece of advice on how they can get started ?

It will never replace you because it will write books that are not good without a human to guide it . But the sooner you start playing with it , don't be afraid .

I was afraid for a long time to say something dumb . I don't want the AI to think I'm dumb , but it erases every conversation as soon as you close it .

Like if you release those feelings and go , I'm just gonna ask what I want , I'm okay if making a mistake , I'm okay with doing something wrong and I'm gonna get there and I'm willing to ask it questions to help me . Then it can be just amazing . That's the game changer .