AI-Powered Book Brainstorming & Writing Process with Claude

Full video transcript

Hey all, so in this video I’m going to be showing you how to take Claude, what I think, to the next level when it comes to analyzing existing research and content that you bring to the table, to then refine and turn into outlines and continued content inside of your book, course, or anything really.

So first things first, in Claude what I want to do at this is take information and research that I’ve got from a prior project. So I’m going to go ahead and select a survey response, and I’m just going to add that here as a CSV file. So I’ve got about 40 or 50 different survey responses for people that were having trouble, in this case, with just getting started with AI. And so I’m just going to start by typing “Claude, analyze the content.”

I want to first just feed Claude this content. It’s my marketing survey, and this is just a simple email list — you could email your customers, potential customers: “Hey, what’s your number one challenge that you’re facing right now?” And I sent people to a Typeform, and from that Typeform we had about 38 responses. It looks like in this, Claude is breaking down the information from what I gave it, and it’s analyzing all of that context. This is part of a research project for creating a book that’s in the process of being written right now.

Now that I’ve fed Claude this information, this is going to start feeding a content brief. But I want to go a step further, and from here I can really take it any direction. So what I like to do at this point, and a little trick that I just do to speed up my prompting of these tools, is I want to simply speak what I’m doing. I use a tool called Voice In, but any dictation tool will work.

Test, test, test. “I’m writing a book that is addressing the primary problems of the people surveyed to help them achieve their number one goal. Can you help identify the top problems and pain points that people are currently experiencing, and identify some of the top goals that we can help people get results with through a book?” I want to speak the prompt. I’m not really worrying about the sentences and periods being all perfect. What I want to do is just give AI more of an idea about what I’m doing, what I’m trying to accomplish here, because at the end of the day, all of this context, with Claude’s ability to read back a lot of context — I think it’s up to like 100,000 characters or so in the past — so in this case it’s analyzing now the problems and pain points, the different goals that people are looking to accomplish here, and the book could aim to provide step-by-step examples of that nature.

From this point, this is great. So I’m going to give it one more second. And now what I just did is open up my library card, and I went and grabbed the title recipe that we were just sharing in another video, where I want to start brainstorming opening title examples and things to brainstorm with, and then effectively take this and kind of work and refine what content I want inside of this specific recipe. But again, if I wanted to go any other direction with this, I’ve already got a lot more clear-cut picture of where I could be taking things. Now, “AI Business Blueprint,” “The AI Advantage,” “AI for Results” — all of this clearly is around AI because that is what our entire business revolves around. But what I want to do is take the existing information, research from real-life people and what problems they are experiencing, and then work with AI on what I can do to create an outline that would be effective in helping these people solve their problems.

So you can see here it’s taken the idea, it’s taking and expanding on it, and I’m getting quite a lot of content that I can brainstorm on. So what I want to do once this iteration is done is condense things down into a really simple step-by-step structure that I can use as an outline for a book. So that was two examples that it created on this front. “AI Business Blueprint” — it’s a complete guide to leveraging AI and automation, process efficiency, scaling your business, provides a practical framework with step-by-step instructions, prompts, workflows to implement right here.

So now that I’ve got this as an example, I can go and really get creative with it. But I want to start first by getting more refined on what my outline is going to look like. So I’ll do that by giving another prompt: “Reference the last outputs and the content that the book is going to be about, and create a condensed, optimized outline from the perspective of a Hay House publisher, using best practices for how-to business books for practical AI integration and application. First, what I want you to do is analyze the content above from the perspective of this publisher and act as an editor to help refine and give yourself different key points and insights that we can take and optimize the prompt, the outline, based off of. And then from there I want you to reference the insights and recommendations from the editor’s perspective, and then rewrite the outline, the introduction, and an optimized title to best reflect a book that’s written to help solve the core problems that the people surveyed are currently experiencing.”

That’s another prompt I came up with, because this is what I want AI to do. I’m simply telling it what I want to do, but also pointing in the direction of, like, Hay House is a massive publisher — I think they’re based out in Southern California. But anyway, by giving AI these different key points and perspective, I’m just trying to refine and focus things down again and again. So: introduction, “The AI Advantage: Boost Your Business with Artificial Intelligence” — that’s actually a lot more clean and clear. I like how it starts: AI 101, setting your AI vision, developing efficient workflows critical for business functions, by focusing on the pressing problems. Okay, that’s great, so I don’t really need to change much on this outline and introduction.

So what I’m going to do now is I went back into my recipe stack, and now that I’ve got an introduction, now that I’ve got a book title, I’ve got an outline, and I’ve got effectively what’s going to be a conclusion for this book — once I get there, write a book description: how would I be marketing this book in the first place, and what are people going to see before they even decide to buy this book? Because I want to test this and post it, and I want to see, honestly, the people that I’m going to be posting this in front of are going to be our existing customers and people that are considering becoming customers but maybe don’t even know where to start with AI. So we’ve got to create content that’s going to get people results in advance. As with Miles Beckler, going through his interview really struck a chord with me on how to make these different pieces of content and really just increase the level that we can produce this content for our own audience.

This book blurb formula was based off of a formula from, I think, Kindlepreneur. So I want to now come up with this book blurb formula to write the blurb that would be used for advertising the book on Amazon, along with the title of the book, the cover of the book, and then the outline could show people what they get inside of the book. Then we could go through the next process, which would be writing the book advantage. Okay, let me do one more — I have one more prompt to come on top of this — because it’s not just the book in the first place, but also the bonuses are what help enable people to get those results from their purchase. That might be blueprints and recipes and workflows and spreadsheets and things of that nature. This is the playbook for entrepreneurs, business owners — this is a little bit more in line with what I’m thinking.

That’s great, so my last part is now referencing the context above for this book, including the blurb and the introduction and the outline: “We need to create a series of three bonuses that are complementary in helping people achieve the results that they want. These bonuses can include things like an audiobook that they can use to follow along with the manuscript as they go through, and include some additional resources that make sense in the context of this book that help people, when they buy, get that result and ultimately lead to the best experience.” Now what we see here is again Claude learning, and what we get: bonus one, the AI Advantage audiobook; the AI case study workbook, printable supplemental workbooks, interactive exercises, prompts, and frameworks; AI integration video crash course, on-demand crash course. Honestly, this is great.

So now what I’m going to do to help me with exporting this: “That’s great work, now can you please reference the content above and keep the information and structure all the same, but we need to rewrite the content so that we can export it efficiently. So take the book title and subtitle, the book introduction, the book outline, and the book description, along with the book bonuses, and present those in a way that it’s properly formatted in H1, H2, H3 format, as well as with bullet points and any other formatting that would make copying and pasting this into a word doc super simple.” This is just a trick I found with Claude — because it does take time to go back up and copy and paste and copy and paste, if I can just get it to rewrite the content exactly but more formatted in a way that’s going to save me time, why not do that when I’m already working inside the AI? It might just take a matter of 30 seconds.

There we go, so from here my next steps would be, one, seeing if I can get some feedback on this outline first and foremost, but then from there, if I want to move forward to the writing portion of this, I would then start to either write out each of the sections in the context of this book, as well as speaking it and putting on what’s essentially going to become the audiobook version of the course. But all in all, all of that in 13 minutes, less than 15 minutes really, and yeah, it’s a very practical way to go about using existing research that I’ve got on hand, analyzing that research, those responses, and getting ideas about what these people’s pain points are and what their goals are, and then writing and brainstorming with Claude to help refine that process to ultimately have a clear way to articulate this for people to buy and get results at the beginning. Then it’s on me now to create the content for this book, but that’s how fast you can do this with the help of AI. So I hope you find this useful in your writing process, and we’ll see you on the other side.