Answering Your Questions About Jasper BOSS Mode and Writing

Full video transcript

We’ve made it here and we’re going into the weekend strong. Noble was just saying he’s got a lot of time blocked, basically the rest of the day and all over the weekend. How is everyone else doing right now?

I’m further behind than I want to be, but I got chapter one done today, so I’ve got about three thousand words now between introduction and chapter one. I’m happy with the progress even though it’s a little bit further behind than I wanted to be.

Bradley, I’m right there with you — we’re pretty much the same. I took some of the advice from yesterday and I turned off Grammarly, and I didn’t even reread any of the stuff that I wrote until I was finished with the chapter, so I did basically zero editing. Thank you guys for that yesterday.

Now the big win for me from yesterday, Darby, was the dictation into Chrome — that was a big win for me. Anyone else have any big wins going into the weekend, or where you’re focused, how are you guys feeling?

Well, I’ve hit just about 5,000 words, so way to go. I think where I’m struggling right now is it’s so much easier for me to just write, but then I go into Jarvis and I’m like, oh, and it triggers, so I still feel like I’m kind of stuck on the right commands. Today specifically I’m getting a lot of — I don’t know if it’s Jarvis or how I’m using it — but I’ll do something like “create write a blog post intro or outline about the above content” and then it tells me how to write a blog post. It’s a little bit wonky, so I was like, okay, leave this alone for a little bit. Then I kind of went into the problem-agitate-solution approach, kind of a combo of the hero’s journey and the non-fiction structure, so I go back and forth. What Zechariah said about doing the intro, getting an outline, doing the closing paragraph — that’s helping a lot actually, but Jarvis seems a little bit wonky at least for me this morning.

I noticed that yesterday too, when I was putting in commands, that in Boss Mode specifically it’s giving commands and going a little bit more literal than you’d like. Is anyone else having a similar experience with Boss Mode? Yes, and I’m also seeing that it’s duplicating paragraphs too. I think either Jarvis is just getting a little wonky, which I know can happen at times, or we should just troubleshoot it here.

Does anyone have some content — Kim, you said some very specific stuff. Let me pull up one of the documents I was working on. This is a book called The Hustle, about anti-hustle culture and online marketing. I put in the content brief, added this after — this is not the content — “write a blog post introduction based on the content above,” and I got “start a new blog post with this introduction, then answer the following.” Some of this is okay, but it’s literally telling me to fill in the blanks, and I was like, okay, that’s not super helpful. I think Jarvis is not feeling well today or something.

If you’re looking at a blog post introduction, I found a little bit more success just instead of saying “the above content,” giving a little bit more description about the theme you’re thinking of for that chapter, to give it more direction to pull from. If that’s not working, try even removing the word “blog” — try saying “write me a chapter intro for the above” or “write me a chapter intro about X, whatever it is,” because you’re directly speaking to Jarvis. Try to tell it exactly what you want instead of sticking to the framework everyone’s used to using.

My favorite author is Patrick Lencioni, and if you’ve read his stuff, he always starts with a parable — a creative story — and then the last third of the book is unpacking the principles found in that. I keep going back and forth: I’ll start down that road with a creative story, run into a roadblock, and then stop and go back to working on the core content. That’s been my back-and-forth trying to figure out where to go.

I would get focused on getting the core content out first — the stuff that’s just going to be what it’s going to be — and then once that’s out of your head, come back and massage it later. Go back and re-read where the content’s at and think about how the story should preface it, how you learned it or earned it, and how your story relates to that, what lessons you learned inside that journey. Keep that step pattern rolling in your head throughout the book: get the meat of the content out first, and then spend more mental energy crafting the narrative theme around it, with your customer avatar in mind.

Awesome, thank you, this was super helpful. So with the hero’s journey — I had a big epiphany when I read StoryBrand years ago, and I’m a Harry Potter fan, so I’m like Dumbledore, not Harry Potter, for my audience. In this case, though, because it’s my book but I’m using my own stories, like when I found the mentor and found the guide — it’s not me trying to tell the story so they see it, it’s relatable. So they’re my stories, but am I Harry in this book? Is that what I’m doing?

No — the reader cares about what’s in it for them. If this is a memoir, maybe, but I don’t think you’re writing a memoir. You still need to relate those stories to the lessons the reader learns from them — you are still the guide, you’re still Dumbledore, telling them “I learned this.” Dumbledore tells a story to Harry, and something clicks for Harry. So what’s clicking for your reader, even though you’re telling the story of what happened to you? You’re still the wise guide, sharing knowledge with your reader, who is Harry.

I’m just going to dive in and pick a topic in Boss Mode that I am familiar with — how I would go about writing the Amazon copywriting secrets content for the first book I did, before Jarvis had grown up so fast on us. Context for what I’m going into right now: how I would start building up a really rough outline using Jarvis for a book if I were to do it again.

This is a book about how to sell more products on Amazon.com. Amazon is the world’s largest online marketplace, and it’s where people go when they are ready to buy physical products, period. This book is going to be marketed toward e-commerce business owners and consultants who have clients that sell on Amazon and want to build the best listing that showcases their products.

“Write me a chapter and a subtitle regarding the content in the description brief.” “Write me a book title for this book about Amazon copywriting.” Holy — okay, so if I’m brainstorming a book title, “write me a title and subtitle based on the suggestions above.” Okay — “Darby’s Book of Amazon Hacks: Brand New Amazon Optimization, Check These and Advanced Tips.” I’ll just combine those two, I like how those rock and roll.

“Write me a 10-chapter book outline for the contents described in the brief.” It looks like it took that as the prompt and wrote an intro description on that. I want to get a few more title options — this is what I did for the first book. I didn’t really know where to start or how to outline, but I knew there was a jumbled amount of things in my head I could talk about. The first half of what I was doing was just Command-J now, instead of refreshing, for different topic outlines and posts — each one of these is a blog topic outline, a topic idea. If you were to use that fifth edition, it’s giving me literally the tenth chapter of this book. I might not use some of these as the actual chapter title, but they could be subsections inside that chapter, if I wanted a quick point-A-to-point-Z overview of the book: the introduction, what is Amazon and why you should sell on it, how to get your products listed on Amazon, and so on.

So right here — introduction, overview of this book: “write me a book introduction that starts with what this book is about,” giving a good little bit of the introduction — what is this book about, who is it for, why is it different. “Write me a list of bullet points about who would sell products on Amazon.”

Darby, can you take that information — that started out with that intro of the book — and use it to create something for the back of your book? Absolutely. So let’s say we’re taking this paragraph, or this whole intro — it kind of looked like the whole intro is where you could use that, going back to the Lego analogy where we’re building blocks — if this is a really good piece of content, I could potentially write a book blurb about it, or use the content above to write a book description.

Oh, this is good, watch this — it takes the intro and all the content right here, and I asked it to write me a book description, give me a call to action using the AIDA framework for people to buy this book, based on the content above. The one you’re going to put on the back of the book is going to be a quick reference for when someone has it in their hand — you also have the book description as it is on Amazon, when you’re selling people to just buy your book. You can have two different descriptions: a little stronger call to action for people to actually purchase the book on the checkout page, and then more detail for the back of the book.

Alright, so we’ve got the consultants, we’ve got the chapter titles — basically from here, I’ve got an idea. Let’s say I want the title, subtitle, a brief introduction on the book, and, if we were doing Craig Hanley’s outline process now, I need to organize out of these fourteen what are the main seven chapters I want to choose, and what am I going to talk about in each.

Chapter one — let’s put little breakers up so Jarvis doesn’t see that. “Give me a blog post outline for the content above” — it continues to be a really good source of inspiration for different sections and subsections of each chapter I want to go off of. “What is Amazon.com — describe the e-commerce platform to me and when it started.” This is a prime opportunity to fact-check, but it still relays the information in a way that sounds like it’s being presented from a factual point of view — the origin of it, right here. I’m answering these questions for people reading my book — “oh, that’s really interesting.”

My target audience’s entire business has been built on Shopify. I get approached and they say, “hey, I know Amazon’s a huge opportunity, I don’t have time to do it myself, I really want to get started on the platform but I don’t know the first place to start — can you help me get started on Amazon?” Sure — “yeah, Amazon started here, this is why you should sell on it.” “Give me the top five reasons somebody should sell on Amazon.” Okay, cool, so maybe a little brainstorming — these are some of the reasons why you want to sell here. Again, it’s more about not wanting to do a little bit on each one of these, I really want to focus in rather than just chopping all of these up, and then, like I said earlier, narrowing down on those seven.

It’s interesting how it’s spitting these outputs out — when at the bottom, from back when we were building out this initial doc, we’re about 1,100 words right now. It’s nowhere near perfect, but a lot of different points we can start to expand on. Let’s say we keep these top seven chapters on the marketplace — take these down here, chapter one, the Amazon marketplace: “write me an introductory paragraph based on the sentence above.”

So in this — “give me a blog post outline for how to do keyword research on Amazon.” “Write me a conclusion paragraph based on the chapter outline above.” Kind of where Zachariah was saying yesterday with the chapter intro, bullets, outro — it might be better, but even in any of these sections, that’s why I could turn this right here into like a 5,000-word section, really just doing the same exact process, rinsing and repeating with the intro, this bullet point — because each one of these is potentially a really deep-dive rabbit hole, and it’s easy to think you need to go into so much depth with all of these.

This is like the foundation of the book — similarly we could probably use an AIDA framework after the conclusion paragraph that could sell somebody into reading the next chapter. This is almost an intro paragraph to what we just talked about here, less of a conclusion paragraph, but it’s still identifying, using that problem or AIDA framework, calling out the problem there — talking to the audience as an e-commerce entrepreneur or consultant selling physical products: this book will help you learn how to research keywords in order to find profitable ideas and compelling product listings, finally measuring sales effectiveness.

So this is kind of the intro, and I like the direction it’s going, and it’s almost helping me say maybe I don’t need to include every single aspect — if I were to write another book on this, I would maybe write a completely separate book on how to find profitable keywords for my clients. It’s alluding that by the end of chapter 10 we’ll give you some information on where to look if you want to start advertising your products on Amazon, but in order to get there, and back to the point of this book: how can we build this outline step by step so that someone knows how to find a profitable product, how to create compelling — “expand on the sentence above and write me an introductory paragraph.” “Write me a list of steps to finding a profitable product to sell on Amazon.”

See, like by accident it’s giving me ideas for maybe things that can replace these chapter titles right here — “how to create product listings with high-converting keywords,” that would probably go in a section up there using high-quality keywords. So for finding — research — it’s basically, how do you find a product that’s in demand that’s already selling on Amazon? “How do I find a product that is in demand and already selling on Amazon?” And this is the whole section where it’s like now we can get into negotiating with suppliers, deciding how much minimum order quantity you want, and I could keep going down this rabbit hole a little bit here.

This is a really good start — this is going to be my first chapter, I can give someone a real good crash course, and this is the overview. Now I don’t want to give them everything, because I want them to either figure it out for themselves, give it to someone else to figure out and take action on, or potentially hire me to help them implement it. “Write a creative story with the plot of how I got started selling my first products on FBA in 2017, when I began selling posture correctors on Amazon.”

I just had a coffee-table chat and told it, hey, this is the kind of background I want you to give me a plot on this story with, and that’s something to work with — this is kind of how I got started in this, and then leading into this was the journey I went through, and this is how I learned this information, or earned it, because I invested in courses and mentors to teach it for me. And then that leads into: here’s how to do product research, here’s how to do X, X, and X, and by the end of it it’s like, “oh, okay, it’s not as complicated as I thought, because this guy just broke it down into one chapter of a book.” I’m kind of fact-checking Jarvis as we go, cleaning up the nonsense, and saying, okay, that’s a nugget, that’s a nugget, that’s a nugget, cool — clean it up, chop it up, and your book will end up looking, even before you add in all your other additional things, like it has this structure flowing down between each chapter and all the different topics inside it, and even potentially subsections inside those topics.

Adding in the story and adding in your own narrative becomes a lot easier once the framework is out. When I was doing the first one, I would get these bullets and lists, but then I’d go back into problem-agitate-solution and follow that format for each subsection of the chapter, literally rinsing and repeating. We were using a tool called AI Text Expander at the time, which they really dialed back because we abused the crap out of it for the first two weeks it was open — it was giving like 600-plus characters, a lot of content, which was kind of what they were building Boss Mode to be.

Still coming at the top of the hour — I hope that was valuable and helpful for you guys watching, just to see the flow. Awesome, that was super helpful, thank you. Awesome, glad to hear. Yes, excellent, great, awesome guys.