From Idea to Reality: The Story of the 7 Day Book Challenge

Full video transcript

And so most of what I’m going to be doing today is demonstrating how we’re using Jasper for things like character development, customer avatar research, outlining books, brainstorming book titles, and all sorts of things, non-fiction and fiction alike, that are elements to storytelling and to helping people solve problems through the written word. Keep in mind throughout this process, yes, we’re using the word book, and it’s because that’s primarily how we started The AI Author in the first place: through a 7 Day Book Challenge, which is starting on March 7th if you’re interested in joining us live. Go to TheAIAuthor.com for membership details. We’re going to be doing that event live starting next Tuesday.

It was two years ago, I think in February of 2021, that the first 7 Day Book Challenge happened inside the official Jasper Facebook group community, and it spawned out of a weekend where I was sitting basically in my house at the time, at my office, really frustrated as a freelance copywriter. I specialize in Amazon copywriting, which means building Amazon listings, from titles to bullet points to product descriptions, a bit more elaborate content known as A+ content, which is more branded content you’ll see on an Amazon product page, plus listing images and everything. I was doing copywriting and creative direction for Amazon brands. It was a lot of work, and I was really burnt out.

This was leading up to December 2022. I’d been doing this for several years at this point and was really burnt out, to say the least. But part of my frustration was that most of my business would come from Upwork. I was a top freelancer for a while in the copywriting space for Amazon listings, with a great profile that generated leads consistently, but it wasn’t always the highest-quality leads. I was always feast or famine: you get five clients at once, do all the work, and then need to go get five more clients. How do I start generating content for my business to attract higher-quality clients, the people I specialize in working with?

That’s where I was when I started talking with Austin Distel and Dave Rogenmoser. Dave is the CEO and co-founder of Jasper, and Austin was one of their very first employees. We got to talking because they had just gotten access to an AI tool called OpenAI, which, if you’re familiar now, is the tool that powers quite a few, or most, of the AI generative content tools right now. That’s also the company behind ChatGPT. This was two and a half years ago, if not a little more. At the time, Dave was CEO and Austin was CMO of a company called Proof, which had a social proof widget. It was working, but they were at a stage where they weren’t sure what the next step was. What they were really good at was Facebook ads and scaling Facebook ads, so they got access to OpenAI and started using it for their own Facebook ads, figuring out how to write ads with this AI tool and how to use it to optimize their ad copy. They were building a tool for themselves and playing around with it.

I happened to be Austin Distel’s roommate at the time, and he said, hey, check this AI stuff out, it’s pretty cool, what do you think? I thought this could be really helpful for scaling up my Amazon listing production. I was already writing a bunch of Amazon listings, so how could this AI tool help me not only write listings but do other things too? That led me to the end of January, sitting at my computer thinking, okay, I’ve got to figure something out.

I was writing a blog with Jasper, and Sean Vosler, who’s now the affiliate manager at Jasper, made a really cool post in the Facebook group about how he was using some of the templates, including an early version called Boss Mode, to create a solid blog post. I thought that was incredible, so I started following the process he used and ended up with about 5,000 words of a rough draft covering everything I could think of about Amazon copywriting, in about two to three hours on a Thursday afternoon. I was like, oh my gosh, this is incredible. This was more content than I had ever produced for a blog for my business, literally ever. I thought, if I can write 5,000 words in an afternoon, I bet I can write a book on this that I could print off and send to clients to show that I know what I’m talking about with Amazon listings, and turn that into business.

So I said, okay, let’s do it. Let’s challenge myself to put Jasper to the test and write this book in a weekend. Rachel, now my fiancee and the head of growth at The AI Author, was there with me that weekend; she can attest to this. I basically locked myself in my office for an entire weekend, heads down, exploring what Jasper could help me do. I’d never written a book before. I said, okay, I’m going to print this on Amazon, write fifteen to twenty thousand words, make an outline, break it into parts, and publish that book: Amazon Copywriting Secrets. Because it was uploaded and published on Amazon, and I printed it off after they approved it, in about five days I was holding the book in my hand. I was like, this is incredible, that’s really cool, to be able to say I published a book myself and I’m holding it in my hand, and now I can print it and send it to anybody I want. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.

Apparently a lot of other people did too, because I started telling Austin, showed him what I did, and he said this is awesome. Talking with Dave, we put together a quick little event: here’s literally the process I used to use Jasper to write a book. I think it was something like 50,000 credits or so as a prize that Dave put up for anyone who completed the challenge of writing and publishing a short, expert-style book on Amazon in a week. We kicked off a 7 Day Book Challenge, and over a dozen books came out of it, from people, most of whom hadn’t ever published a book before, though there might have been some existing authors in there too.

Most of the people who succeeded in that challenge had run up against the same issue I did: writer’s block, maybe imposter syndrome, and thinking you have to write a massive 50,000-word novel for it to count as a book. That simply isn’t the case. In a lot of cases you’ve probably seen books getting shorter and shorter, while other books get longer and longer, and that’s totally fine. This isn’t a competition to see who can write the shortest book the quickest, or the longest book the fastest, with AI. The idea behind this challenge was to break through that writer’s block, get the book that’s out of your head onto paper, and share your experience and your stories with the world. You can use that book as the cornerstone for your marketing, maybe a podcast outline, or a roadmap for how you already help clients get from Step A to the other side of the river, which we’ll break down more here today.

What I realized after that challenge was that this was a great opportunity to dive even deeper into AI, keep posting events like this, keep working with the Jasper community, and keep learning new ways to use this tool to create content, not just for my business but to help other people do business too. That’s really where the idea of The AI Author was born, which is now, over two years later, looking at an incredibly fast-growing generative AI industry, with new tools popping up all the time. There’s a lot of flash-in-the-pan ways to create quick content, and there are also ways to learn how to apply this content in specific areas of your business to leverage and grow it, whether through content production, different voice creation tools, slide deck tools, or tools like Descript alongside Jasper that pair well together for breaking down existing content and repurposing it, or using Jasper with a tool like CopyPro, where you can create your entire marketing blueprint and use CopyPro’s frameworks to create endless sales pages, sales emails, opt-ins, and upsells. These tools, combined with different stacks depending on your workflow, can help you scale whatever type of content you want to do in ways we’ve never seen possible before.

All that said, what we’re covering today is how to do this in seven days, and by that I don’t mean writing a bestseller that’s going to hit the New York Times list. What I’m talking about is creating a minimum viable book: whatever that means to you, the minimum version of a manuscript you can produce and then take to the next step of production, such as getting feedback from advance readers, giving it to an editor for real editing support, or handing it to someone else on your team to turn into different versions of content.

If you can produce 20, 25, or 30 thousand words of content for a book you’re creating, that’s a very real number I’ve seen many people hit inside this challenge once they get in the flow of using Jasper. You can take that content and repurpose and reproduce it for all sorts of things. But your book doesn’t need to be 25,000 words to do what it needs to do for you. Maybe you need more of a micro-book, or maybe it makes more sense to treat it like a micro-course: a really quick, short, five- to ten-thousand-word educational piece that helps your existing or potential customers solve a specific problem. Maybe you just want to write a fiction story or create a character you’re going to use as the next main character in your next novel, and you want AI to help you brainstorm. This same framework can work for that too, so it’s very versatile in how you can apply this seven-day challenge format.

We use books as the primary example because it’s a good way to look at it from the top down, but everything inside the books, we cover how to go through with AI, and we’ll continue to cover it as we do our next live 7 Day Book Challenge. Again, if you aren’t a member and want to join us, go to TheAIAuthor.com.