Write A Book in 7 Days with Jasper AI

Full video transcript

Love to hear kind of where you guys are at, what’s the wins coming off the weekend? Mark: Oh yeah, so, uh, wrapped it up. Yeah, so the book is wrapped up. I’m pretty excited. Finished the writing. Um, it’s at the editor right now.

So I’m pretty excited about that. Uh, there’s still some minor things, like, you know, the copyright page and, you know, some little things that are just gotta include — it that as appendices — and some links that I want to make sure are in there. But right, as a whole, it’s just a matter of sweeping up the crumbs, so to speak. So I’m pretty excited about that. And just let you know, my son has come through for me. I’m so pumped, because he gave me some mock-ups this weekend, which of course is like, as you know, that is like fuel to the fire because it’s just so energizing. So pretty excited. I’d love to share this with you at some point, so you just say when and I’ll do that, and we’ll get some ideas on what direction to go, because he’s on standby to kind of make some final adjustments to that.

So Mark, going into this process, did you think you would get as far as you got in one week?

Absolutely not. Um, it has everything to do — I think as I kind of review the process — it boils down to two things. One is there was a consistent time for encouragement and motivation from people who know what they’re doing and kind of come alongside each person to motivate them and encourage them and give them what they need to go to the next step. And second to that is the fact that it’s a focused time — like you’re dedicating your energy to get this done and eliminating as many of those distractions that oftentimes derail the process and really provide some structure. Those are two very key components of what this is all about. And then I have to give props to Jarvis, of course, but that’s a whole other story.

That’s great, and Jarvis is a big point there. I’m curious how do you feel now after a full week of kind of immersion inside of this process with Jarvis? Um, before — because I know you played with Jarvis before going into the challenge — how do you feel about it now?

I was able to really get Jarvis to kind of produce those introductory paragraphs, if you will, or introductions to the chapters that help — even if I didn’t choose to use what he said — provide a little tip on how to move forward in that chapter. Or I would take what he said and then really customize it to fulfill the experience I want to take the reader on during that chapter. So, you know, I would play with it a little bit about improving content, and every now and then he’d nail it, and every now and then he would try to create a whole brand new story and I was like, no, no, no, John, I was — back, back here. So I think there’s some shiny things out there that Jarvis sees too and he gets distracted. But other than that, I mean that’s just true of, I think, any AI. And perhaps that makes AI more human than not, which is really strange to think about. But it’s true, and Jarvis — well, more than kind of — actually provided a lot of the skeleton to hang really the chapters and the content and the flow of the chapters on. And that’s kind of great, you know, it’s like the Christmas tree with no ornaments, you know.

Seven days is a very short period of time to imagine getting that done in, um, but it isn’t — amazingly possible.

Perfect. I mean, I’m pretty pumped, I’m pretty excited. I’m definitely not in a place where I thought I would be seven days ago. I tried to look forward and say, okay, because I’m a dreamer, I like to cast vision ahead and kind of know my path and kind of know where I’m going to land, and then kind of imagine myself there so I get motivated to hit that goal. This is one that had no vision whatsoever — like I had no idea what to expect or how to imagine what that would look like. So I had to trust the process, and that’s probably one of the most difficult things to do in this — trusting the process. I tell my students that all the time — in the process of, you know, college applications, right, just trust the — and you know, even that, it’s difficult to convey that message to a teenager, for myself as an adult who has always imagined and dreamt of writing a book and always thought maybe, okay, one day — but that one day never comes, right? Trusting that process, that’s hard. It’s hard, but you just have to let go and go.

I ended up with, uh, I think 17 — 17,500-ish, okay, in that neighborhood ballpark. My goal, of course, was imaginatively in the 20,000 range, um, so it’s running a little shy of what I kind of envisioned. But here’s what I settled on mentally — is that it’s better to be concise and clear than long and muddy. So I didn’t spend time trying to puff it full of marshmallows. I wanted to make sure that it said what I wanted to say, and quite frankly, it doesn’t need to say a whole lot. I mean, it doesn’t need to be thick, it just needs to be true, and that’s what’s important. And I don’t want to tell them everything, right? Because if I tell them everything, they won’t hire me. I need to give them enough to feel like that was good, but I wanted to leave a little bit on there, right? You know, it’s different if you give everything — the entire process, every secret, every detail. It kind of depends — a lot of people are just going to read that and go, okay, he knows what he’s talking about, I just want to hire him to do it, right? And you might get the one-off person that’s like, oh, I can do this all myself. They try it for a month and they’re like, it’s a full-time job, I just need to hire someone. That’s most of the time when it happens — like when you hear other coaches or gurus, they’re like, I’ll give everything away, share it, because most people aren’t going to do the work anyway, so they’re going to end up hiring you in the past. But, you know, this is a great start — version two, version three, you know, the concept.

So for me, a lot of the branding that has taken place, both by way of the cover, the title, and the metaphors that I use inside, all developed while I was writing it. So none of that was preconceived. In fact, it’s a very far cry from where I started, and my initial intent and motivation to write a book — title and content wise — has turned out to be significantly different, which is okay, and I’m great with that, because part of the recognition that titles matter and what that title is about makes all the difference in the world to marketing helped kind of drive what was important to write about. And while I still included some of that content and pain point that I referred to and wanted to write about as a whole, I included it in part and made it only a section of the book instead of everything about the book.

The anticipation’s killing me, Mark, you got to show us your cover now.