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The Future of Content Creation? Cut Through The Noise With This Step-by-Step Content Strategy

Published September 11, 2023 · 173 views on YouTube

Key takeaways

What is Miles Beckler’s process for turning an idea into a published book?

Miles Beckler’s process is three two-hour sessions: a brainstorm session to land on a title and sub-headline, an outline session to structure the book, and a recording session where he talks through the outline on video or audio. From there, the recording gets transcribed and edited with AI, then handed to a proofreader, copy editor, cover designer, and layout person before publishing.

Beckler, an online entrepreneur who started affiliate marketing in 2003 and has been full-time since 2010, walked through this workflow in an interview about creating content that resonates with an audience while using AI to speed up production rather than replace a creator’s voice.

How does the three-step brainstorm, outline, record process work?

  1. Brainstorm (2 hours): Sit without distractions and work out the book’s title and sub-headline, drawing on what’s already working in the niche.
  2. Outline (2 hours): Build the book’s structure. Beckler mentioned researching bestselling courses on Udemy to see their full outlines as a reference point for structuring a topic — not to copy them, but to see how a proven course is organized.
  3. Record (2 hours): Talk through the outline on camera or into a voice memo, wherever feels comfortable — his own recordings happen on his phone, outdoors on his property.

After recording, the audio gets transcribed and run through AI for a first edit pass. Beckler described telling ChatGPT to edit a transcript “as if you were an editor for Hay House Publishing,” a major publisher in his wife’s niche, and said the suggestions it returned were strong. From there the draft goes to a proofreader and, for sales-heavy books, a copywriter.

Why does Miles Beckler publish short Kindle books instead of one long book?

Beckler targets roughly 8,000-12,000 word “short reads” because he treats Amazon as a search engine and wants as many page-one category rankings as possible. Splitting a topic that could fill one large book into four or five shorter books gives him more listings, more rankings, and more opportunities to build bundles.

He also prices these short reads at 99 cents intentionally, saying Amazon’s algorithm favors sales volume, star rating, and low price together, and that this combination is part of why his books have outranked bigger-name authors in his category. For books meant to have a printed spine, he said the rule of thumb is closer to 25,000 words.

How does Miles Beckler turn Kindle books into email subscribers and customers?

Every book includes calls to action — for example, offering the audiobook version free right after the table of contents, and additional offers at the end — designed to move Amazon customers onto an owned email list before they’ve even bought anything. He described actively working to move people from a “leads list” to a smaller, more valuable “customer list,” and pointed to a book called Sales Funnel Sabotage, structured as ten questions/mistakes, that functions as a sales letter for a paid masterclass.

He also described running Kindle (KDP) ads at roughly $3,000-5,000 a month, aiming to break even on ad spend directly while treating the resulting sales volume as a way to climb organic rankings and grow the email list at the same time.

What role does AI play if it isn’t writing the whole book?

In Beckler’s account, AI’s job is transcription and editing, not replacing the creator’s core message. He said the outline and the recorded talk-through are what carry his actual process and expertise; whether the smaller paragraphs in between are written by him, drafted with notes and finished by AI, or run through an AI editing pass afterward, is “almost irrelevant” as long as the core process is intact. He also credited ChatGPT with titling one of his books, Niche Navigator, and its subtitle and description.

Full video transcript

All right everybody, welcome into today’s interview. Today I am joined by Miles Beckler, who is one of the OG Jasper AI (then Conversion AI) users, I believe, and has been around the content game for years — entrepreneur, author, content creator. I’ve been on a few interviews and sessions with Miles over the course of the past year, and his approach to content creation really resonates with me, and I know it’ll resonate with a lot of you out there as well, because it really comes from that authentic, human-driven focal point from the beginning, and then using AI to enhance the message that’s already in our minds and helping us really make the most out of all the content that we’re spending this time getting out into the world.

So, Miles, I’m not going to beat a horse over the head with the 20-minute introduction here. We got a bunch — welcome to the show, Miles. Thanks for taking time to be here. I’m excited to dive into your content production process, because right now we’re doing this interview kicking off a seven-day AI book-writing challenge, so we’ve got a whole community of people out here writing books using AI to help speed along the process, and a lot of great stories in people’s heads that get out in the world make a lot of impact getting that out there. But I know people are going to get stuck throughout this process, and I wanted to bring you on to just kind of see — I know you have a lot of value to share, you share everything for free on your YouTube channel, and you’ve got tons of stuff.

Thanks, man, happy to be here. Yeah, I’ve been doing this for a while. Started internet marketing, affiliate marketing, in 2003, because that’s when I made my first dollar online — I was still at community college in California. I’ve been with it full time since 2010, so I’ve got a bunch of experience, and my big thing is trying to help people bring what’s in their heart. When you tap into that and really start to share that — and some of these words are so overused, “authenticity” and these kinds of ideas — but the truth is that when you stand in your power and shine your light, everything seems to work better. Some people look at AI as a tool like, “oh cool, now I can hide behind my laptop, shortcut, not do the work and still publish.” While more and more people attempt to do that because AI does make it easy, the audience becomes thirstier and thirstier for honest, truthful, helpful people. It’s almost like we’re creating this divide through more search-engine spam, more Kindle spam from rubbish books that just get published, and it leaves people with a very sour taste in their mouth. The response from the user’s standpoint is, “I’ve got to find a real person I can trust.” When you, the viewers, step up to be that person for the people in your niche, everything else in your business gets easy. It’s a simple plan — not necessarily easy, but simple.

Yeah, and I think it’s a big spotlight on content creation and books right now with all the crap getting spammed on Amazon, and people just taking advantage of AI automations to put stuff out that’s not even useful when you look at it. That might put a sense of overwhelm or fear, like how are we going to compete with this stuff and cut through all this noise. That’s something you do naturally because you’ve been doing this for so long. Can you break down your workflow for producing content that clearly resonates with your audience, and maybe some tips for folks writing books with the help of AI — where AI isn’t taking their voice but enhancing it?

For me, if there’s a secret to success, it’s all about the outline. That outline is the framework to help my audience get some kind of result they want. People buy books because they want a result. People buy video courses because they want a result. People watch YouTube videos, read blogs — it’s irrelevant the direction we publish in, but people are trying to improve their lives, experience more happiness and joy, save money, lose weight — a million and one ways, but all linked to more happiness. When we as creators build systems that work for us and can work for others — one example is affiliate marketing, which I’ve done for a long time. I started over from zero in the middle of the game with a brand-new niche site just to prove my process works even in a niche I’m not an expert in. While going through that process I was detailing and building my outline, forcing myself through the horrifically challenging process of starting over as a beginner. When I teach that process — which I originally did haphazardly, the way we generally do everything the first time — but then I built a structure and process around it, and that process got great results. All the little paragraphs in between, whether I write them myself, or put a couple of notes and have AI write them, or put a draft together and have AI improve it — that’s almost irrelevant, as long as the core process is in there. When the user reads the book or takes the course, they’re going to have a high likelihood of getting the result they want. “If I help them get the result they want, I can have anything I want in the world” — that’s an adaptation of a Zig Ziglar quote: you can have anything you want in this world if you help enough other people get what they want.

What I love about Kindle books is there are hundreds of millions of people with Amazon Prime and Kindle hardware devices who use Amazon as a search engine — when they need to figure out how to do something, they’ll search Amazon for that. Some people go to YouTube, some go to Google, and ultimately the goal is to be everywhere. I’m spending a lot more time on books now. My wife and I published our first book in 2012. I published three books this year, one of which was almost all written with AI, which was the most nerve-wracking experience for me. The other two I built an outline for and recorded a video going through it — those were the ones I was most confident handing off to a team to take to production. I spend about an hour and a half to two hours recording, which produces short reads technically on Kindle — eight to twelve thousand word Kindle books — because I’m trying to help people solve a specific problem. Then I hand it off to teammates who get it transcribed with AI, cleaned up, improved, run through a copy editor, maybe a proofreader, then a book cover on Fiverr and layout from a guy on Upwork, and boom. I’m building a system that lets me get my ideas out into a format where I can go after the Amazon search engine and rank several books in several key categories, just like I’ve done with my YouTube channel — 700 videos where I rank a bunch of them — and just like with my blog posts. Doing all the content manually every time, everyone’s like “oh God that’s a lot of work, Miles” — it is, so focus is one of our keys to success, along with leveraging teams and technology.

You point out focus as the main key, but also leveraging the other humans on your team that you’re passing things off to. Yeah — and because you’ve done it so many times through YouTube, you’re taking that same proven approach to creating videos that help people, then bringing that back to your website where they opt into your list, which you own. Now you’re taking a two-hour video to Kindle short reads. Is there any benefit to a Kindle short read compared to someone wanting a traditional paper book in hand?

Definitely, and there are benefits to both. My biggest benefit is that I’m able to actually get them done — done is better than perfect. People trying to write that masterpiece manuscript can drag it on for a very long time. I can go from idea to execution to launched on Kindle within a few weeks, because I’m looking at Kindle, or Amazon, as a search engine, and I want as many rankings on that search engine as possible. One of my books is Niche Navigator — brilliant title, thank you ChatGPT-4 for coming up with that, and the subtitle and description too. In my world of people trying to make money online, one of the most common challenges is “I don’t know what niche to go into.” I’d done free videos on this on YouTube, so I put together a new, updated process and I’m actually selling the video course for about nine dollars — or they can get the book for, right now, 99 cents. I thought 99 cents would be an introductory offer, but my sales volume is so high that the book is ranking very well at that price, so now I dare not touch it. For someone who wants to learn how to choose a niche, there’s no reason to drag the question out over 300 pages — that’s not helping them. I should help them choose a niche and then get to the real work, which is publishing and building a brand in that niche through content. So the faster I can get them over that hurdle, the better.

I might take what could be a mega book with “thump value” — 300 pages, six-by-nine, which my wife and I have some of — and break it up into four or five different books, because then I get four or five different rankings and can create bundles, which give you more real estate on your listing. I’m not spamming the search engine — I’m putting up the best content I can — but I’m obtaining as many page-one rankings in as many categories as I can to help the brand be everywhere. My wife, on the other hand, has a book that’s about 370 pages in a six-by-nine or five-by-eight size, in the meditation and spirituality space, and her audience absolutely loves that — a bunch of guided meditations in written format.

Quick backstory: in 2003 I started making money online as an affiliate marketer, wasn’t growing an email list, and when Myspace shut down, my links were essentially gone — I was bulk publishing on social media and they shut down my links. When my wife and I got together in 2009 we co-founded a site in the meditation and spirituality space that’s still running today, with about seven books published. In 2016 I started teaching everything we’d learned growing her brand, which became the Miles Beckler brand — so I’ll reference both. Within my wife’s brand, a lot of her audience wants the physical book — they want to sit down with it — and we see that even with forever-free Kindle books: those are our best-selling print books, because people read it on Kindle and then want it in print. It’s a different user experience. My audience wants help getting a specific result, getting over a specific hurdle. My wife’s audience is more about getting into a certain vibration or state of being, and once they feel that, they want the print version too. We didn’t know that going in — we were just taking action and looking at the data, and when your free book turns out to be your best-selling print book, that tells you something. So now we make sure her books are large enough to print with a spine — roughly 25,000 words — because it serves a different purpose for a different niche and avatar.

That makes sense — it’s about who you’re writing the book for, and whether wanting a physical book is more about branding, or being able to mail a book to a potential partner. You’ve taken a lot of action over the years to learn what actually works, and if you never take that action you never find out.

Yeah — to distill it down: create an outline for something you know how to talk about and teach. Make a two-hour masterclass video on it. Take that transcription and, if doing it yourself, run it through GPT or Claude — you’ve also mentioned Koala as a tool. Once you do that you have a roughly eight-to-twelve-thousand-word book you can publish on Kindle as a short read, and start ranking in the Amazon search engine — but you can also repurpose the content on YouTube, on your blog for Google search, and we haven’t even talked about Twitter posts or Instagram, which I completely ignore. The reason is bandwidth — there’s a concept of “enough.” My wife and I run a business doing over a million dollars a year, so we want to work on things that keep working for years. A Twitter post works for about 17 minutes and then it’s dead. A great Instagram post might bring attention for 24 to 48 hours. A good YouTube video can bring traffic for years. A good book can bring customers and leads for years. It’s also worth mentioning that one goal of creating books is helping Amazon’s customers — if my Niche Navigator book doesn’t actually help someone get over that hurdle, it hurts my brand. But when it does help, that’s where the calls to action in every book matter — every book grows my list and my customer list, and every book promotes the other books and some kind of lead magnet, because Amazon owns that customer until I get them into my own ecosystem. On one of my earliest books, The Seven Figure Side Hustle, right after the table of contents I offer the audiobook for free — the audio I recorded to make the print book — so someone can click “look inside,” see the call to action and the URL before they even buy the book. I’m gaining leads from Amazon before purchase, and there are calls to action at the end too. This comes from being mindful of how much power platforms hold over us — YouTube shuts people down, Facebook shuts down fan pages — we live in an age of a lot of censorship, so if we all-in trust these mega corporations to do what’s right for us long term, we’re setting ourselves up for a potentially disastrous outcome. Amazon is genuinely one of the least worrisome to me in that regard, but we still need to play the Amazon game in a way that works for Amazon, make the product great for customers, and still funnel people into an ecosystem we own and manage long term — that’s how you build a real, sustainable business.

Quick note: these short reads aren’t technically in a separate “short reads” category — they’re in the normal category. Right now in e-commerce/marketing bestsellers on Amazon, my Niche Navigator is number three in that category, my Seven Figure Side Hustle is number five, and Sales Funnel Sabotage is number seven — so I’m outranking all three of Russell Brunson’s books right now, punching above my weight class, even ahead of people like Jeff Walker who have more experience and brand value, because of sales volume, star ratings, and pricing — the factors in the algorithm. As I get more rankings in my categories, I’m pushing competitors farther down — same game I played in SEO from 2012 to 2020, though I do less SEO now because it’s easy for people to steal blog content and republish it; it’s a higher bar for people to steal videos and books, though it still happens.

Yeah, I’ve seen that with tweets going viral and getting ripped off by tools designed to regurgitate the same concepts, which waters things down and creates a thirst for something unique and authentic — that’s the real opportunity, because we all have the same tools and the same 24 hours in a day.

Pro tip: just keep at it long enough and you’ll figure out your style. I’ve done a lot of snowboarding — at one point I lived across the street from a ski resort, had a shuttle stop in front of my house, rode back-country back home, had seasons with 130-plus days on the mountain. In snowboarding, phase one is falling a lot, and it hurts — most people stop there. Same is true for Kindle book writing. Then there’s a phase of competence — you can get down the mountain, you can publish a book, you’re competent, but something’s missing. Then there’s the third phase, style — when you’ve done it so long you relax into it. I’ve got a lot of style snowboarding, purely from the discipline of doing it over and over. Same with my YouTube videos — I didn’t sit down and design a “Miles Beckler style”; I did 758 videos over six years and the style emerged from finding my comfort zone, which for me is a phone on a tripod, sitting on my property, 20 acres in the woods, no lighting, no microphone, just my four-year-old Samsung phone. I share an idea and feel so comfortable that it brings out something no one else in my niche has. All of that happened from just doing what I could, as quickly and frequently as possible — iterate, fall down, get up, fall down, get up — and the style emerges from there.

That’s a great insight — practice and consistency stand out regardless of industry; the people at the top of any game have been doing it a long time. Like Pioneer, dude sixty — he’s a boss, been doing this forever, and obviously really good at it and at teaching it.

One other thing worth noting is the value of “niching down” — I think of it as solving more specific problems than anyone else. If you go to Amazon Kindle looking for a book on how to choose a niche for an online business, there aren’t more than a couple, if any besides mine, that answer that one specific question. Most people instead try to write the be-all, end-all 800-page book on internet marketing that nobody ever finishes and that doesn’t sell — you waste months. If you’re new, focus on specific challenges. Someone in weight loss might do “the shortcut to macros” — thinking in nested layers, like keto within weight loss within fitness. When you go into a sub-niche with a little sales funnel and a little book in a specific area, you can see what works better and build the next thing — what’s the next challenge after this one is solved? You build a pathway with a high likelihood of working because each step is a smaller iteration cycle. You go back and update the first book to recommend the next one, and create a bundle. Zooming out, this is what a properly built sales funnel does — three or four products in a row, each one a natural upsell for what comes before, building pathways at low ticket prices so people can guide themselves to results, rather than the high-ticket approach of hyping a big sale up front. When people actually get results with your content in motion, without you bleeding them for money upfront, they know, like, and trust you — and if you later run a small mastermind for a thousand or a few thousand dollars, or in-person masterminds in Thailand or Bali, people’s willingness to fly across the world for it goes way up, because of all the small experiences that built trust first. That’s a low-ticket business philosophy — making it as easy as possible for people to get an experience with your training that helps them overcome something, which positions you as someone who actually gets results, apart from all the noise on Facebook and YouTube.

That keeps bringing to mind the value of a one-on-one way to interact and continue helping people down the funnel — what’s the next logical step after they’ve gotten a win. You mentioned the audiobook giveaway as a way to get people off Amazon while still playing the Amazon game. Can you walk through what’s worked well for Amazon keyword and category research, simplified, and how you point people from the book to the next step?

Relevance is important. I’m always testing — through people like John Benson and old-school copywriters, the one thing they all did was test constantly, so I blaze forward not fully knowing what will work, try things, then look back at the data. One book, Sales Funnel Sabotage, essentially sells the recordings of my last mastermind, where I brought in 50 people at a thousand dollars each. The book’s framework is the ten biggest mistakes people make with their sales funnels. There’s a huge pool of people paying for expensive sales-funnel software month after month, thinking the software is the solution, and not seeing results — so I came up with ten questions, with ChatGPT’s help, and ten answers; this one was almost all written by ChatGPT, then sent to my copywriter to go through line by line, because I have a sales funnel masterclass course with recordings that sells as an upsell — 97 dollars is the lowest price, 197 through the book’s link, or 495 on my website directly. The intent is to attract someone struggling to make a sales funnel profitable, run them through a ten-step checklist, and — surprise — each problem is covered in the course. I run KDP ads against the most relevant category and keywords, and the cover has a bomb graphic so it stands out. The idea is someone on vacation buying a couple of Kindle books by the pool, having an “aha moment” or two, and wanting the full video course.

Other books are more about growing my opt-in list — taking people from a big-picture idea to a freebie that gets them on my list, because it’s easier for someone to say yes to a free opt-in than a paid course. I generally recommend people lean toward growing their email list from their book. On my wife’s brand, her big book has a call to action for a free audio at the beginning and a free book at the end — separate opt-ins — plus a call to action for an inexpensive product like an audio guided meditation, and cross-promotion of her other books. Generally, your second book is one of the best ways to sell your first book — the more books you have, the more the lifetime value goes up. Step two is the most logical, relevant way to get people onto your email list — often a five-day-challenge-style landing page (we used ConvertKit; LeadPages or any page builder works). For a fitness book on counting macros, it might be a five-day challenge revealing the secret; for weight loss, a shopping list or recipe book. The book delivers the big-picture information, and the next logical step is offered right there — a cheat sheet, checklist, five-day challenge, shopping list.

There’s an extremely high correlation between our revenue and the days we send emails — we don’t always make offers, but my wife’s list is about 160,000 subscribers, and we put together a 17-product bundle last month with two ten-thousand-dollar days because she mailed it twice and it was time-sensitive. That happens because of the size of the list, which started with one subscriber and grew from there. I’m a huge email-marketing geek — pretty much everything I do is designed to grow my leads list or my customer list. Someone who buys Sales Funnel Sabotage and then buys the masterclass is on my customer list — the most valuable list — and I’m always thinking about how to move people from the leads list to the customer list, and how to get more people onto the leads list. That’s the old-school direct-response marketing game.

To market the books, I always hustle up five-star reviews first. When I launch a new book at 99 cents for the first week, I’ve done a free live stream on my YouTube channel — buy the book, leave a review, reply with your receipt, and get access to a free two-hour Q&A/consulting session you couldn’t otherwise buy. That got me 25 to 35 star reviews from about 70 sales. I always try to launch with a bunch of five-star reviews so that when the inevitable one-star review shows up from someone frustrated that I actually did the thing they’d thought about doing for years and never did, it doesn’t sink the book — I still have a 4.9-star rating. Before we had email lists it was “hey Auntie, go buy this book,” “hey Mom, go buy this book” — hustling the first ten five-star reviews any way we could. I like low-price books because Amazon surfaces low-price items with good reviews and low return rates as “best deal,” which is what I want. That’s why all my books right now are 99 cents — I believe the combination of sales volume and low price is why I’m outranking people like Russell Brunson, who charges nine dollars for his book.

We also run ads — there’s no lack of traffic in this world; if anything, people have a conversion problem, because once that’s solved you can buy traffic from anywhere. This gets into what I call “celebrity authority” — I want people to see the brand as an authority, whether they’re searching YouTube, Google, or Amazon, and even when they’re not searching for me, I run Google ads so I show up on other websites via the Display Network, and on Facebook. Being everywhere presents the brand as bigger than it might otherwise seem — not because I’m uniquely famous, but because I’ve spent money on advertising and played that game consistently. My best return on ad spend right now is Kindle; the one challenge is volume — Facebook and YouTube ads can absorb $150,000-$200,000 a day without running out of traffic, but there just aren’t that many people searching within a book category, so we spend roughly three to five thousand dollars a month on Kindle ads, generally making that back on the front end through book sales, aiming to just break even. But every one of those sales pushes organic rankings up and puts eyeballs on the calls to action, some percentage of which join the email list — a self-liquidating system where the same thousand dollars recycles every month while rankings and the email list both grow.

That’s some of the value of Amazon — organic rank compounding over time from consistent investment, even at five dollars a day. If you’re also pushing out a short read every couple of weeks, you get publishing velocity on top of that, and if you have a team handling the parts you don’t want on your plate, you’ve found a workflow to focus on what you’re best at while other people operate the rest.

Even on my AI-written book, my operations guy did the actual AI work — I wasn’t in there prompting paragraph by paragraph; I gave him the raw material and said “make it into a book,” got it back, read it, and thought it felt right. From there it’s a question of who to send it to next — a proofreader, a copy editor, a copywriter — broad categories of people who can help. For that book I went to a high-end copywriter and it cost a couple thousand dollars, because it was especially sales-heavy and I wanted someone who knows sales copy. That’s the “who not how” philosophy — who can get this done for me, because I want the result, not necessarily to do it myself. I started by doing all the stuff myself too, to be fair — everybody’s in a different place when they start. For our first books, I got layout help from someone on Upwork, and I still get book covers made on Fiverr for about fifteen dollars. Once you build the system, it’s something you can execute over and over, and that’s what people are really searching for — their own personal process. I’m clearly a talker, so I lean into that. Some people that scares — being on camera. If you’re a walker and a talker, is there a nature trail where you take your outline, hold your phone, and record a voice memo that then goes through Descript yourself or through a teammate who runs it through Descript — that’s what my VA does for me. Whether you’re the writer or the prompt executor, none of these paths is better or worse — they’re just different pathways to the same place, and when you find the one aligned with your style, you’ll ship more work, and the more you ship, the faster you get the feedback loop — “that one flopped, that one’s okay, that one’s not bad” — and you keep making educated guesses based on the feedback from taking a lot of action.

The more you publish and get feedback, the faster you improve — that ties into today’s kickoff call about what the minimum viable book looks like so you can start getting feedback. It’s so easy to get stuck writing something that has to be perfect, dragging on for months, never publishing — and then when it finally comes out, you’re exhausted and no one reads it, because most people don’t finish a book even if they buy it. If you can get someone their result in 8,000 words, Amazon isn’t punishing you for a shorter book — they want readers to solve their problem and be happy customers. Just like Google rewards blog content with high on-page time and click-through rate, and YouTube rewards a high watch-through rate and click-through rate, every algorithm has its own KPIs for measuring content quality, and if you’re the best within those chosen KPIs, you inch your way up. There are ways to be intentional about those KPIs rather than just “publish and pray.” That “oh man, I poured everything into this” feeling is what I call the creative hangover — people finish their life’s-work course or masterclass and have no energy left for the sales copy, marketing, and advertising that’s actually going to sell it, so there’s a balance to find.

For someone starting out, especially with a one-on-one coaching offer or a high-ticket product, books are some of the best front-end offers — technically an Amazon customer, but they bought your book, so they’re kind of your customer, and someone who’s read your book on intermittent fasting is far more likely to hire you for weight-loss coaching than someone reached through an interruption-based Facebook or YouTube ads funnel, because they found you while actually searching for something they wanted. Amazon is smart about this too — if someone’s been buying keto supplements and a keto book, Amazon will surface related recommendations, doing some of that connecting work for you. So the main product might be weight-loss coaching, with a keto book as one entrance point and an intermittent-fasting book as another — different top-of-funnel entrance points that can be replicated with free-book opt-ins and email follow-up sequences, run through Facebook ads — the same game a sales-funnel business runs, just leading with the Kindle book as the front end. You might not know in advance which entrance point will bring the best customers, so you build them all out, split five dollars a day across each, and eventually use click tracking and UTM parameters to see which book brings the best customers and shift the ad budget there. All of this can happen while competitors are stuck on the content marketing treadmill doing daily Instagram Reels and TikTok, while you’re methodically building proven pathways from a platform people already trust and are ready to buy on.

It’s very bottom-of-funnel in one sense — someone can be top-of-funnel and still find you through Amazon because they’re already in a marketplace looking to buy. There’s still benefit to your own website for your own products, but for getting into distribution, there’s no easier advertisement than putting your name and brand on Amazon at five dollars a day of auto ads. You can get sophisticated if you want, but for books there’s no need to overcomplicate it the way you might with physical inventory — it’s just: get the book out, let AI tools help you get into the zone and get the initial content out there, then click publish. That’s the whole point of the seven-day book challenge — with AI as a co-pilot, now is the time to really leverage these tools to build personal brands that solve real problems and get people results, because helping other people is what drives success in your own endeavors.

I think you articulated that perfectly, Miles — thank you for coming on and sharing with us. To everyone watching live: if eight to twelve thousand words is the target for a Kindle short read, you can go up to about 25,000 words if you want a spine on the book. This is absolutely doable inside a seven-day framework as long as you commit to consistently showing up, doing the work, and then analyzing the data and letting the results speak for themselves.

And if you want to take the process to the next level — I learned this from Jason Fladlien in one of his courses — give yourself deadlines. Phase one is a two-hour brainstorm session: come up with a title and sub-head by looking at what’s working and cross-referencing what you know. You’re not allowed up out of the chair, phone gone, just brainstorming for two hours. Then leave, go for a walk, shift your state, and later you get two hours to write an outline — that’s it, that’s all you have. For the outline, there’s the Udemy trick: go to udemy.com, look at bestselling courses on your topic, and you can see the entire outline for that course right there — not to steal someone else’s outline, but to see how quickly you can understand a proven structure you can make your own and improve on. Step one is the brainstorm session, step two is the two-hour outline session, step three is a two-hour recording session — video or audio, sitting out back, at a coffee shop, wherever you feel free — and once that’s done, transcribe it, run it through AI editing.

One last tip: my wife, in the spirituality niche, has told ChatGPT-4 something like, “here’s my transcription, edit this as if you were an editor for Hay House Publishing” — a major publisher doing about 100 million dollars a year — “for one of their best books on [insert spiritual topic],” and the edits and suggestions it came back with were brilliant, on par with a strong proofreader. From there it’s off to Upwork or oDesk for a proofread, and Fiverr for a cover — I usually pay three different people for three cover options, for about forty-five dollars total, and pick my favorite, which is way cheaper than 99designs. A proofread from Upwork usually runs a fraction of a cent per word, maybe 130 dollars total, and then an InDesign person handles layout. It sounds like five, six, seven steps, but you’re building a business — there’s a lot to do, so let’s just get to it: outwork the competition by publishing more books, then out-strategize them. My wife and I have sold 135,000 books of our own and wouldn’t take a traditional publishing deal if offered — it’s not that difficult a game to figure out once you see it, and it’s one of the best front ends for everything you can sell on the back end once you get a book funnel working.

Fantastic, Miles — thank you again for breaking it all down. We’ll have this replay inside the community afterward, and I want to break down the transcript using AI and some of our recipes so you all can take action. Full force, day one coming up tomorrow — let’s rock and roll, guys, take action, you can do it. Thanks, Miles. Cheers.

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