← The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying AI For Curious Beginners
The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying AI For Curious Beginners
EP 56 - Writing A Business Book With ChatGPT
00:21:53
In this solo episode, host Cary Weston dives into the process of using ChatGPT as a supportive tool for writing business books. Cary shares insights from his personal experience and from helping others navigate the journey of turning their knowledge,...
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Hey there. Hey. Welcome to the ChatGPT experiment. This is a podcast designed to help curious beginners better understand what ChatGPT is and hear from others who are using it and find ways and practical ways that you can utilize ChatGPT for your personal and professional life. My name is Kerry Weston. I am your host. And a quick episode today wanted to share a couple of experiences that I have had recently in helping people write books, specifically business books, and the role in which Chat GPT has played in that. In that process. And so when we start with the concept of writing in general and we introduce ChatGPT, there's two ways in which the brain and two ways in which the tool can be used, right? And the first way is just literally, hey, Chat GPT, write this for me, right? That's not what we're talking about here. We're not talking about that in terms of articles or in terms of writing a book. And if you've been following the podcast at all, then you know that. I subscribe to the belief that ChatGPT is an amazing instrument. It is a writing partner. It's something that will help expedite and complement the processes that you do instead of replacing it. I think it's a fantastic way to. To get rid of the busy work and allow you to focus more on the thinking and the optimizing and bringing what's truly you to the process without having to sift through that anxiety of looking at the blank page or the blinking cursor. Right? So when I'm talking about using ChatGPT to write a business book, what I'm really talking about is sharing the things that you know, sharing the things that you share, your experiences, your skills, your expertise, the things that makes you valuable, and putting it into writing so that you can scale that. Right? So many of us have sat and thought, maybe I should write a book someday. Or I say this over and over Again, or if you're a writer, maybe you've got a collection of articles and a collection of things you already have put together and you want to make something bigger of those collections. So I'll share with you where I've been with a few folks here and the things that I've learned in hopes that it might help you, too. And I have been watching a friend of mine, Chris Green, who's been putting a book together on his own. He's in the finishing pieces. I have not been working with Chris on that, but he's been sharing his journey. He's quite generous with the information that he shares on social media. Chris, if you remember the flood insurance guru, he was a guest on the podcast not too long ago in sharing all the things that he's been doing with ChatGPT and introduced the concept of writing a book. And he's in his finishing stages of that last episode. I talked about projects and how to manage your files with projects and how to keep things organized so you can find them. And Chris shot me a note and said that he's been using projects for his book. Right. So that's really cool. And so let's talk about the second way. Not the automated go do it for me, but the second way. If you have a goal of writing a book with ChatGPT, I'm going to share with you a few tips that I've used and found to be incredibly productive and helpful and in hopes that maybe, maybe it serves some value for you. So the first thing I would share is if you have an outline, just a bulleted outline, that is fantastic. That's a good starting point for any writing process anyway. But for a book specifically, and I've used the outline to kind of talk about the path that we want to take and get things out of our head. Now, what's really important is when we're writing any kind of business publication, right, Your unique perspective, your unique point of view is really what's going to differentiate whatever you're producing from anything else that's out there, because that's what makes you uniquely special. It's the point of view and experiences that you bring to the table. So the outline is your way of delivering the information and breaking it down into nuggets that you can share. And here's why I say both of those things. Once you have the outline, you have a couple different paths. Number one, if you are one that has been writing or even video, right? So I'll go back to Chris, Chris Green, who has a volume of videos on his YouTube channel. And a lot of the things that he shares are in those videos. And videos give you the opportunity for transcripts. And transcripts is a magic tool for work with ChatGPT. So if you have the opportunity of using resources that you already have out there, articles, blog posts, videos, and transcripts, then that's a piece of the puzzle that you can bring right from the beginning, right? So you can add those nuggets to it, to the outline. So let's assume you don't, though. Okay? So the first thing I would say is the combination of an outline and an audio file or an interview file is going to be your best friend. And here's what I mean by that. Once you have your outline done, the first step I have been doing, and the first step that I would recommend doing is sitting down and having somebody either interview you or you talk like I'm doing here. Just talk into a video recorder, into an audio recorder, and just get it out of your head. And don't try to do everything all at once. I would literally go bullet by bullet or chapter by chapter or topic by topic. However, you've organized this thing for a couple different reasons. Number one, we tend, and you've heard me say this before, we talk much differently than we write. We are more detailed, we are more thorough, we give examples, we tend to tell stories and provide anecdotes. We wouldn't normally do that in writing because it takes too long. It's a different thought process for most people. I'm generalizing here. Right. And so your outline gives you talking points to either interview yourself or have someone interview you, but you want to get everything out. And the goal here in getting everything out is again, to use the transcript that's going to be produced by the interview. Okay. And the reason I'm sharing with you to go one bullet at a time, one section at a time, one topic at a time, is the more complete and detailed the transcript, the better the writing is going to be. Okay? So your ability of matching what you're talking about and the questions that you're answering or whatever information you're providing in the transcript to that outline is going to help you in an amazing way, and it's going to show you the power of how ChatGPT can take one resource and turning into something altogether. Okay? So I'm expediting this instruction for the sake that you can see the pattern. But number one, create your outline. Number two, interview yourself, talk to yourself, or have someone interview you and get it out of your head and give as much color, context, detail stories as possible right into that transcript. And I would do one recording per section of your outline. However, you are structuring that you want to keep those transcripts separate. And I'll share with you again why in a moment. Once you've gone through and recorded all those thoughts, then you have the ability of creating text transcripts. I use Descript as a tool, but also for a free way of doing this. You could actually just create a YouTube channel, upload your videos to your YouTube channel. Now, some of you are saying I wouldn't want anyone to actually watch these, so why would I put it on a public forum like YouTube? You can put up private, right? You can put up videos into your YouTube channel that will not be seen by anyone else but you. You can label them private and unlisted and all that fun stuff. But here's the reason. YouTube automatically creates transcripts from the videos that it's putting up. So in your account, once the video is loaded and processed, you've got yourself a free transcript. Then you can simply copy and paste it, right? So once you've done that and you've got your outline set and you've gone through and got your transcript set for each section, bullet topic, whatever it is for your outline, it's time to bring ChatGPT into the process. And the easiest way to do this is to literally tell Chat GPT that you're writing a book and you're going to give it the outline. Okay? Now, if you've been a listener of the podcast, then you have seen me reference how to relate to ChatGPT, how to make it right. Like you voice, tone, style, right? There's a few episodes of Chat GPT experiment here that would allow you to see how to do that. Okay? The ability of giving cues and attribute lists to Chat GPT to allow to understand how you write is important. So if you've done that extra benefit for you, extra points for you, that's one of the resources that you're going to want to use here. So you want to share with it the attributes of you. How do you write, right? How do you convey? How do you talk? How do you share? And then you, you take your outline and you upload your transcript. And as you upload the transcript, you say, this is a transcript related to bullet point one or section one, whatever it might be. This is the reason I asked you to do it or suggested that you do it one at a time, your transcript to your outline. And this is what I found the more you try to put into one of these requests, the less detail ChatGPT is going to give back to you, meaning it will make things generic in a way that you are not going to be pleased with. If you are uploading, let's say you took your entire outline and you had one interview for the entire outline. It would condense and it would summarize and it would not put as much effort into each of those chapters as you would like. So that's, I'm sharing that from experience, is that the more detailed and structured you make your work with ChatGPT, meaning topics or chapters, the more detailed, the more relatable, the more authentic the output is going to be and what you're going to end up with if you do this is a collection of those authentic chapters, a collection of those authentic outputs that will make a really nice complete package. And so what I found in doing the interviews with others as they've gone through this is follow up questions. Tell me more about this, tell me more about that. Give me a story. Do you have an anecdote? Don't make it all about facts, make it about your experiences and give for instances and share stories. The ability for ChatGPT now to understand how you write and your voice, tone, style and your approach. It sees the outline as a goal, it understands its parameters, it knows what your what success looks like. And it will take those transcripts and it will start to come back and give you chapter by chapter. So this is an easy way of doing that. I mentioned at the beginning, if you have writings or if you have transcripts that you've already created on a YouTube channel, much like Chris does, then as you're doing these chapters, you could be loading. You know, here's an additional reference point. Here's an article on the topic or here's a video transcript on the topic for additional color and context. Okay. There is a more complex way of doing this whole thing and we get into custom GPTs and whatnot, but I'm sharing with you the step by step in just a traditional regular chat, regular conversation that's worked well for me. The tip that I learned the hard way is if you start to get comfortable with ChatGPT, meaning you've done a few chapters, it's starting to give you detail and you just start pasting things in and saying next, next, next, it will also start to dumb down and so treat each chapter, each bullet, each transcript exercise that you do with the same level of detail and direction. So tell it. This is the transcript for this chapter, I have a few extra resources to give you. Again, I'm reminding you I want this to be as authentic as possible and make it sound like me. When you do those little things, the output is going to be much better. Right now, you would think that after you've done it four or five times, the memory is going to be there and it'll just repeat that process, but I've found it's not. This is a lot of this is heavy work for ChatGPT and it starts to get tired, as I've talked about before. So reminding it of the goal and reminding it of what it's supposed to do and what you need from it will serve you well. Okay, so the cherry on top, if you will, the icing here is once you've gone through and you've, you know, you've done your interviews and you've loaded a file, by the way, if I didn't share that with you, you can take that file and attach it, right? You don't have to copy and paste. You can attach it to your CHAT GPT conversation. So, for instance, you've got your outline, here's chapter one, and you've got a text file from the transcript. You can upload that Text file to ChatGPT and then say, use this transcript to create a chapter. And you want to make sure at the beginning, as you do this, that you are giving details about who the reader is, like who the intended audience is and who you're writing this for, for, and the. And the reason and perspective that you're writing it for. That information, along with your voice, tone and style analysis will really personalize the output. Right? And so it's been amazing. I'm just going to share an experience here. It's been amazing to watch two different clients go through the book writing process. Both of them Never thinking about ChatGPT is a part of that. They both stared at notebooks over the course of months. And much like you and I would do, we get busy and then we set things aside and then they put a bunch of energy into it for a weekend, then you walk away for a month. It's hard to keep that focus, isn't it? So neither one of them had thought about ChatGPT as a reference. And when we started to work on this, they were equally amazed, independent of each other, at how much better the writing process was, how much more excited they were getting, how much more productive they were getting. And here's the reason. It didn't become about writing anymore. It came about Sharing thoughts, experiences, stories, anecdotes, because that's really what the book is intended to be. But the process of writing, it goes so tedious because they're not writers, this is not what they do. And the ability of just talking or for both of them, because I led them through the process from an interview point of view, the process of being interviewed and getting information pulled out of our brains in a comfortable way made the writing experience in the book much more enjoyable, much more productive, much more efficient. And I think seeing progress enables more progress. Right? When you see things are working, you are more energized to keep doing it and do more of it. It's very hard to stare at pages that you've been writing and writing and writing and think that you're making progress because it's slow and it's tedious. For a lot of people, it's mentally taxing, isn't it? So chatgpt as a transcript tool matched with the outline, understanding the audience, understanding the voice, tone and style, and understanding the reason and purpose of the book itself, has really become something that I've seen folks get excited about, right. Rather than have it become a chore. Because if you're like me, you've got this big idea and you know it's going to be great, but the dog days of getting in the middle of it can tire you down. And so, just like I've shared before, ChatGPT can be an accelerator. It can be a fantastic compliment. It can do the busy work for you and it can really extract the nuggets that make things special, those experiences, those anecdotes and those stories. Right. I've also learned, once you, you know, I guess what I'd say before I share what I've learned as well is get it out of ChatGPT. That's one of my tips that I've shared with you before, is as you build each chapter, keep a Google Doc or a Word Doc or something on the side and then paste as you go. Don't keep it in ChatGPT because you're going to want to come back to it. And Chat doesn't always remember as much as you think it will. Like I said, it tends to get tired at times. And if you keep it in an external document, you can bring those chapters back and work on them one at a time and say, all right, let's revise this and make it as best as it could be. Let's make it as authentic as it can be. You know, is there an opportunity of making it More real or adding another story or here's another article or resource. If you keep that aside, then bringing it back into ChatGPT is going to be your friend. One tip I have is if you use projects in ChatGPT for your book, then I would have one conversation per chapter inside that project, right? And that way you can apply transcripts and documents and articles and whatnot to that chapter and you can work on each individual chapter as you go. It'll give you the opportunity of really focusing in and not letting yourself be more generic as you work through these chapters. Like I said, it's easy to just say, do it again, do it again, do it again. You really want to give some individual effort and guidance to those chapters so you can make them as effective as that can be. So that's my quick experience in utilizing the tool. For a few instances where people want to write a business book, I have seen them. One of the questions I get is, how long does this take? In both instances, I had two clients that have been thinking about this for a long time. And by I say a long time. One of them was a couple years. It was in his head and he had notes and whatnot, but didn't know how to move forward. And another one had been thinking about it but not done anything for more than a year. Started and stopped, but nothing productive or meaningful. In both cases. We went from outline to interview to what I'd call a draft, which means it needs to be edited, you know, for grammar and whatnot. But we went from outline to interview to draft in about 60 days and understand that those are a collection of individual interviews and a collection of working in transcripts and ChatGPT. So start to finish about 60 days. Can you do it sooner than that? Of course you can. But this is not their only focus, right? This was along with everything else we do in a daily life. So what an amazing opportunity for those that are looking to get the experiences that they have and the stories that they have out of their head and put it into writing. Why would you do this? Well, it could become a business development tool for you. It could just be a project that you're looking to achieve. It could just be something you've always wanted to do. But I'm seeing the ability for a tool like this to get rid of the busy work and really pull the essence of what makes things special and different of those stories and experience that we have and turn it into something real. And we say, you know, along with family and work and all the other things, start to finish 60 days. That's pretty amazing. That's pretty efficient when you can think about all the ways in which a project like this could get stalled. So if you're thinking about a book, um, there you go. There's some ideas I hope you got from it. Shoot me a note if you want to know more. I'm happy to share what I've seen, what I've learned. If you are in the process, let me know how it's going. Love to talk to folks that have been down this journey and share more with the audience. Yeah, you can find me@chatgptexperiment.com you can find ways of getting a hold of me there. There's also some workshops and resources there for you as well. But writing a book with ChatGPT as your efficiency partners, your amazing instrument. I hope that was helpful. And again, if you have any experiences to share, shoot them my way. I'd love to hear about it. So, hey, that's all for today. And until we talk soon, do stay curious. That is the most important element of making ChatGPT work for you. Okay, talk soon.
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