I Tried To Write A Novel With AI (here's what happened)

Can I show you how in just 3 hours I used AI to write a novel that is actually good and how I also created a cover, set it to be ready to publish on Amazon Kindle, and also show you how I optimized it for free traffic. Well, that's today's challenge. So, thank you Scribe for sponsoring today's video. More on them later, but for now, let's get started. And I'll tell you something. I was inspired to try this after I read this article about an indie author who in just one year published more than 200 novels using Claude AI and sold over 50,000 copies. Crazy, right? And she did so by selling them through Amazon self-publishing service called KDP. You can upload a book PDF file and then you can sell it on Amazon as either an ebook, a print book, or both. And for her, she uploaded and sold romance novels. However, in this previous video on this channel, I already wrote an AI romance novel. So, to keep things interesting, for this challenge, I'll

write a different type of book, a detective novel, and I'll be using a new and improved AI workflow that I have developed to write and publish Kindle ebooks. So, first up, I researched a

high demand, low competition niche to write my book in. Because, you see, as I will discuss later, I like to focus on free traffic methods for my marketing. And on Amazon, their search algorithm can be a great source of free traffic. My goal is to pick a book topic where if somebody searches for it, my book will likely show up near the top of the results. But this won't happen if I pick a niche like this one that has lots of books in it already. So to find a low competition niche, I use the first tool in my AI workflow, Claude. As my regular viewers know, Claude is an AI LLM chatbot similar to Chat GPT. It is made by a company called Anthropic and in writing tests, Claude consistently beats Chat TPT, so I'll be using it to write my book. Plus, it also has a great research tool. So, I told it that I wanted it to write a mystery novel and that I wanted to search the internet looking for discussions where people have been talking about mystery novel niches that they want more of. And then in the chat settings, I turned on research mode and I set it to the latest set model, which is their mid-tier model with thinking turned on. And then that was it. Claude followed up with a few clarifying questions, which I answered. And then I just sat back and let Claude search the internet for me. And it searched through hundreds of websites. And when it was done, it created a research document. And it found lots of low competition niches. And out of these ideas, I decided that this one would be fun. I figured I'd write a murder mystery with two middle-aged sisters who accidentally become crimesolvers. And I had another idea. So, a popular hobby in this demographic is travel, right? So, what about a murder mystery but on a plane? So, I did a search for it on Amazon. And look, you get almost no results. So, if we were to write a book in this niche, our book would most likely immediately jump to the top of the search results. Plus, there is another reason I like this idea. It's a fun, almost cheesy concept, which means it falls into the beach fiction genre, which are basically feelgood books that are simple and easy to read. In other words, they're cozy fiction. And while AI doesn't usually write award-winning books, it can be great at writing cozy fiction. Plus, I've also noticed that on Amazon, indie publishers can do very well financially by creating a book series. So, take this murder mystery series. It's set on a cruise ship. In each book, the cruise ship director solves different murders. People love it. So, these traveling sisters I've created could become their own series, too. All right, then. We have our book idea. So, now to move on to the next step. But first, just a quick tip. In this video, I'll be using the pro version of Claude. And the deep research tool I used is not in the free version. So, if you want a deep research tool that you can access for free, check out Perplexity. This is the most popular AI powered search engine. The free version of this has a deep research tool built into it. You get some free searches each month. Out of interest, I ran the same search with it and it gave me similar results to Claude. But yes, either way, now that I've picked my niche, I then

moved on to a crucial phase that most people skip, which is this plotting. Because you see, AI novels are usually terrible since most people just come to their favorite AI like chat GPT and say, "Hey, write me chapter 1 of my book. Go. " And that's it. No planning, nothing. And that is a legitimate approach some human authors take, which is called the pancer approach. But AI work much better at writing when you instead take the plotter approach, which is to plan your book before you write it. And to do that, we'll be using a feature within Claude called projects. This lets you create a dedicated workspace where users can create chats and upload files to it that Claude will essentially remember and be able to access from conversation to conversation within it. It's super handy. So, I set up a project for my book. Then, within this project, I started a new chat where I started working backwards. Plotting is usually easiest if you figure out what your ending will be first and work backwards from there. So, I got Claude to come up with some twist ending ideas for me. And I'll be honest, I didn't like them much. So, I got it to come up with some more. And out of these, I like the idea of it being some combination of it being the pilot that did it and that he had set the murder plot up in advance, knowing that the passenger would be on the plane. So, I asked Claude to expand more on this idea, and I came up with some ideas behind the pilot's potential motivations and scenarios for how he did it, too. So, I read over these and I picked the ideas that I like the most, like the fact that the pilot caused an allergic reaction. And I asked Claude to take this and to expand out on it into a full reference document. And not only did it write this reference document for me, but it coded it together, too. And it had pretty much everything you'd expect. An explanation of the history of the motive, an explanation of how he did it, and even red hearings that distract from him. So, I downloaded this and then I uploaded it into the project to save it as a reference. Then, next up was the characters. So, I started a new chat in the project and asked it to come up with some character profiles for the characters that we would expect in our book. And it came up with some fun characters, perfect for the style of book I was after. So, I then asked it to turn these character profiles into a document, which it coded together for me, no problem. And if you want to make any changes to these, it's really easy. Like reading back through it, Claude had made Alanor, the organized sister, a retired teacher. But I thought it would be better if she had been a lawyer. So I asked Claude to make this change and updated the document for me. So then I downloaded it and then I uploaded it to the project files. And then we had one more thing to do, and that was to choose a storyline structure. These are plot structures that have been proven to be popular with readers. The hero's journey is a classic one. Although the save the cat structure is probably the most popular for commercial fiction, it works well within a lot of genres, including romance. But since I was writing a detective novel, I chose this structure, the 12step mystery formula. Then I just came to Claude and I started a new chat within our project asking it to write out a 12step mystery formula based on the documents we had created so far. And that is what it did. It both wrote it and coded it together into a document for me. and I read over it and it was pretty good. So I just downloaded this formula document and I uploaded it to the project. Awesome. So now that I had finished plotting, I then moved on to

the next step which was to actually write my book. And actually because of all the plotting that I had already done, this was surprisingly simple. Yep. Basically, I just started a new chat and asked it to write chapter 1 based off of our project plotting documents. and I copied and pasted in part one of my 12step mystery formula for it to use as a reference. And then that was it. I sat back and let AI work its magic. And three minutes later, Claude had finished coding together a document containing chapter 1. Now, this is very important. I didn't just get AI to write the book for me. I treated this as a collaborative process. Basically, I read over it to check for any changes I wanted or mistakes that it might have made. And I noticed that the chapter ended with them in the plane. Whereas, as part of the plot we've written in our 12step mystery formula, they shouldn't begin to board until chapter 2. So, I asked it to change this, which it did for me, no problem. Then, after that, I just repeated this process for each of my chapters. And I kept it all within the same chat thread. I ended up writing 15 chapters this way. And once it had finished them, I downloaded each chapter and I started a new chat. And I uploaded the chapters into it and asked Claude to turn them into a single manuscript while fixing up any mistakes it noticed along the way. And when I did, I made sure to change the Claude model from Sonnet to Opus. This is Claude's most advanced model. It's very smart and can handle lots of text and data. But since it's smart, it uses lots of tokens, so it eats into your usage limits faster. So to save usage, I got their mid-tier model Sonnet to write my first draft chapter by chapter. And then once I started making complex manuscript wide edits, I switched to Opus. It took all of my chapters and turned them into a full draft book for me. Nice. So now I was ready for the next step. But first, we have a quick word from today's video sponsor, Scribe. So creating tutorials to show how to use tools can be a slow process, right? I mean, I should know. Well, today's video sponsor, Scribe, has fixed that. Scribe captures your workflow in real time and automatically builds a step-by-step guide that anyone can follow. No extra time required. Just install the free Chrome extension or download the desktop app and then click capture. And now you can complete anything on screen that you want to create a tutorial for. So, let's say that I wanted to teach someone how to start a project within Claude. I could just use Scribe to record my browser as I go. And then when I'm done, I just click the stop button in the Chrome extension. And look, Scribe automatically created a step-by-step guide for me, complete with annotated screenshots. And I can edit steps, crop or zoom in on images, blur sensitive info, and then share instantly. And I can send it as a link to my video editor, download it as a PDF, add teammates to it, or embed it. And you can even follow along live. The guide me feature pulls Scribe straight into your browser with interactive step-by-step walkthroughs which lets you see exactly where to click and it moves you through each step as you go. So take back your time and skip the busy work. Go to scribe. house/haleted to get started for free. But anyway

back to the video and onto the next step, which is this. I used AI to both edit my draft novel and polish it to turn it into a print ready novel. Yep. So, first up in my editing process, I actually chose to extend the book and make it bigger because my first draft came out to be just 40,000 words, and most mystery books I see sell well on Amazon are about 50,000 words or more. Claude asked me some questions on which parts I wanted to expand on. And then that was it. It just worked its magic. It took about 20 minutes to do this as this was quite intense work. It extended the chapters and even added two new chapters as well, taking it to just over 50,000 words, which was perfect. Now, I needed to check for errors. So, to do that, I used two different AI chat bots, CH E GBT and Google's Gemini, to basically act as third party neutral editors. I uploaded my manuscript to them, and I got each to read over it to see if they could spot any mistakes or continuity errors. And because I wrote this book in tandem with Claude and I read over each chapter as I wrote it and I got it to fix up mistakes along the way, there were actually very few errors, although they did spot some, which frankly, even in a human written novel, you'd expect. Then I came back to Claude and with Opus still turned on, I copied and pasted in the errors that chat GPT and Gemini found in a fresh chat along with a copy of the manuscript and I let Claude do its AI magic. And in just six minutes, it went through and fixed them all up. Nice. So, after I downloaded this new draft, there was one final big thing I needed to do, and that was polishing. So, I started a new chat in our book project, and I uploaded this final draft. And I asked the Opus version of Claude to polish it up and to turn it into a final manuscript that is fun and easy to read. And this definitely took a little while. Obviously, I sped it up, but in total, it took roughly 15 minutes for it to do this, but it was well worth it because at the end, I had my AI mystery novel that was well, actually, good. So, then this is the final copy that you will want to read over to double check for any mistakes. You can do what I did and pop it into a Google Doc to turn it into a document that you can edit yourself. But before I could upload it, there was something else I needed to do. I now

needed to make a book cover and AI has surprise actually made this pretty easy. So for this I used two tools. The first was Nano Banana, Google's AI image generator which I access through Google's all-in-one media generation platform called Flow. And I also used my favorite AI powered graphics editing app, Canva. And seriously, when it comes to making a book cover, I really wouldn't overthink it. Like this is a top-selling murder mystery book. And as you can see, the cover is pretty simple, isn't it? But it gives the right vibe, which for this style of book is cute and cozy. So, it's the vibe that's most important here. But either way, I started out by coming to Google Flow. If you don't have an account yet, that's easy. You can scroll down to pricing and sign up for either the free account or the pro account with their free 30-day trial. Then, once logged in, I click to create a new project. And then, in the chat settings, I switched to the image generation. And I selected to create a 3x4 image. And I chose to generate four images. And I also picked my favorite Nano Banana model, which is Pro. Then I just typed in a prompt explaining what I wanted my book cover to contain and what image style I wanted it in. And then that was it. N Banana went ahead and made four images for me. I also went ahead and generated a bunch more just to give myself lots of options to pick from. And out of these, this one was my favorite. But I needed to make some tweaks. So, I prompted it telling it what to change and it made the changes for me. And then once I'd finished tweaking it, I just downloaded it upscaled to 2K. And yes, before anyone asks, all images made in Flow with the Pro account currently, as of me filming, have no watermark, which is super handy. Then next, I came to Canva. You can use the free version of this, but I use the pro version to get access to more fonts and to upscale my book cover into higher resolution. So, if you do want to sign up for a free 30-day trial to it, I'll include my affiliate link in the description. Either way, I started a new project and set it to be 1,600x2560 pixels, which is the standard Kindle ebook size. And I uploaded the image of my book cover and placed it in the middle. Then I came to elements and selected shapes from the menu and added a rectangle. And I dragged and dropped it to fill the empty top section. And I selected a matching color from the color picker. Then I came to the text menu and elements and I added in my top tagline and then I switched the tagline font. Now as you can see Canva especially the pro version has lots of fonts but if you have a font you want to use in particular you can just type in the name of it and select it. Then after that I came to the text effects menu and selected a fun effect. And for this I thought the echo effect worked well with it. So once I had it looking the way that I wanted, I clicked on advanced text settings and then I used the slider to decrease the letter spacing for the tagline. And then that was pretty much it. I just repeated the process, but I added it at the bottom with the author name. And then when I had it looking the way that I wanted, I just clicked share download and I changed it to JPEG and I upscaled the image quality as high as it could go and I just click download. And now I had my own Kindle book cover. Yay. And also, just a quick note, I unfortunately only have time in this video to show how to upload novels as ebooks. But if you'd like to use Amazon's KDP program to also sell your novels as print ondemand books, you can use their book cover template generator to download a template that you can use to create a print ready book cover to sell as an actual physical book to. So then after I had my cover, I then moved

on to the next step, turning my story into a Kindle Ready file. So, first up, what I did was I came back to my chat thread with Claude Opus and I asked it to format my book manuscript into a nice, easy to read Kindle friendly file, which it did. So, I went ahead and I downloaded this. Then, I came to Amazon's free software, Kindle Create, and I downloaded it and installed it on my computer. And then I opened it up, started a new file, and uploaded the newly formatted novel that Claude made for me using their refflowable book format. And when I did, it asked me which chapters or sections to include. And then honestly, that was pretty much it. Because Claude had already formatted the document for Kindle, it looked great as is. I just made one change. You can add text or change the formatting on any of the pages that you like. So, I just added in an author name to the front page. And then I clicked to preview it to double check how it would look on a tablet. And as you can see again, it looked pretty much perfect. So, I just went ahead and clicked export and saved it as a KPF file. Nice. So then the moment of truth had come. It was now

time to upload and set my ebook to publish on Amazon's Kindle marketplace while also optimizing it for free traffic. So first of all, I signed into my account that I already had for Amazon's self-publishing service, KDP, and it's free for anybody to go in there and create an account. Then once I was logged in, I clicked to add a new book. And then on this screen, I needed to choose which book type to make. So, if I'd wanted to add in a physical print on demand book, I could have chosen either a hard cover or a paperback, but since I'm uploading an ebook, I chose that. Then, next, I needed to add a book title and a book subtitle. And this is actually an opportunity to optimize it for free traffic. So, as I mentioned earlier, we can optimize it for search engines, especially if you picked a low competition niche. This is called SEO. But we can also optimize it for GEO, which is generative engine optimization traffic. Basically, this is the AI recommendation feed. Essentially, if you open up Kindle inside of the website and app, Amazon's AI algorithm will choose and recommend books to you. And a well-known quirk is that the new books seem to get a 30-day algorithmic boost. So, this can be a great source of free traffic to get initial sales and reviews. So, what I did was I asked Claude to help me write this while also noting who my target audience is. And it came back with three options for me. And out of these, I liked option two the most. So, I copied it and then I pasted it back in on the KDP submission form. Then, next up, I decided to not create a series yet because it's probably not worth it until you have a second book, you know. Then, in the author section, you can enter in your name or if you want, you can use a pen name. Amazon doesn't mind either way. Then, after that, I scroll down to the description box. And of course, at this point, I switched back to Claude. And I asked it to not only create a description optimized for SEO and GEO traffic, but to write a description designed to hook readers in from the very first sentence. And then I copied the optimized description it gave me and I pasted it into Amazon's KDP. And then after ticking I own the rights and that it didn't have any explicit content, I came to categories. And here you can categorize your book into three categories. Your first category is your primary category. So I chose the one that best fits it. Then after that I came to the book keyword section and I asked Claude to come up with seven keywords for me. And while I liked six of them, I noticed that one of the sets of keywords it came up with involved author names. Anything involving names, trademarks or copyrights is something I stay clear of. So I asked Lord to redo this avoiding these and it made that change for me no problem. So, I copied these keywords and I pasted them back into my book listing. And then, while you can choose to set the book as a pre-order, I set it to release now. Then, on the next page, I just scrolled down and uploaded my book manuscript I made with Kindle Create. And then I scrolled down and uploaded my book cover that I made with Canva. And then I scrolled down again and gave a full disclosure of the AI content in my book. Amazon has publicly said that this is just for their own internal data. They don't release this publicly and they don't penalize books that are AI written. So I think it would be wise to disclose honestly here. Then I scrolled down to accessibility. Disclosed I wasn't quite sure on how accessible my book was, which was fine. Then I went over to the next page, pricing. I enrolled in the Kindle Select program and I chose to have a higher 70% royalty, which is what most authors do. For that, your book needs to be priced at least $3. Most ebooks I see in this niche price at around $5. So that's what I did too. And then that was it. The book was ready to either be published or as I did to save it as a draft ready to be published later. And check it out. While I did choose to break up the steps into little micro tasks spread out over multiple days, when I timed how long each task took and added it up, combined, it came out to just under 3 hours from start to finish. Very cool. So then if you'd like to learn about other business ideas that people are starting with AI tools, be sure to watch my next video here on screen and I will see you in the next