In this video, we are going to go over the exact
process
so that you can write a great book with Claude
right now in 2026
using the best
practices. Once you learn the seven steps
that we're gonna go over in this video, it's actually gonna be quite straightforward for you to produce something that you're truly proud of, builds your authority, creates trust with your readers, and actually turns those readers into clients and customers and income for your business. The reality right now is that most people are doing the exact opposite. They're using Claude to just print out crappy books that sell no copies and basically make no noticeable difference in their lives or their businesses. And that's because AI has basically given everyone the tools to write a book. That is if you just consider a book to be words between pages.
However, even a child could write a book with AI in a couple of days. So books have essentially become commoditized,
and now the competition
is much
greater
for your book to actually be great, to actually stand out, to actually shift the beliefs of the readers, and to make a meaningful difference in your business,
you've gotta have a bigger strategy and even a system that lives around the book that actually can turn that book into an engine.
And this is not easy. Otherwise, everyone would do it. Right? But that's what we talk about here on this channel. That's what I do and what I help my clients do. My name is Brian O'Hud. I help coaches, experts, agency owners publish books and use those books to get more clients for their business. I've worked with lots of $6.07, and even 8 figure coaches and experts, and I wanna share with you what I'm learning from working in the trenches with these very seasoned marketers
to use Claw to develop their books, create their books, and then ultimately build that system around it so that they can actually make money. Because writing the book is really just one of six components that turns a book into clients.
The first thing is you do need that self closing book that shifts their beliefs,
presales your offer before a call ever happens.
You're also gonna wanna sell it in what I call an evergreen book funnel,
and what you're seeing right now is an example of a funnel. I'm going to share more about this in a moment. What the funnel does is it allows you to make a lot more money per book sale and then capture their information so you can follow-up with them more effective than Amazon.
The third step is to also put it on Amazon and Audible. Most people are very comfortable buying books there. And then you want to funnel those people back into the same sequence
so that they can land in what I call your invitation
funnel. And that's simply a page that looks like this where you tell people about the high ticket offer that you sell. You show some testimonials,
and you allow them to book a call, fill out an application,
whatever that may be. Most authors don't even have a page like this, so they really don't have any chance of selling the thing that is actually gonna make them the money. And that thing is actually step five of this framework. You wanna have an Ascension offer,
the premium program that lives behind the book where the real revenue lies. And the final step, number six, is you wanna have what I call an authority flywheel.
You wanna have content that both builds your audience
and sells your book simultaneously.
You can expect to get 2%
of book readers to convert to clients or customers for your higher ticket stuff.
And so if you want two customers, you gotta sell a 100 books. I do that with content on YouTube and Instagram,
paid ads, and this is what puts a bow around the whole thing. By the way, if you want this entire system, I just launched my new book called the author operating
system.
You can get the book that walks you through this entire process
as well as an AI agent skill pack that's pre trained with all of my book writing prompts.
You're gonna get my exact book funnel templates and training on how to build one of these for yourself,
how to build your high ticket offer,
how to get your book on Amazon.
All of these bonuses are included when you grab a copy of the book. I'll put the link in the description in case you wanna check it out. And in this video, we're talking about this first step, writing your self closing book. And so without further ado, let's get into step one on how to do that. The first step is to define the book concept. You must be crystal clear on who your book is for,
the outcome that the book produces,
and what makes your approach or method unique and different from everything else that is out there. And just as a hint, that ascension offer that you sell behind your book will give you the clues on how to do that. For example, if you wanna help lawyers
to get more clients with YouTube,
then your book should also help lawyers get more clients with YouTube. And the book would be like the appetizer version,
and then hiring you would be the entree.
The only way an ascension offer makes sense is if it matches what is in the book so that the reader can naturally ascend
to the more white glove version of what you do. At this phase, I also have a working book title
and a handful of book subtitles that are essentially interchangeable,
just saying the same thing in different ways. I usually kinda wait towards the end to pick the final book subtitle,
but I wanna have some
idea of the title before I go any further because I'm probably gonna be referencing that title or concept throughout the book. And I recommend that you stay on step one until you really lock in the concept.
This is kinda like choosing a spouse.
You wanna
go slowly and make sure you nail this because if you don't, you basically will end up having to restart this whole thing and write a whole new book down the road. Alright. Once you've nailed step one, step number two is to assemble all of the raw material for your book.
It's kind of like building a house. You bring all of the construction
materials
to the site so that you can build a beautiful mansion.
Claude's an absolute machine when it comes to building that mansion,
but it can't do it without the materials that you give it. You are still the
architect
or whoever creates that blueprint for the house, and you're gonna tell it to design it exactly how you want it. And if you haven't used Claude before, you're going to want to use a Claude project. This is like the hub where everything is stored. Like, for my latest book, I've got this stuffed with all of my YouTube transcripts,
my past books,
everything I've ever said, a bunch of information about my offer, my perfect client,
and all of their desires and their fears, etcetera. You want to give it all the perfect context
so that it can write the book correctly for that person that you're trying to reach,
and this acts like the brain for your book. Once you stuff this full of everything, it's actually quite easy to produce a great book. You're gonna wanna store it full of all of the objections
that people could possibly have to your methods so that you can address those in your book.
Every story
that you could possibly tell in your book should be stuffed into that Claude project,
every YouTube transcript,
every newsletter,
transcripts from all your online courses,
basically
anywhere that you've ever said anything or taught anything on your topic,
you should put it in there. And then here's what's key. Once it's all in there, you say, hey. What's missing for me to write a great book? And it's gonna say, you've still got these three major gaps in your content.
What I do often for clients
is I'll get on Zoom, and I'll interview them on those missing topics. We often repurpose those interviews as, like, a YouTube video so you get more bang for your buck. But what you're really doing
is you're gathering
that raw material
that is still missing. You can't build a mansion without some beautiful big
glass window panes so you can look out on the street at all your peasant neighbors who have worse houses than you.
And so you wanna make sure that you get all the raw material.
If you want writing the book to be as
one click as possible, or you could, in theory, draft the whole book in, like, a day or two,
then stay on this phase, the raw material gathering phase relentlessly
until
Claude is basically telling you there is nothing else missing. You've got everything you need to write this book. And here is a bonus pro tip for this step that I love.
Tell Claude
all about you personally,
All your hobbies, all your interests, the different life experiences you've had. What it can do is weave those into your book. Like, I love to play Frisbee golf. I love to drink coffee.
I love to go snowboarding.
I've got two little daughters. Right? Claude can then take those things and actually weave them into the narrative in your book.
If there's a section in a book about you need to get up more times than you fall down or something,
then it could use an analogy from snowboarding, which is an arena where you definitely have to do that. Right? What that does is it gives the book some personal brand type of flair. The readers are like, oh, Brian snowboards. That's cool. I snowboard too. What you wanna remember
when we're playing this game
is this.
Just as much as people are buying your special unique framework or method,
they're also buying you as a person, as a coach or an expert or whatever it is that you do. And so you want to show
as much of you as possible in your book. I have looked at so many books that are just so
devoid of personality
that
no reader's ever gonna really even have the chance
to relate or resonate with the author.
Hence, this is a step that nobody thinks to do. But if you take the time to just unpack all that stuff about you, the weird stuff, the different stuff, strange interests and hobbies that you have,
what makes you unique,
and then literally just, like, layer that throughout the whole book.
That's how you write a book that's truly you and that no one can copy and that the reader has a chance of latching onto a few things.
It's gonna help you unpack your overall personal brand,
which is the big picture idea,
and you're doing that in the form of your book, which is going to act as a mega
chunk of your personal brand. It is a part of the footprint of your personal brand.
So make sure you bring that personal flair to your book itself by putting it in the raw material. Alright. Step number three is developing the writing style. This is critical. A lot of people just write
with, like, the standard Claude writing style, and that's a huge mistake because
that sounds exactly like every other Claude written book. It's got the em dashes in there. It's got those one sentence, like, dramatic cliffhanger lines.
It just
started out as cool, and now it's kinda cheesy.
And most importantly, it's not you.
So what you wanna do is give it a bunch of samples of you writing or even speaking
and have it draft potential writing styles for you. If you read great books on how to be a great writer, they all say to write like you talk. That is counterintuitive.
A lot of people think you have to write in this, like, elegant, proper way.
That's not real, and it's honestly not desirable.
You wanna write like you speak so that people can really feel you in the book. And so give it
samples of you speaking, of you talking, or writing in an authentic way, and then you're gonna have it create three different versions of what your writing style could be like based upon what it's got. There's gonna be one standout option that's your favorite. So you might say, I like option two. So now I want you to test option two against three new versions, and then it'll give you some more challengers, let's say, to option two. And then you might be like, oh, option three is pretty cool now. Let's do a blend of two and three.
And you basically just keep iterating in that fashion
until it feels like at least 80% or 90% right.
Like, you're like, man, this is literally writing almost how I would write it. You're gonna still pass through in the editing phase and modify anything that doesn't sound like you. A lot of times when I write books with clients with Claude,
we edit the crap out of the book after those initial drafts are created. Like, if you're worried about it sounding like AI,
between what we've talked about so far, like getting the raw material, your personal stories,
and really developing your writing style and then the later editing phases, it basically becomes undetectable
that AI ever assisted in the process because of the refinement and the customization
to how you
actually communicate.
Alright. Now we are on to step number four. This is critical. This is where we actually structure your book, kinda like building a house where you frame it out. Right? And the framing out process for a book is the outline.
Now people always screw the outline up. It is complicated.
It is important. There's some things you should know about the outline that are gonna both help you create a great outline and also kinda hold it with a loose grip knowing that the first time you try to do it is likely not gonna be the final version you actually go with. Now I wanna show you a couple of outlines that work really well. This is the book 10 x is easier than two x by doctor Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. This is a fantastic
book, and I just want you to look at how they structured this book. You've got an introduction
up here, and then you've got part one principles,
and this is where they talk about the principle
of 10 x.
Three chapters on that. And then part two is the applications.
How do you actually apply it?
How do you do it? So, basically, part one is how to think, and part two is what to do.
It's six chapters with an introduction tacked on the front and a conclusion tacked on the end. Best selling book. Fantastic book. If you look at the book Deep Work by Cal Newport,
again, it's the same framework.
One of my favorite books.
Introduction,
part one is about the idea of deep work where they convince you on why it's so valuable to do and why it's meaningful and rare.
I loved part one. By the time I got to part two, I was like, please tell me how to do deep work because I am sold on this concept.
And then part two tells you the rules of deep work, how to actually do it. I mean, look at how clean this is. It's seven chapters
with an introduction and a conclusion.
This is what a great book looks like when the author takes the time to simplify the concept down to its essential components
and remove anything else and combine any chapters that are kind of redundant to one another.
This is not something that they likely got on the first try,
but this is what you're aiming for with your first outline
that you create. Alright. Now we are on to step five, and this is where you're actually gonna start writing your book. So you've got all the prompts in there. You've got all of the raw material. You've got your writing style, which I don't think I mentioned this, but you wanna actually upload the writing style into that Claude project as a separate file so that it can always reference that as it writes your chapters. Chapters. Now what you do is you go into Claude and you have it draft the chapters one by one.
And what you wanna do is have it create the chapters in MD files right in the chat thread. This makes it super easy because, like, for example, I've got the introduction to my book here.
I can click on it, and I can see the introduction.
And then if I want to change something about this,
then I can tell it what to change.
What it will do is actually update
this MD file.
So it's not just gonna generate
a whole new introduction
in the chat thread that I then have to, like, copy paste over to my Google Doc and all of that. That can get really messy, and you can't figure out where the old version and the new version is. These MD files are like living, breathing files in the chat thread. And at any point, as you're working with Claude, you can be like, just link me all the updated MD files, and it'll put all of these, like, in a stack,
and then you can easily access the most updated version of each chapter.
Another major, major tip
that nobody knows about here in this phase, it's gonna sound simple, but it's a game changer. You wanna actually just ask Claude to review
your work. So it writes a chapter. You say, now review your work. What it's gonna do is check what it wrote against all the prompts you gave it, against all the uploaded project material. It's gonna be like, oh, I found seven mistakes.
There's redundancies.
There's fabricated material in this chapter,
and I put some em dashes in there, or I violated the writing style prompt. Would you like me to regenerate with fixes? And, of course, you say yes, and it updates that MD file right with the fixed version. That one step is gonna save you so much time. It's basically going back and editing its own work. A lot of people think AI
is perfect,
but it's actually not. It makes mistakes just like humans do. If you ask it to review its work, it will make your life so much easier. Now once you've drafted every single chapter of your book and you've asked
Claude to review the work, you've got all the updated MD files,
what I do is I copy them over onto a Google Doc. You don't have to worry about formatting or anything. Just literally just copy paste it. It can be all on one page. Just make sure it's in order.
Because what we're gonna do now is we're gonna move to step six,
which is where we do the developmental edit and then the line edits. This is where we take your book from just being kinda good to great. And there's a fair amount of work involved in this step,
and this is where the magic happens.
Now here's a really cool tip that I like to do. Once I have all the chapters pasted onto a Google Doc, I take it over to this tool called Speechify.
I will put a link down in the comments so you can try this thing out.
There is, like, a price you have to pay after, like, the three day trial or whatever.
But
what you can do here
is you can drop a Google Doc right into Speechify,
and then you can listen to it. And it narrates it, and there's, like,
really good narrators. I mean, they're AI narrators, but really cool voices that read it in, like, a storytelling kind of vibe. You can even have Snoop Dogg read your book if you want to. I'm a big hip hop fan, but I have not yet tried that. Uh, I just don't know if the genre quite matches,
but, like, there's all these celebrity voices on there.
And the reason why I use Speechify
is because
when I do that first draft of my book with Claude,
it's not ready for a granular edit. Okay?
So I will just listen to it at, like, one and a half times speed
while I'm walking my dog. Maybe that takes me three or four hours to get through it. All the while, I'm just creating voice memos on my iPhone where I'm, like, saying all the things that I wanna change that I don't like about it.
And then I upload those
files
to Claude
so that it knows what to fix. So, again, the big picture idea here is we're doing a high level tour of the book, and we're slicing and dicing
at a broad level. This is a developmental edit, but it's even, like, faster and higher level.
One thing that we have to rewire our brains
to when we learn to write books with AI
is to not get granular too soon.
That is how you'll get in the weeds, and you'll end up with a book that's just on a Google Doc, and you'll kinda give up because you've been wrestling with it for too long, you can't get it quite right, and it's frustrating.
You're probably trying to
get too close to it too soon. You literally just wanna, like, speed through it on audio a time or two, voice note feedback to Claude,
and have it draft
a second draft. Okay? And then I would do that again.
At some point, your intuition's gonna tell you
this book is really close. Like,
it only needs some finishing touches. And so then you can transition out of this, like, big picture developmental
edit
into a line edit, and that's when I would actually go on to Google Doc, and I would use a tool like Grammarly
to help me go through and fix all the more add a comma here,
fixed grammatical stuff, that kind of thing. So to be clear, when you're in step six and you're drafting the book and you're reviewing it and drafting it again and reviewing it, there's a couple things that are gonna happen.
One is it's very normal for you to restructure your book outline at this phase. You'll add chapters. You'll combine chapters. You'll delete chapters.
That even happens if you were to work with Penguin Random House and their developmental editors. They often take a wrecking ball to the original outline and create a new one at this phase because now they can really see what's there. They can see the book at a much closer level,
and so expect that to happen to some degree.
And then the second thing is you really just stay in this
phase where you're developmental editing the book in step six, and then you're going back to step five, and you're drafting another version.
And then you're going to step six, doing developmental edit,
going back to step five, drafting another version
until
you get to the point where it feels 90% there, and you're like, I don't need to see what's there anymore. It's all there. I just wanna shift to putting the polish on this thing. And that's when you read it word for word. You could even print it out and read it and mark it up with a pencil or whatever,
and you go through it at a granular level of detail.
Most people over edit too soon,
so don't make that mistake
until you feel like it's almost there. Alright. Congratulations
to making it to step seven. This is the final step of the book where we wanna add all the finishing elements. We wanna have a call to action in your book where we invite them to take the next step to working with you, whatever that might look like, a little description, and QR code. I put that at the beginning and at the end and maybe even somewhere in the middle. I'd also have a free bonus in the book so that you can get the Amazon buyers and the Audible listeners,
which you can attach a PDF to Audible with a QR code if you didn't know. You wanna get those people
into your ecosystem, get their information so you can email them or text them or whatever and follow-up with them and send them into whatever it is that you want to sell. And by the way, Claude can actually generate
a decent ebook version of your book
so that you can have a digital copy to later sell in your book funnel. You're also gonna create an about the author page, just a little bio. You're gonna have a headshot. You might write a dedication.
You may reach out and get some endorsements like my client David Mormon did so that you can put them at the beginning of your book like this. This is what his endorsement page looks like. This is what his QR code page looks like. You just wanna have this stuff because this is how you turn a book into something
that actually acts as an engine getting more customers and clients. You're gonna need to decide on a trim size for your book. I like five and a half by eight and a half. You can grab some books off your bookshelf and a little tape measure and decide what size feels right to you. You're gonna purchase your ISBN numbers. It's like the identifier for your book, and then you send that off to a professional formatter
to format it for print and Kindle.
And then lastly, you're going to want to shift to recording your audiobook.
I made a whole video on exactly
how I record audiobooks,
which you can check out right here.
So that's it. The seven steps to write a great book with Claude in 2026.
Go out there. Use this to crush it. Write a book that's gonna change the world and get more customers and clients for your business. I appreciate you being here, and I will see you in the