I have written dozens of books for 7 and 8 figure experts.
And every time Claude was involved, there ends up being this huge mess that we have to untangle. And that's often why these people come to me because they start their book with Claude, and then they never finish it because they just can't quite get it right. When I fixed these books, we were able to publish them and use them to help these experts generate 6 or even sometimes 7 figures in additional revenue. You do not want to publish a book without fixing this mistake.
It will actually
reduce trust, will lower your authority,
and it will fail to produce any meaningful result in your business. And this is a mistake that a professional editor
would never let you make. You hardly ever see this in the traditional publishing world.
In fact, your book would not even make it out of the proposal stage
if you had professional eyes on it. The problem is when you're writing books with AI like Claude,
it will let you make this mistake all day. I've seen it dozens of times, and it is very hard to untangle
a book once this mistake has been made. It is much better to fix it upfront. And if you're trying to get customers or clients with a book or use it to grow your business in some meaningful way,
writing the book with or without Claude is really just one piece
of a much larger ecosystem.
You also need to sell your book inside of a book funnel
so that you can make a lot more per book sale
and get their contact information so that you can follow-up with them. You need to have a high ticket offer
that lives behind the book so that you can ascend book readers to the thing that actually makes you money. You also need what I call an invitation
funnel,
which is the thing that lives in between the book and the high ticket offer and invites them to take the next step. You also need to get this book on Amazon in all formats,
but do it in such a way where you lift the Amazon purchasers
out of the book and also onto your newsletter
so that you can continue to follow-up with them, build your audience,
and sell them the products or services
that you want to sell behind the book. If you want the full system on how to write a book that generates customers or clients for your business,
you can grab my book, the author operating system.
The link is in the description in the pinned comment.
It costs less than a cup of coffee,
and it comes with a ton of bonuses that cover all of the elements that I just spoke about. It also comes with the AI agent skill pack, which is a massive Google Doc that has every single writing prompt
that I've ever created
for Claude. This has taken me hundreds of hours of telling it to fix its mistakes over and over again and generate prompts so that those mistakes won't happen. One of my clients said that that
skill pack with those prompts is literally the guardrails
that has helped him
write a great book because it just doesn't let you make the mistakes
like the one we're going to talk about in today's video. Okay. Without further ado, let's talk about this mistake Claude keeps making that's basically screwing up everybody's
book. There's something every great book has that I have named the golden thread. When I researched it, I found that there's a word for this in the traditional publishing industry.
They call it the through line.
And what this does is it really allows your book to be punchy and cohesive
and to stay
on theme throughout.
The book just makes sense. It makes
the single
big argument
that you intended to make instead of
going off in 10,000 different directions
and confusing the reader and causing them to just chuck your book in the dust pile. This is also the key to writing a book that actually stands out in your niche. It's like, oh, this is actually something new. This is actually a fresh, unique idea.
How many books have you seen that the moment you see the title and cover,
you're instantly bored because there's nothing unique about it. There's nothing fresh about it. It doesn't stand up. The book has no golden thread,
and it is dead on the vine before it even began. So first, I'm gonna show you what a book looks like that does not have a proper golden thread. And embarrassingly,
I'm gonna show you
my second book called Nail Your Niche. I put my heart and soul into this book.
A lot of people loved it. But there's some reviews that say, like, what's part one even about it gets good in part two?
And I got a little pissed off when I first read those reviews,
but the more I thought about it, those points were totally valid.
Basically,
I
veered off course
several times from the big idea in this book, and you can actually see it right in the title. Okay? So I chose nail your niche as the title. That works because that's like, oh, nail your niche for what?
And the subtitle,
if you can see here, I chose the seven ingredients
to a 6 figure online coaching business.
Now right out of the gate, that doesn't really make sense. Like, nail your niche,
the seven ingredients of a 6 figure online coaching business.
It's almost like
this book is the
bible for how to build an online coaching business,
and there's seven ingredients.
Then why is the title nail your niche? Like, those two don't go together.
I I should have named it something like nail your niche. The positioning
strategy
that becomes the foundation of
your 6 figure online coaching business.
Can you see how those two work together?
Everything in the book should be about how having your niche nailed
is
the first step and it's foundational. The introduction would be like, here was me without a niche. And then when I did find a niche, here's what happens when you don't have a niche. Here's what happens when you do have a niche. And then here's how to do it. It's literally just one argument that you gotta know your niche. It's the foundation of a successful coaching business, and every chapter literally just ties back to that golden thread. Now I kinda did that, but, like, look, chapter three, that's some precious real estate. It's kinda like track three on a album. You know? Usually, artists save that real estate for, like, one of their best songs. I don't know if you can see that, but chapter three is how to pick your coaches. And I go into this long
framework for how to choose
a coach that has nothing to do with your niche.
So it's a perfect example. Like, when I rewrite this one day, I'm just gonna delete that chapter entirely.
Chapter four, the good and the bad of the online education industry.
What does that have to do with choosing a niche and why that's foundational?
Then when I get into section two, can see nail your wide, nail your demographic, nail your niche, nail your promise, nail your QER. We're finally getting to the point.
And then even in section three, I have other things like the
three attraction strategies,
which is which is the three different ways that you generate leads
for an online coaching business. And again, that just strays from the core idea of it's all about choosing your niche. That's foundational.
Here's why that's true, and here's how to do it. This book here, Deep Work by Cal Newport,
I kinda spilled something on it, but this is a fantastic book.
And this one went through the filter of traditional publishing, so they're not gonna let him screw it up. He's also a fantastic author. Now I want you to look at the table of contents for this book. Look. Part one is the idea of deep work.
It is valuable.
It is rare. It is meaningful. And part two is the rules. The rules of deep work. So how to do it? And as a little bonus tip, that's a really fantastic way to structure your outline of your book is part one is like the principles
and part two is the practices.
So another way to think about it is tell people how to think, then tell people what to do. This is built into all the prompts that I use to write books because it's just a super clean way to separate it. And you'll see the same outline structure in books like 10 x is easier than two x by Benjamin Hardy. Lots of best selling books. But look. I'm digressing right now from the golden thread of this video. We're talking about the golden thread. I'm telling you about outline structures.
I'm getting too excited. What I want you to really understand is that this book has a golden thread. It's all about the idea of that deep work
is meaningful,
valuable. It's what you've been missing.
Here's why that's true,
and here's how to do it. Can you see how simple that is? It probably took him years to strip the idea down to that level of simplicity and then convey it to people in literally eight chapters like this. This is a work of mastery. Like, here's another random example. So I
like to drink green smoothies. That's like one of my
core meals that I eat almost every day. It's my breakfast every day. It's like tons
of protein powder, peanut butter, avocado,
spinach, carrots, blueberries,
like water, banana, a little bit of almond milk or oat milk.
It's a bomb by the way. If I was gonna write a book about healthy eating,
I'd probably just narrow it down
to talk about that smoothie
and I might even target it further
to dads who want to get healthy.
And I'd say like, look dads, you're busy. You know, you wanna be healthy and and lose weight and be fit. The easy cheat code for that is just drink green smoothies.
Can you see how clear that is?
I know it sounds like overly simplified.
If your book's a bit more spiritual or dense, it's gonna be a little trickier to do this, but it's so simple.
It's like, here's my journey. I used to, like, have food allergies and eczema and stuff, which this is true. And when I learned to eat more of a high nutrient diet
where I'm putting lots of fruits and veggies in a smoothie,
all that went away. And I have lots of energy, and I never get sick anymore. Here's the science behind why smoothies
are better because they chew the food for you and the nutrient availability increases. You're sold on that idea?
Now here's how to make the smoothie. Here's some pitfalls to avoid when trying to live the green smoothie life. That is what a properly built book looks like.
It's centered around one big idea. If you're, like, thinking of doing a book or you're in the process of it, I invite you to just pump the brakes for a minute and think about the big idea for your book. Is it clear?
Is it unique?
Is it something that you can state in a sentence and your grandma would understand it? This is key. There's a guy named Michael Masterson. He's a fantastic author, by the way, of some best selling books.
And he was one of the head copywriters
at Agora
for a long time. Agora is like this 9 figure marketing agency type of business or whatever.
What they did
is they put out massive amounts of newsletters and blog posts to millions of people. And so they had all this data
on which pieces of content
performed the best for them. They studied
all of them.
Here's what they found. This is gonna tie it all back for you nicely here. Content
that got people to click and got people to read and got people to take action
all shared
one thing in common, and that is that it all had one big idea.
So the article might have been about
why you should write an ebook.
And notice, it's just why you should write an ebook. It's not
why you should write an ebook and the three steps to start writing your ebook.
That's two ideas.
And they found that when you put more than one idea
into a piece of content,
it does a lot worse. You actually wanna pull those apart.
Write a blog post on why people should write an ebook. Write a blog post on the three steps to start writing your ebook.
Two ideas, pull them apart. The same thing is true for books. It actually goes further than this. Only should your book
have one big idea in it is centered around one big idea.
Each chapter
should actually only have
one
big idea as well. And those are like the sub ideas of the big idea. So for example, the first three chapters in Cal's book are deep work is valuable,
deep work is rare, and deep work is meaningful.
So those are three different ideas
about
this bigger idea that deep work is awesome and everyone should be doing it. Take the time to get clear on the big idea for your book, which will act as that golden thread that passes
through it, and that is how you can then use something like Claude
to actually write a great book that makes a difference in your business, bringing you customers and clients.
Once you're clear on that, you're gonna wanna watch this video where I break down the entire process of writing a book with Claude step by step. It's a full tutorial.
Check that out here, and I appreciate you watching.