The Author Revolution® Podcast

Jonathan Green on Harnessing AI for Author Success

• Carissa Andrews • Season 1 • Episode 258

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Are you ready to revolutionize your author journey with the transformative power of AI? Join me, Carissa Andrews, as I sit down with Jonathan Green, a seasoned author and AI expert, on this insightful episode of the Author Revolution Podcast. 

We dive deep into the intersection of AI technology and writing, uncovering strategies to overcome writer's block, boost revenue, and maximize efficiency. 

Jonathan shares his personal journey as an author, offering invaluable insights into ghostwriting, client acquisition, and the exciting integration of AI into the writing business. 

If you're a writer looking to take your career to new heights, this episode is a must-listen!

Are you an author at a crossroads, feeling stuck & unfulfilled in your author career? Do you know deep down it's time for a change, but you’re unsure of the next step?

The High Vibe Author is the only transformational membership designed specifically for authors like you—those who are ready to break free from limitations & step into the abundant life they deserve. Click here to learn more.

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Go forth and start your author revolution!

Carissa Andrews:

Welcome to the Author Revolution podcast, where change is not just embraced, it's celebrated. I'm Carissa Andrews, international bestselling author, indie author coach and your navigator through the ever-evolving landscape of authorship. Are you ready to harness the power of your mind and the latest innovations in technology for your writing journey? If you're passionate about manifesting your dreams and pioneering new writing frontiers, then you're in the perfect place. Here we merge the mystical woo of writing with the exciting advancements of the modern world. We dive into the realms of mindset, manifestation and the transformative magic that occurs when you believe in the impossible. We also venture into the world of futuristic technologies and strategies, preparing you for the next chapter in your author career. Every week, we explore new ways to revolutionize your writing and publishing experience, from AI to breakthrough thinking. This podcast is your gateway to a world where creativity meets innovation. Whether you're penning your first novel or expanding your literary empire, whether you're a devotee of the pen or a digital storyteller, this podcast is where your author revolution gains momentum. So join me in this journey to continue growth and transformation. It's time to redefine what it means to be an author in today's dynamic world. This is the Author Revolution Podcast, and your author revolution starts now. Hey there, author revolutionaries, welcome back to another episode of the Author Revolution Podcast. I am so excited about today's guest. You're definitely going to want to grab your notebook for this one. Trust me, it's going to be needed.

Carissa Andrews:

I had the chance to sit down with Jonathan Green and let me tell you this guy is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to using AI to accelerate your author business. Jonathan is not only the best-selling author of ChatGPT Profits, but he's also been running a successful online business full-time since 2010. Plus, he's got over 100,000 email subscribers on his list and he hosts a podcast with over 250 episodes. Talk about impressive right Now. In today's episode, we're diving into all things AI and how these tools can help transform the way you approach your author business.

Carissa Andrews:

Whether you're struggling with writer's block, trying to maintain a consistent writing schedule or just looking for ways to generate more revenue, jonathan's got you covered. We'll be talking about which AI tools are an absolute must-have, how you can leverage them to make money, make your books better, all the things and, of course, the biggest trends to keep an eye on as AI continues to evolve. Seriously, this conversation is packed with gold nuggets that could change your business and your life. So grab your coffee, settle in and let's get to it. Well, hi there, jonathan. Welcome to the Author Revolution podcast. I'm really excited to bring you on to the show today. Before we get started, do you want to tell my audience a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Jonathan Green:

Sure, I've been a full-time author for about 12 years now. I started off writing books in the direct response space, kind of like you see a commercial or a website and you buy the book from the website as opposed to Amazon. In 2016, one of my clients I wrote a book about potty training for them in 2015, and they didn't release it. They ended up having a problem with the marketing of the product and I said, can I rewrite the book and publish it myself on Amazon? And it became the number one book on Amazon for potty training for an entire year. And I just started doing more and more in that space and I've written, ghostwritten and penwritten under different pen names that I have about 300 books now and every one of them has hit bestseller since back then, since way back in 2015.

Jonathan Green:

My best book served a master hit number two on all of Amazon, and when that happens you start getting a lot of phone calls. All the big publishers started calling me, but it didn't work out. I'd rather have control over my catalog. So that's my experience. And then now I live on a tropical island in the South Pacific with my wife and five kids and when I'm not working on books, I do a lot of ghostwriting for clients. Now I don't write as many books for myself because I've kind of said everything I want to say. So I ghostwrite three to six books a year, in addition to really being an influencer teacher in the artificial intelligence space.

Carissa Andrews:

I love that. I love that so much. So, when it comes to doing the ghostwriting stuff, do you just kind of do what is called to you, or do you kind of wait?

Jonathan Green:

and see what comes your direction. I don't do any prospecting or reaching out for clients. When you only do three to six a year, you're going to get enough inquiries. Probably 80% of the people I talk to hire me. So the email is usually hey, do you still do ghostwriting? That's the most common email subject right or someone I'll just meet through life.

Jonathan Green:

Well, I'll mention it in passing oh, what kind of stuff do you do? Just like I mentioned to you, and that's it. I don't have anything on my website that says for ghostwriting inquiries here or this and that, but I mention it enough that it comes around and it usually comes at the right time, like right when you need that cash injection, and go, oh, this is perfect timing, like this project. So I really like doing it. So I decided I was going to stop writing books. About two years ago I said no more ghostwriting. I've written enough books, I'm done.

Jonathan Green:

And I started blogging like crazy again and one of my friends was like you can't stop yourself. And I was like, oh my gosh, you're right. I love writing, so I can't turn it off. But what I like about ghostwriting is that you take a story and you make it interesting. You take someone's journey and create it into something. That's just like making a movie about someone. In the same way, you're creating their story in a medium that they can't do themselves and it becomes something that's like immortal. So I just love that journey of taking someone's story and finding the most interesting part of it and bringing that forward.

Carissa Andrews:

So that's really what I love to do do you do a lot of like memoirs then, or is it like you said, like the pottyty training thing, where it's like just a nonfiction concept and then you flourish it out?

Jonathan Green:

Mostly this is a great question. Mostly these days it's somebody who wants it to be their one big book that launches or establishes their authority. So usually they want to speak from stage or speak from larger stages or use it to grow a different part of their business. I have had a lot of people in the past. I've done a lot of books in biohacking and weight loss and different health types of products that are more specific. Most of my clients these days it is a variation of memoirs plus teaching a specific lesson to lead somewhere.

Carissa Andrews:

Sure, sure, biohacking is huge right now too. Gary Brekka for the win, like all the people right. Yeah, so good, I love that. Okay, so you mentioned your journey about living in a tropical island with your family, which is amazing, incredible, and I read I think it was in your pitch to me something about being fired during a blizzard, before this all happened. So can you share a little bit about this transition of going from being fired in a blizzard to moving onto a tropical island and, really, honestly, what motivated you to become this entrepreneur that you have become?

Jonathan Green:

Yeah, I thought it was my dream job. I got this job teaching at a university running a multimillion dollar project in charge of six other teachers massive leap in my career. A multimillion dollar project in charge of six other teachers massive leap in my career. And I hated it. You don't realize how much large universities are working for the government, so there's a lot of slow rolling and a lot of passive, aggressive games. So someone had turned down my job internally. They tried to do a short brochure. She said I don't want that job. And then they hired me and she would come by my office all the time and complain. She's like oh my gosh, I can't believe. They got you a new chair. And I said wait, I didn't get a new chair. The office had no chair. That's very different.

Carissa Andrews:

It's very different. I wasn't going to sit on the floor.

Jonathan Green:

Yeah, you get a customized chair. I said no, no, no wait, I was using a chair from the coffee room or whatever, so it wasn't like a chair and I just got a chair that had wheels on it so I could move around the office. The cheapest $50 Amazon chair. I'm not familiar. I wasn't really used to this type of environment where there's lots of passive, aggressive games and they would give me tasks that were supposed to take six months and I would finish in 30 minutes and then start crying because I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to turn 30 minutes of work into six months.

Jonathan Green:

I didn't really fit in with the culture. I remember my boss one time said, yeah, most people who, once they work here, they never leave, and I was like, is that a threat? It felt like that's how much I, but you never think of yourself as an entrepreneur. We've created a real culture in America where, unless your parents are inventors or entrepreneurs, you don't think of yourself as ever becoming an entrepreneur. And even though I'd done a lot of side businesses and different things and projects, I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. But getting fired from that job was the best thing that ever happened to me. So they fired me during I drove there in a blizzard and they fired me and I'm driving home and I was like just don't crash. Just don't crash today, like don't make it worse. And it was the best thing that ever happened because it kind of gave me that kick out of the nest to finally take action and create my dream life. Sometimes we need that additional push that we no longer have that security. So we have no choice but to succeed.

Carissa Andrews:

Right. I think that's so relevant to so many of us because we kind of like to sit and stick in that safety comfort zone so long until that is the case that we have to actually push ourselves out. And I agree with you on the entrepreneur side of things. I can't say I ever, I think, even after years of being an author. It took me a long time to accept the idea of being an entrepreneur myself. Like I've owned my business. Well, I think it's been officially now five years, but I was doing it much longer than that. And there are still some days where I'm like is this real? Am I really this thing? So it is interesting, it's kind of a strange concept.

Jonathan Green:

Yeah, most authors don't think of themselves as optioners or don't think of it as a business, and those are the ones who always fail. I can always tell, because there's a certain type of author who thinks that their job finishes the moment they hit end or the moment they hit upload on Amazon and I'm like, oh my gosh, no, you are just starting. Now, you're at the beginning of your job. So what I really say to people is not that I'm an author. I tell people I'm an author because it's easy for them to understand what that means. But really I sell books. That's really the business. I mean, it is the business of selling books, which is completely a different mindset.

Jonathan Green:

There's a lot of people I'm sure you encounter this. They say things like I just want to write my story, I don't care if anyone reads my book and I'm like I bet you do.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, yeah, you know they do. They're checking their stats every day.

Jonathan Green:

Oh, I got one wholesale, yeah, and it's because it's never really explained, because we're used to the traditional book model where you send the book to the publisher and then they make all the sales happen through magic. But those days don't really exist anymore, unless you're already a celebrity or you already have a huge following. Your job is just beginning and selling books is very hard. It's very competitive. The number of books I look at this, there's at least 3,000 books every month get uploaded to Amazon and never get a review. They never get a single, even negative review, and that number's sure gone up, because I checked that a few years ago and then just constantly going up. There are so many books getting published that it's really hard to get attention and get noise. Like, how many movies do you hear about every year that you never go see because it's just too long or you don't have time? Too much? Yeah, there's too much stuff coming at you?

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, for sure. What is your difference in mindset, or what do you perceive as the difference in mindset between the author who doesn't succeed then and the one that is actually selling the books? What's the biggest difference?

Jonathan Green:

There's two things. The first thing is the author who doesn't succeed usually thinks of themselves as an artist. They have that idea of like my art form is pure. I'm a starving artist and you don't have to be. That's intentional. Once you create that frame, then you act out the role you've created.

Carissa Andrews:

Right, I love that.

Jonathan Green:

Then it happens is that they don't approach their books strategically. So I will look at before I write a book. Maybe I'll have 10 ideas and I'll look to see. Will look at before I write a book. Maybe I'll have 10 ideas and I'll look to see. Are people buying books on this category? Is it popular? So? And it's you never know. So there's different categories. Like I've got approached about men's health products and people are buying for the most common men's health problem. Every man is buying pills. There's commercials for all the time and I was like, oh, this is an interesting project and you look on Amazon, no one's buying books about it. So even though my book idea I said listen, this is an interesting idea because it's a hot topic turns out not in bookstores. People don't want a book solution, they want a pill solution. Same thing for other categories are really tough, like Stop Smoking. I did a project and it just everyone wants the Alan Carr book. So sometimes the category is locked in, for if you want to declutter your home, you're going to read the Marie Kondo book. It just is the book that solves that. Everyone reads it, everyone gets it and to enter that space is very difficult because she really owns decluttering. So if you don't look first, you're going to just crash and burn.

Jonathan Green:

And I'll give you some specific examples. A friend of mine wrote a book about how to quit vaping about five or six years ago and I said oh, that's so interesting. I thought everyone was trying to start vaping. I said where did you do your research? How did you find out this market exists? And he goes what? And I said oh, okay, nevermind, it's probably just too early. In 20 years it will probably be an amazing topic niche to be here just too early because no one's trying to quit yet. Maybe now people are, but back then for sure nobody was trying to start. So you can end up with these problems. And it's similar when someone will come to me and they say listen, here's what I want to write is a book of erotic poetry, a children's book, a book about saving your marriage.

Jonathan Green:

If someone sees that on your Amazon profile, they will freak out. They will get very uncomfortable. We don't like authors who write about different topics.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah.

Jonathan Green:

So when you're not thinking about business and marketing, you don't realize that you need the same people to want to buy all of your books. They might not, but it needs to be a possibility. So this is why the most successful fiction books are all really long series now like 50, 60, 70, 200 books in a series, because that's how you win in fiction. That's why romance novels all have a collection of like 8,000 pages of romance novels, because they understand the system and they're approaching it for marketing, as opposed to someone who's writing just about the things that interest them that may not interest anyone else.

Jonathan Green:

So it's really those two mindsets the starving artist and the non-strategic approach that I am just going to look at this from what I want to do. I'm not going to pay attention to what my audience wants, and this kills any business. No business works when you ignore your audience. Look at all the movies that like movie studios and video game studios closed down every week now because they make games that no one wants to play in movies no one wants to watch, and then they're like why are we going out of business, right, right, or your audience? It doesn't matter what market you're in.

Carissa Andrews:

That makes total sense. So do I take it then from the flip side? The successful ones are going to be more strategic. They're going to be utilizing tools. I noticed on your website you use Publisher Rocket, or at least recommend it. Do you have other recommendations on how authors can be more strategic and be thinking about things in a more entrepreneurial mindset way?

Jonathan Green:

Yeah, I've been using Publisher Rocket since it was called KDP Rocket. I've known Dave for a long time.

Carissa Andrews:

We're close to each.

Jonathan Green:

So there's I'm very cautious about the tools that I recommend because it's just, there's a lot of people whose whole business is recommend everything and I don't do that. So the core important the publisher, rocket's probably the tool I've been using the longest. I still use, uh, some plugins that have around for a long time, like KD Spy. I've been using that forever. That helps me as well, and it's just about figuring out how am I going to sell books? So you figure out what you're good at and not good at.

Jonathan Green:

One of my clients, she wrote this book. This was a tough one for me. Her book was like an autobiography, but it was like a romance novel and like I was turning red as I was reading the chapters because she's an intimacy coach, okay. So I was like I was like, why are you turning red? I was like, well, let's, we had to did. We did. But when I'm at the client, I do all the exercises book. I did every exercise with my wife, all the different categories. We work, that's what I do, and she was really good looking. So I was like don't do audio podcasts. I look like I look. So I'll do tons of audio podcasts, lots of blog posts and she's doing TV shows and stuff to market her book.

Jonathan Green:

I was like you have an asset, I don't have. So you want to look at what's the right marketing strategy for you. There are people who do really well with TikTok, people who do really well doing interviews, and you have to figure out that element of where's my market. So there's that strategy and then there's the part of it that's how am I going to make money? If your answer is royalties, you're in really big trouble because there's no money in royalties, unless if you're in fiction, you have to have multiple books and if you're in nonfiction, you have to have courses or something you're selling behind it. Those are the two ways to monetize.

Jonathan Green:

Sometimes people come in and go I'm going to write one book and I'm going to become a millionaire. And I was like Danielle is still writing books. She writes out a book every year. She's putting out a book every week. Why do you think they're still doing it? They're not doing it for love of the game, and that's a rude awakening for a lot of people. I mean, maybe once in a while someone writes one book and it hits out of the park. A friend of mine is doing $100,000 a month in book royalties from his book, but it's like his 28th book that hit. Finally, one just really hit for him, which is amazing. But it's very rarely the first book, it's very rarely luck. It's a lot of strategy and learning what your audience likes and modifying what you create Right.

Carissa Andrews:

Well, and I love that we're at this era too, then, with getting around to the AI topic, because I've found personally, ai has revolutionized the way that I look at strategy, the way that I look at the way I'm going to launch something, the way that I'm going to write something, the way that I'm going to pretty much everything. So you're an expert on the practical applications of AI in modern businesses and I want to pick your brain about. You know, what do you see as AI right now, and how is it transforming the landscape from what you perceive? For authors, specifically Like, what's the biggest aspect that people should be paying attention to?

Jonathan Green:

right now we're at the tail end of the phase where everyone is cranking out ai books and trying to get them uploaded everywhere. That's gonna. All of those accounts are going to be deleted over the next year, all of those people. And here's a surprise when you get kicked off of amazon kdp, it's forever. There's no forgiveness there, and they used to have.

Jonathan Green:

I used to have a rep at amazon so I booked it so well. I had a personal rep there who invited me to all the programs. They don't have anyone who works in that department anymore. It's completely automated, so there's no one you can go to. When the computer turns against you, there's no person at department anymore. So it's really rough if that happens to you.

Jonathan Green:

But a lot of people are playing that game and they don't realize your budget. My budget for tricking Amazon is way smaller than their budget for detecting AI content. There's no comparison. It's the same people saying, oh, I can trick Google. It's like their budget for AI detection is billions of dollars. There's no way that's your budget for AI trickery. So what they do is they will wait about six months to a year while everyone who's going to cheat starts cheating. Once they learn a way, they're cheating and then they grab everyone. We've seen this when they've done great sweeps of everyone who is doing reviews in naughty ways or manipulating kind of limited naughty ways. So all of those accounts just disappear all on the same day because they do a sweep, because they're waiting long enough for everyone who's going to cheat to cheat. Once everyone who's going to learn that method and do it does it, then they wait. That's what they're doing. They're just waiting and that's why they've added those questions.

Jonathan Green:

Now, was your book written by AI, edited by human, all of that stuff? So my book, which has a lot of AI content, anytime it's the AI talking, anytime it's ChatGP, it's in italics and my narrator uses a different voice. So you know the AI content. It's very clear. But it's a book about using ChatGPT. That's the only book I used for it. So that's the first thing. That phase is going to end. So the complete abuse of the tool phase. It's happening now and it will disappear. I'm very aware of that.

Jonathan Green:

The next phase of the tool is people using it for the wrong stuff. So most people think of AI I want AI to do everything for me. That's the wrong way to do it. It's really you want it to take what you're already doing and help you to do it faster. That's where you can do really strategic things. You have to do a rewrite. You have to do a heavy edit.

Jonathan Green:

You can either have AI write the book and you edit it or you write the book and AI edits it. You can't have it do both. That's agreed. Even if the book comes out good, it has no value because if you can push a button and I can push a button, why would I pay for what you push the button and made happen? It has no value. That's why ai art has no value. So the really good way to use ai as an author is for creation, for a lot of the things that there's a lot of steps most people skip, let's say, when they're creating their first book, like character sheets and so when I create a training, I can I, when I have AI, write an entire book.

Jonathan Green:

Here's the process I go through. I say give me seven ideas in this genre for a book title or for a book pitch, and it will give me seven ideas and I pick which one's the most interesting to me. So my approach is really choose your own adventure. I'm already affecting it because I've chosen which is the most interesting to me. Sometimes I'll change a name or I'll change the lead character's gender back and forth, depends what I'm working on. Like, for romance novel, the main character has to be a woman. For science fiction traditional science fiction it's got to be a man, like it just 99% of the books in the space. So I again, I'm data driven and then you have, you work through it. So, and then I always think about a series. So I do all those things. I say, well, tell me what the next seven books in the series could be about. So I start working through those ideas. Then what I'll have? The idea.

Jonathan Green:

I say give me a list of all the characters in the book and I'll look at this and I'll remove characters I don't like, add characters that I want, build them out, and part of this is it's the creation process. But the other part is you're doing error correcting. Now, if a character appears in the book who's not on that sheet, you know something happened. The next step is to create a character sheet for every single character in the book, which everyone teaches. I don't think anyone actually does it, like I don't. I've never seen an author who actually has like a wall of all the character sheets on the wall and we all read the book where a character switches genders, which is racist, which is eye color, not intentionally, but because the author forgot, or between books one and two. This happens all the time and it's like wait, wasn't that the person's main trait? So they're left-handed, now they're right-handed. So that stuff is why we have character sheets. You're supposed to do that, but no one really does it.

Jonathan Green:

Then, from there, I'll do a big outline of the book and then each chapter I'll break it down into five to seven scenes. So I'm writing the book that way. So I do like mind mapping. You do the middle and then work your ways out. That's when you can be very effective. So before you write anything, you have the entire thing really planned. That's critical when working with artificial intelligence, especially because otherwise it will go off the rails. So writing from the seat of your pants is just the hardest method to use and there's a balance between if you're knowledgeable or if you're just passionate about a topic.

Jonathan Green:

It's really hard to write a book in a genre you've never operated in before. So I was watching a movie with my kids yesterday and I kept telling them what was going to happen in the next scene and they're like, how, like, how do you know? I watch a lot of movies. It's like if you watch law and order, if there's a character, you recognize the actor. They're the killer, like. It's like because it's the guest, you always know that's the bad guy because that's the structure. So I've watched so many certain whereas that I recognize the beats.

Jonathan Green:

Whereas for me, to write a romance novel is I, my knowledge is so limited, I've only read three or four that I wouldn't get the beats. Whereas for me to write a romance novel, my knowledge is so limited I've only read three or four that I wouldn't get the beats correctly. So when I've done books, I've hired other ghost writers because I don't know enough about that space. Whereas science fiction, action, of course, business, yes. So the danger is, whenever you go outside your area of expertise you can't tell when the ai is doing something weird or going off the rails. Like I happen to know that if you don't have a happy ending at the end of your romance novel, you better put it in the description happily ever after, or you will get really hurtful reviews.

Jonathan Green:

So I only know that because of research yeah you'll get full lead like you better tell me that there's gonna be a bad ending. I need to prepare for it in other genres. You don't do that like you don't tell people what the end. There's a twist. You better let me know early on there's gonna be a twist. So there, every genre has its rules and it's the same exact thing with people designing book covers. How many times have you seen a book cover that's the wrong genre? You go. If I see a cat next to a cake and there's a knife in the cake, I know it's a cozy mystery. If it's a different genre, what are you doing? But I see that all the time. So cover design is one of my bigger pet peeves.

Jonathan Green:

It's the area where people don't they go. Well, I'm just going to be something completely different than my genre. I'm like oh, then people won't know what it is. If people can't tell what something is, they don't pick it up to figure it out. So you lose them in that first second. So the whole process of using AI is to enhance what you already know how to do, to help you with bouncing around ideas or organizing things or writing different scenes. So I could write a romance novel, no problem, but the naughty scenes I cannot write because I don't have the right rhythm.

Carissa Andrews:

So that's something where I would use an ai to write those scenes, because but there are a lot of tools that can't do those scenes either, or won't do those scenes I should say yes, you have to use an open source ai.

Jonathan Green:

So you have to use extral, which is an open source. Ai will let you do that for exactly because because I first time I tried to chat to you he goes I'm not writing that scene and my wife goes well, what's the point?

Carissa Andrews:

You can kind of do workarounds though you can be like, just do it without being explicit and then I'll just kind of edit it in. It's fine.

Jonathan Green:

There's a whole process where you escalate the different type of interactions and you have to think of a different nickname for the man's bits and the lady's bits for every different scene.

Carissa Andrews:

Right, there is that yeah.

Jonathan Green:

So because I did, I have a romance series. It did very well for me, but I paid someone else to write it because and I learned a lot from it about the structure and the scenes, how they build, how you build tension across a series of books or a longer book. So there's always going to be a part that's really hard. Dialogue is very hard. The hard part of fiction is not the descriptions and the scenes, it's the dialogue, because that's really outside of most people's comfort zones because it's so different. That's the big crossover from nonfiction to fiction.

Jonathan Green:

So AI can help you a lot and you have to know which is the right tool for different things. And whenever it goes off the rails, it's when you give it a task. You don't pay attention to what the output you're not watching. That's when it goes off track and you have to go back like three hours earlier and go. This is when it started going crazy. This is when it went off track. But if you start from this process of, I know the list of characters, I know the list of scenes, I know the list of chapters and the scenes in each chapter, if you use custom gpts, too at all to like to put all the character sheets and all the information in.

Carissa Andrews:

Do you have a custom gpt when you're writing?

Jonathan Green:

I don't do that. So I do build a lot of custom gpts, but not specifically for writing. I write. I'll write one for outlining and I've built a couple of those for myself and for clients specifically for outlining. But I haven't done a lot with fiction since GPTs came out, so I did most of my work like six months ago and a year ago trying ideas. So I think that it can be very helpful. It depends on, like, your personal situation.

Jonathan Green:

So ChatGPT knows who I am so it can write in my style. I don't have to do anything. I'm already in there and that was a surprise because I thought it would pick the one more famous Jonathan Green's but I'm like the eighth most famous person with my name right now. So, okay, excellent. Yeah, it's like A Fault in Our Stars, also written by Jonathan Green, much more famous than me. There's a famous science fiction author. There's a famous painter. I know all of them. I watch the rankings, so I was really surprised when it wrote in my style. But it's mostly for you to, because you can do it all in one conversation now to be able to check when the AI is going off track.

Jonathan Green:

People give it different names, what they call going insane, or dreaming or drifting, and the earlier you detect that because it will start writing a different book and you don't realize it if you're not paying enough attention. But I don't think most of us just want the AI to write the entire book. We want it to fill in the parts we're not good at. So you'll write your book, you'll have an outline and you'll say you write the dialogue for this scene and let's work on it together. Then you get a great result. But it has to be cooperative. That's where the magic happens.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, it's like working with a co-author in a sense, because you should have a good grasp on your story and know what you're trying to accomplish with it, and then when you interact with the chat or the AI tool, now you can work as a team together. Like you said, one fills in the elements that the other is not great at. Yeah, that's really cool. So do you have any AI tools that you recommend the most for authors?

Jonathan Green:

So I'm a simple guy. Nearly every single AI tool in the market is just run through ChatGPT's API. So I believe you really need one text tool and one image generator. So I use ChatGPT and Midjourney. Those are my meat and potatoes. There's a lot to be said for using Clod instead of ChatGPT, so you can try both of them. They're the same price it's $20 a month and then your image generator is $12 a month. Those are the really only things that you need. Your image generator is $12 a month. Those are the really only things that you need. Everything else is derivative or just straight up using chat gbt's api. Like the odds, every single author specific product out there is just using chat gbt's api. They're just chat gbt with less features right, right, I'm right there with you.

Carissa Andrews:

I think chat is probably the most versatile. I've even gotten to the point where I dropped my mid journeyney subscription so that I could just use Dolly, because it got to the point where Dolly was just as good, if not better, than Midjourney was.

Jonathan Green:

Yeah, the problem with Dolly is that it only gives you one image at a time instead of four. That's true Core programming thing and it fights you if you try it. Try. It's not meant to ever let you do more. That's one of its core laws. Those came out last. Someone cracked it. But the issue is that most people will generate an image in dolly and the first image they get they post on social media and they always look wet. That's the problem. Yeah, can do good images, but 99 of what you see is the worst case example. I very rarely encounter someone who's good at creating images with Dolly, whereas mid journey you're more likely to create a good image, even if you have a bad prompt. That's the difference to me.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, it does require good prompting, otherwise you get some really weird stuff. You're just like well, okay, that's a little bit strange, but all right, I appreciate that. Whatever, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's interesting. I haven't used Clod as much. I use chat pretty much for everything that I do, but Clod has a bigger context window so it just helps contain, I think, the story better if you're trying to keep it all together, but otherwise, because I work if I ever work with chat in any of my scenes or in any of my nonfiction stuff I'm doing it in such small, bite-sized chunks that it doesn't usually hallucinate and start going off the rails. So it's been pretty easy for me to just stick with ChatGPT and run with it.

Jonathan Green:

Yeah, I'm the same way, but I just happen to know some people just prefer the type of answers the cloud gives and the type of responses it used to be. The context window was the big benefit, but now they have such big context windows it's like one can remember 350 pages. The other one can remember 360 pages. That's not a significant difference anymore. The more valuable difference is that they're finally diverting the type of results you get, so they're actually splitting. They've been doing the same thing for two years but now they're going in different directions and that's where it's interesting. So some people might just prefer the result, especially people who write technical. Most of the things that say this tool is better about programming and languages and logic chain. So for some people it's a better tool. But I just recommend try the free versions of both and deal for it. But yeah, I'm 99% of the time I'm operating in ChatGPT Same same.

Carissa Andrews:

Okay, so let's talk about your book ChatGPT Profits, because it delves into making money with AI and I know a lot of authors obviously are trying to get that to work for themselves, whether they're being fiction or nonfiction. So can you give us an overview of some of your key strategies that authors could use to leverage ChatGPT?

Jonathan Green:

Sure. So the overall strategy. The first thing you should do is look at what do you do every week, break down how you spend. However many hours you spend working whether it's 40 hours like a traditional job or you start your own business and you's as long as it's something you spend one hour a day on and it requires less than 80% of your focus, something you can do with the television on or where you can do where there's music with words. Sometimes I can have music with words and sometimes I can't have any words and sometimes I can't have any music. So there's levels for how I focus, so use your scale and that task. That takes a lot of your time. You look at how can I do this faster If it's one hour a day? How can I do this in 10 minutes using AI? That's a time saving, so it might not be the most glamorous thing.

Jonathan Green:

The most useful ways to use AI is organizing your files so you can find everything. That's huge, because we always lose stuff. The second thing is organizing your emails. A lot of people think using AI to write your emails is a good use case. It's a terrible use case. What if, instead of having AI write 100 replies. You only wrote four to the emails you actually need to respond to today. That's really where the mess happens. So I use a lot of AI in sorting and there's a lot of studies that say people spend like 35 to 40% of their day answering email and that information specialist, whether you're an author or content creator, spend up to 15% of every day looking for a file.

Carissa Andrews:

So how do you use it in the sorting aspect of it? That's super wild, because I've never considered using it in the sorting capacity.

Jonathan Green:

So there are more tools coming out in that space. Like for email, I use a tool called Spark and there's a couple of things like Superhuman AI. There's different tools for email that help you to sort what I like for my computer. There's a bunch of tools that are really built around sorting or finding files on your cloud server. They're company-based Everyone wants to be in corporate but they're adding in their roadmap. So I use a tool called Finder. I think it has no E in it or something.

Jonathan Green:

I always have a weird spelling that I grabbed early on because they said we're going to add a function where it will search your old hard drive to help you find stuff. So let's say I'm looking for this happens all the time trying to think of a word in a chapter that I wrote seven years ago, or I can describe it. So what I really want is the AI to watch every video in all the folders so that it doesn't just look at the name of the file to find stuff. That's the functionality that will be the dream. It's not there yet. There is some tool that I haven't finished testing that you can just have it look at a folder on your computer, which is organize all the files for you Makes me very nervous, because what if they do it wrong? But something I haven't finished testing yet, but that's on my list, that's something that's on my radar and that's a free, open source tool that does that. That's very cool.

Jonathan Green:

You can also build an automation. So I have a simple automation If a file goes into a certain folder an image, that image will automatically get compressed, which is a huge deal when you have a website. I have another folder that if I put something in there, it turns that PNG into a JPG. Then it puts it into the compression folder. So that's something that I've done. I've converted PNGs to JPGs tens of thousands of times over the past few years. I just said to chat GPT, what's a process to automate this? And then it said are you on a PC or Mac? I said this is my Mac, I'm doing this on, and it said here you go, and I copied and pasted it in five minutes and it saves me like an hour a week.

Jonathan Green:

It sounds so often the things that make the biggest difference in your business are the smallest and most boringest of tasks, but that made a huge difference for me. So I really think that it's important to be strategic. What most people are doing is they'll grab a tool that looks cool and then go how can I use this for my business? And that's really where you end up making mistakes. It's far better to take what you're already doing and do that faster than it is to add in a new thing.

Jonathan Green:

A lot of people launch an AI podcast now or make AI videos and I say, well, how many videos did you put out last year? None. Then don't look at this part of the market. It's all hype. You don't need an AI-generated video for your brand because you don't do that. That's not something you're already doing. Far better, to help it, you can have an AI do things like help you practice for a podcast interview in case you get nervous.

Jonathan Green:

My favorite use case is for editing, so I use AI content to edit my videos all the time. It saves me a huge amount of time. All of that stuff like Descript is my third favorite tool. If you're doing anything with video. They have the best AI on the market. I will take a video and I record into Descript now so it saves me a bunch of time and it will find all the repeats, find all the times you say the words you don't want to say and just delete them with clicking one button. That saves you a huge amount of time. It has the best AI audio enhance, the best AI green screen removal, the best all of the stuff for formatting and editing, and you edit by text so you can read it without playing the video. So it lets you do it without being a video editor. So that's an area where it's a huge time save.

Jonathan Green:

Now I just hired a video editor because I was looking at editing a video went from taking 10 hours to about two hours. So from when I have an idea to when the video is uploaded to YouTube, it's two hours. If I'm putting out a video every day, now it's 15 or 20 hours a week again. So that's why I hired an editor. That's why I switched to a person, only because of a scale. It hit a point of scaling where I go. I've just taken all the time. I got back and filled it by making more quantity. So that's why I hired an editor.

Jonathan Green:

But it's the exact same mindset of okay, what's the best way to approach this process? Can AI make this any faster? The answer is no. There's a limit to what AI can do AI can do adding the B roll, adding the things in between scenes where it has, like, cool words showing across the screen, all the cool stuff, all of that using camera angles. That's the stuff that starts to take too much time, and it hit the point where AI can go so far. And then the next level.

Jonathan Green:

But what I now do, though I'll take the video back from my video editor, fire it into Descript and I'll click their button, write the YouTube description, copy and paste it right in. Click another button, write the blog post, throw that on my article on LinkedIn. I'll edit that sometimes. Sometimes it's good enough. It takes a light edit, sometimes it needs a big edit, but it just does such a good job because it has the whole video pre-transcribed in there that I still use those functions, and it saves a huge amount of time. Creating short clips from videos is a huge, huge usefulness, especially for podcasting, when I appear on other people's podcasts. I appear on people's podcasts all the time, and they don't send me any clips. So I say, great, just send me the video, I'll make the clips myself and I'll use a tool. You can do it in descript or you can do it in video.

Carissa Andrews:

I use Opus Clips.

Jonathan Green:

That's the one that I've been using yeah, a lot of people. I have found in my personal experience that Opus has a lower accuracy rate for the right clip. I know they've done a recent update that may be better, but I tested it like three months ago. But video, instead of doing AI B-roll, they just really improved their accuracy. So I had someone on podcast. There were 13 clips. I ended up using 12 out of the 13 that video made and that's what matters to me more than the flashiness.

Jonathan Green:

I just want to get the clip as fast as possible. And there's another thing that AI tools do. Now when I publish my podcast, it shows whoever's speaking, and that used to be something you had to manually edit. Now it's one button by recording tool and there's a bunch of tools that will do. There's like 10 tools that do that. So things that used to take a huge amount of time, you could do those way faster. So those are areas where AI really shines. There's some really good tools If you stutter a lot or get really nervous and have to do tons and tons of takes, which is fine.

Jonathan Green:

I've worked with people like that. Then there's a tool called Gling, which I pay for. I use it with clients. I don't do a lot of retakes. I'll repeat half a sentence four or five times in a video, but I don't have to do six takes of each scene, like some people do. So for that you go to Gling and it will. Just it's really the script can do it too, but I like the way Gling does it and you can see the script. You can see what's cut out and what you add back in, so you just take the best take of each scene, end up with a really good final video. Then I process it, edit it somewhere else. So those are some of the tools that are on my radar. But that's when you're moving outside of author-specific stuff, when you're into the marketing space, because you have to create videos for TikTok and create content for LinkedIn or content for Instagram, wherever you're marketing, and that's really the better, bigger bang for your buck for authors is the marketing space anyways, yeah absolutely Absolutely Okay.

Carissa Andrews:

So, with AI evolving so rapidly, which we've kind of discussed a little bit, do you see any upcoming trends or new tools that authors specifically should keep their eyes on? Or do you think that ChatGPT and cloud are just going to be evolving so fast that that's really the place to stick it?

Jonathan Green:

most of the tools that people talk about to get a lot of news and press are very unuseful. They're high hype, low value, like AI video stuff, ai audio stuff. A lot of people I know are excited to have an AI that sounds like them narrate their book and it's like, well, it's a cool idea. It's against Amazon's terms of service. They'll ban your account, they catch you and they will catch you because you'll miss something in it, right? So I tend to say stay away from things that are so unnecessary and so not part of your business. The things that I think will be useful and it depends on who you are. If you need file organization, if you need email organization, if you have trouble with dialogue, then look for tools that solve that problem. If you start from the mindset of here's my problem, let me look for solutions, you're going to find there are so many people doing AI development now it can be a little overwhelming because every single company now says they do AI. Every single person is now an AI developer. In the past year, every LinkedIn profile has changed, so that can be really overwhelming. But just start with what is my problem that I need solved, and then you look for the tool that solves that problem. When you approach it that way, you're going to be much more efficient, you'll save a lot of money and you're going to get closer to the right answer for you.

Jonathan Green:

99% of the time, even with all of these pools, all Opus does is take the transcript, send it to ChatGPT and say ChatGPT, pick the clips. So they're still using ChatGPT, they're still using the OpenAI API. Even those tools that seem like video tools and I'm pretty sure Descript is doing the same thing they think they have a higher level functionality because they're a really big company that people don't realize how big they are because they're buying up all these other brands. But that's all that they're really doing is saying to the ai here's the transcript which of these clips do you think, which of these snippets of text do you think will go viral? That's really what they're doing. So even tools that seem like they're video editors are still using chat gpt in the back end right.

Carissa Andrews:

so interesting too and, like you said, a lot of people don't realize that that is actually the base level of everything that's being run, and it goes back to like utilizing a tool then like the source tool. Really, that's going to help you do the most and get the most bang for your buck. Okay, so you built a mailing list of over 100,000 subscribers. You posted a podcast with more than 250 episodes, so what advice do you have to give authors when building their own audiences and establishing a strong online presence, whether it be just utilizing your own knowledge, your basis, or utilizing AI tools? Do you have any tips on that?

Jonathan Green:

Yeah, the most valuable resource you can have is an email list. There's nothing else that's worth more money, because it's the one time you get someone's undivided attention. If you're watching a video on YouTube or Facebook or reading a post, there's always other posts that are trying to get the attention. As soon as my video ends on YouTube, youtube will recommend like 16 other videos and maybe one of those will be mine, but the rest are all by someone else. So you're never getting someone's undivided attention, except when it's an email. People can't read two things at the same time. That's the one time you get all of their attention.

Jonathan Green:

So the mistake a lot of authors make is they don't respect people's email address. So it will just say join my newsletter, and the assumption is that your newsletter is so valuable that I'll jump at the chance to have another newsletter coming in. But no one as a consumer feels that way. So every single person would pay a certain amount of money to never receive another spam again. Whether it's $10 or $20, they pay for these softwares that block those right. So everyone has an idea of what their email address and their privacy is worth. So you have to give people something of equal or greater value. So if someone, when you visit my website, and I want your email address, I want to give you something that's worth more to you than your email addresses. That's when, then, you make the purchase. Same thing if you're spending money, you're just doing a barter, so people don't. If you see it as a purchase, you're way more likely to succeed. So I think, okay, I have to give you something that's worth what your email address is worth, and I have a sense of what an email address is worth to me, so I want to give it a value equal or greater. That's how you get a lot of email addresses. So, instead of here, join my newsletter and you'll find out cool stuff about me or find out what next launches.

Jonathan Green:

You can say get my next book or get this short. A lot of people in fiction will give a prequel short story away. That never entices me, but that may entice other fiction readers, but that's a really common one, I see. So you look, you want to have something from that approach. That's like a really good reason.

Jonathan Green:

The second thing is that when someone finishes reading your book, you can have two things happen. Number one you can have them feel one emotion if you try to have them feel two emotions, you will fail. That that's a guarantee that your book will fail. I want someone to feel happy and sad at the same time. There's no happy-sad. As soon as you try to do that, you create a problem. The second thing is you can have people take one action. You can ask them to do one thing Leave your review, join your email list, listen to your podcast, follow you on YouTube or read the next book in your series. But there are some podcasts you ever heard this where someone says, oh, thank you so much for listening. Why don't you leave a review on iTunes, then leave a review on YouTube, then leave a review on this and this and that, and you go. Oh, people do nothing, yeah.

Carissa Andrews:

Because it's so confusing. The confused mind does nothing yeah.

Jonathan Green:

Yeah, when you give people too many choices, it's better for them to have a yes-no decision than to have a multivariate decision. So just give them the one thing you want to happen. So when I work with a ghostwriting client, this is what I ask. I say what's your real goal? They say I want to speak. Well, I go.

Jonathan Green:

Where do you want to speak? Do you want to speak at corporate events? That's very different than speaking at TED Talks. It's very different than speaking at conferences, because the way conferences book speakers is completely different than corporate events. Because at corporate events, one person makes the decision and they always think, oh well, I want to speak. The head of HR makes the decision and I say that's not true. It's their assistant who says, oh, this is the speaker we think we've got, and then they go okay, the assistant is the one who actually reads the book and then tells their boss. This is the one you should do, because if you've ever worked with anyone in corporate, you know that's what happens, so understand who the decision maker is. Then we want to write a book that appeals to that assistant and we'll get that pitch, because that's who you want it to appeal to, whereas if you want people to come to. So whatever your goal is, then that becomes the seed you plant through.

Jonathan Green:

So let's say, you host a lot of your own live events what I'll do. Throughout the book I'll say oh, someone at one of my conferences asked this and I was speaking at a conference and someone else asked this question. But if I want to sell one-on-one coaching, I'll say one of my one-on-one coaching clients asked this amazing question a few months ago. So what I'm doing is letting you know over and over again. This is the thing that I do.

Jonathan Green:

Whatever that cell is, then, because you planned it before you wrote the book, now you can put it and seed it throughout the book. So if it's, I want you on my email address. I'll mention all the reasons. My email list is amazing. Throughout the book. That's where my someone emailed this amazing question and I just want to share it with you guys. Here's an amazing testimony of someone sent to me via email recently. That was so cool. They know that you're really great for that. So, whatever the thing you want them to do, you can then plant that seed throughout the book and that's the only seed you plant. You don't do all of these you just pick.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, that is so smart and it's so key too, because, speaking of being at conferences, I've seen people talk about your back matter, and when you have your back matter doing too many of the things as well, that confuses the reader, right. And then they do nothing and it's like just pick one. No, just pick one thing and that's it. Yeah, so interesting. But I love the concept of sprinkling it throughout, because when you can plan it, whether you're using ai or whether you're doing it yourself, there is that kind of subconscious level strategicness, because as we read, we go into kind of that hypnotic state anyway, so it kind of gets put into the subconscious mind and next thing you know they're taking action. That's super cool.

Jonathan Green:

And a lot of people will just read the first chapter, first couple of chapters. How many people have recommended a book to you and they've only read the first two chapters? So what some people will do who prefer to learn through courses if you mentioned, I teach this content for this book with videos as well. They'll jump to the back of the book and then they'll go buy a course. So content from this book with videos as well, they'll jump to the back of the book and then they'll go buy your course. So some people will jump up the tree to whatever's the better thing for them. They'll be reading a book and go oh my gosh, this person does live events. What if there's one near me? I'd rather just go hear this live because I learn better live. So finding that earlier has additional value so you can catch the people instead of losing everyone who doesn't get to the end of the book and turn one more page. You don't want to lose them by waiting too late.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, that's so smart and I think there's a lot of people, if they don't value the content that they create, they think they have to wait to the end to share that information because they don't want to seem too salesy in the beginning of their nonfiction books or whatnot. But that's so important. I think I completely agree with you. They need to know that upfront because so many people drop. I think isn't it something like chapter three by chapter three? A lot of the people will drop off by that point if they're not a hundred percent involved or interested.

Jonathan Green:

Life happens. So, in course, design like 99% of people watch the first video, 90% watch the second video and then like 1% watch the third video. So people drop off. And this is true of me as well. When I buy someone else's course, I will watch part of it or watch a couple of videos, and then life gets in the way. So you want to be strategic and say well, what if someone only reads the first chapter? What can I do to make them say this is a really good book? Well, if they only read the first two chapters, it will change how you write the beginning of your book. So you want to do that. And then I also work a lot on how can I plant seeds that will make people read more of this book. Right, what are the things I can do? And I use a really simple strategy. I ask every ghostwriting client the same question what's the worst thing that's ever happened to you that I can put in the book?

Carissa Andrews:

That's an interesting take.

Jonathan Green:

I take that story, I cut it in half. The first half is in the introduction, the last half is in the conclusion.

Jonathan Green:

This creates I want to know how the story ends right, I want to know what happens, and that's it's the same method you see in fiction, like a movie. They'll show the end scene, the end battle scene. Then they'll do a rewind and says, three days earlier, that's overdone. But if you don't do it like that, obviously that's basically what's happening. It creates this oh, I don't know how the story ends. I'm going to read the rest of the book, so I'll read the learning to get back to the entertainment part and it will create that tension that will pull people through the book and you'll have a much higher retention rate. Yeah, that's great.

Carissa Andrews:

Oh, what a good idea. I'm actually in the process of building and fleshing out my next nonfiction book, and so all the little tips and tricks on getting that going is always helpful for me specifically too. So I'm like what a great idea. Taking notes right now, not surprising. I love this.

Carissa Andrews:

It also mentions that while your entrepreneur clients or while people are growing, that you can use websites like Fiverr and Upwork to leverage any of the skills that you obtain through AI or whatever. So I'm just curious have you utilized those platforms yourself to be able to get gigs, to be able to help you in times when you hadn't been as successful to be able to? And obviously AI is kind of new but, like in this era, right now, authors are trying to get to the point where there are full-time authors and maybe they don't have all the tools in place yet. But I know when I first started, I was a freelancer as well and I was using. I didn't use fiverr, but I did use upwork. So I'm curious have you seen any kinds of jobs out there for utilizing AI tools or things like that that they can do then?

Jonathan Green:

So I never, ever, ever get hired when there's a competition. So if someone is talking to 10 ghostwriters, I never get picked. Okay I, that's not my environment, I don't do well with that. I just never. Every single time someone says we're talking to other ghostwriters, I'm like and don't wait, and I already now. I'm like then, don't wait, and I already now. I'm like don't waste my time, I'm not interested in that. Okay, because that's not the game I'm gonna play, because it usually leads to well, they offer this price and or this and that, and I'm. I don't do any of those things. So I've never done well as the and.

Jonathan Green:

But I've hired people in those platforms. I've hired people on upwork. I've hired people it was called um elance. I've hired people in what's called Elance. I've hired people on Fiverr. So I hire people a lot on those platforms.

Jonathan Green:

But for me, I know what I'm good at and not good at. I'm good at the single conversation. When someone talks to me, they want to hire me. So I lean into what I'm good at. I know plenty of other people that are good at the other direction. They're great at making proposals and great at getting picked, just not me.

Jonathan Green:

So I have gotten most when I need revenue, I just will post on Craigslist. I do really well posting on there, because nobody on Craigslist is looking for information. They're shopping and you will be surprised how successful the people are who spend time on Craigslist. So I've had clients who are millionaires and billionaires who found me on Craigslist. This is back when I was selling computer services like SEO stuff and that kind of stuff and a little web design and a little social media marketing those types of things way back in 2010.

Jonathan Green:

But it's the same thing now. You'll still see that people who go there are looking to hire someone for a task they're already in the mindset of I'm going to hire someone now, I just want to see who's here. There's a lot of challenges with hiring on Fiverr and hiring on Upwork. These days, there's just a lot of bad vendors. I don't hire on Upwork anymore because 90% of the people who are delivering content are bait and switchers. They'll bid a price, then you go great, they go actually, I want a different price and it's like, well, you've wasted my time.

Jonathan Green:

So, that's what drives me the craziest. Just tell me the real price, don't that's like drives me the craze is just tell me the real price. Like don't play a game. So those to me, have lost a lot of their luster. Like I don't like to deal with that, so very rarely do I. Like I just hired, I went through like 20.

Jonathan Green:

So many people have hundreds of applications to hire a video editor and even then the first person who was a recommendation from a good friend of mine, all the bait and switch after the first week and I was like well, you're fired, we made an agreement. It was the first message I sent you was here's the price, here's the thing. And they go. Well, actually I don't want to work for you full-time, I want you just to be one of my other clients. And I said, oh, that's a. And they switched salary to retainer like doing this because it's.

Jonathan Green:

If someone will do that in the first part of the relationship, if they're going to pull a bait and switch like they're going to lie because they she knew from the very first message that she didn't want the job I'd offered her. She wanted something else. Like add another client to her rolodex. And I was like oh, that's cool, you've created an enemy for life. Yeah, right of time, like you're just my time, which is something that bothers me the most. So, absolutely, there's so much work out there now for authors and blog posts, writing and ghost writing. There's just so much. There's more work now than ever before, because what happens is a lot of people will use AI to do something, get a bad result and then go. I just need to hire a person like lesson learned. So I think it's actually a better market for right now than ever before.

Carissa Andrews:

Nice. So do you have any ways of getting those types of gigs then that authors could utilize Anything that is of service to them in this time of era of the market space, I guess?

Jonathan Green:

Here's how you get clients. Tell everyone what you do. Most ghostwriters who I meet who fail. They'll say I can't get any clients. I say well, how many people have you told that you're a ghostwriter? Nobody. Well, then the result makes sense. So change your LinkedIn profile, change your Facebook profile.

Jonathan Green:

A lot of people feel like, oh, I have to get the clients first, and then I can say that that's what I do. You have to switch around. You have to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have to tell people this is what I do and think about what type of client you want and who you want to attract, and then say well, this is it. You say who do I want to hire me? Well, what type of person do they want to hire? Then become the person who fits that goal. Become that matrix.

Jonathan Green:

So I have a whole like for ghostwriting. I'm not good at blog post writing. I'm not good at short form. I'm good at long form. I'm much, much better at writing a really long book than I am writing blog posts of the same number of words. It's just what I'm good at. So I lean into that and I want to get paid a lot of money. So I act. I have a calibration of how like haughty I act or how much of a jerk I act like. So I don't chase people. I'll say things like like oh, are you a ghost, right? Yeah, I'm not really looking for clients right now. I really only take projects that get me really excited, right people here right.

Jonathan Green:

Oh my god, this guy must be so good if he talks like that. This guy, because they think when you're that con, you talk like that. So you just calibrate that to the right thing for your business, because you want people to ask you rather than for you to prove yourself that you're a good writer. People will say things like how do you know I'll be a bestseller? I haven't written a non-bestseller in 12 years. I don't think your book is going to be the one where suddenly I stop writing bestsellers.

Carissa Andrews:

Right right.

Jonathan Green:

And around like that. So I talk like that and it's a calibration, I'm just, it's cranking up your confidence up to 11 or whatever's right for your personality. So you want to switch so that you're doing positioning instead of prospecting, instead of chasing clients. So instead of saying, hey, are you looking for a ghostwriter, are you looking for a ghostwriter? And you'll. Most people don't know five ghostwriters, most people only know one.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah.

Jonathan Green:

So you do the one everyone knows and that's really all there is to it. Once you plant the seed and you tell everyone what you do, you'll start getting inquiries all the time because it's not a very common profession, it's just not Most people know one. Someone will say to your friend of a friend hey, do you know any ghostwriters? Oh, I know one person. I know, jonathan. Can you introduce me, because I don't know any other ghost writers and you're off to the races. So, whatever the thing is that you want to do, whether it's I know some people who just write book outlines or they only do paranormal romance, character development, whatever the thing is that you do, it doesn't matter. Just tell everyone and then act like you're good at it.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, I think that's so key. I teach manifestation to authors as well and so to me that makes total sense, because you're putting out and projecting and, like you said, recalibrating. So like even when I think about it, like from the quantum physics perspective, it's like you're calibrating yourself into that reality. You're pulling the possibility of that being in and you're acting the part which totally makes sense I of that being in and you're acting the part which totally makes sense. I love that. That's super cool, okay, so what do you think is the biggest misconception about?

Jonathan Green:

AI that you'd like to address. The biggest misconception is that it can replace you. A lot of people say things like I want to replace myself with AI. Whenever someone says that, I know that they're going to fail, just like an absolute giveaway. What AI can do is move you into management. So now, instead of writing your emails, chad, you'd be right to email us, but you have to read them and do quality control. Every single time someone has a debacle with AI and makes it in the news, it's because they did not check the work. They let something go out the door without reading it, and that's really the difference, that difference of mindset. That's the biggest mistake that people make is letting it do something unfettered and publishing something that they did not read, whether it's to social media or, even worse, to a book. Don't do that.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, yeah, cause it does kind of do some weird things once in a while. It's sometimes it's great, like you mentioned in an earlier discussion. It's like sometimes it creates content that's perfect, and other times you're like what in the heck just happened? There's a, there's a good like gist here, but I need to add some more stuff in. Yeah, ok, finally, what's the one piece of advice that you'd give to authors who are hesitant about incorporating AI into their writing business?

Jonathan Green:

Oh Don't, you don't have to do it. You only do it if there is an area where you're stuck, if something is taking a lot of time or you're frozen on a process. You don't need ai to write your book. You don't need ai to edit your book, just use it to help you with different areas. But if you, for example, have writer's block, then you can just say to chat gbt, I'm working on a book and I have writer's block, can you help me get through it? And it will work you through it in an amazing way.

Jonathan Green:

I'll do an exercise or a drill with you. There's tons of ways to do that. So that's really the approach I have. It's not a necessary tool, it's just a way to enhance and you just can use it for different parts. Like, okay, let me just work through, let me just do a brainstorm with the AI. I don't need it to do anything else. So you just use it wherever you are stuck or you're spending a lot of time on something. Sometimes I've worked with clients who will spend like a year just rewriting the same chapter over and over again.

Jonathan Green:

And it's like well, of course, it's obvious what the problem is. You won't stop working on chapter three, no matter how many times I tell you and it's most of the time when people do something they'll violate one of my rules. One of my rules is do not have a friend or family member design the cover of your book. And I remember someone even said I know I broke Jonathan's rule, but I had my daughter do the cover. I'm starting to fall in love with it. And I was like, yeah, it's too bad, it's trash. And now you can't get rid of it, you can't change the cover because you have this second problem oh, my daughter's feelings will be hurt.

Jonathan Green:

So it's like now you've prioritized this person's feelings over success. So that's like mixing personal and business. So that's the kind of thing that can sabotage you. So I definitely encourage you to use AI strategically. You don't have to use it, but use it wherever you're stuck, where something's taking too long or something's wonky. Sometimes you can look at something and go. I don't know what's wrong with this. So you can, for example, upload a cover of your book to chat GBT and go what genre is this book?

Carissa Andrews:

And if it guesses, the wrong genre, then you know you have a problem, right. Right, that's a great way to use it. I do sort of kind of similar things where it's like what kind of? If I'll take my book description like what genre of a um, what genre do you think this book is going to be in based off of this description, and let it kind of take a look and then let me know, and if it's not the right one, go and you rework it then to be fitting in X genre Like whatever, so that it can help you to calibrate it to the right messaging. Yeah, it's good.

Jonathan Green:

Great, I love it. That's a good idea.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, okay, jonathan, where can my audience go to find out more about you, to learn about all that you do, to check out your many, many, many, many books? Where do they go?

Jonathan Green:

On any platform. You can just type serve no master. Every Google search result is me. Every book result is me. It's either my podcast or my books or a review of me. You'll find me everywhere. Serve no master.

Carissa Andrews:

I love that. That's awesome, jonathan. Thank you so much for being here today and sharing all of your wisdom. Thank you for having me. Wow, what a conversation.

Carissa Andrews:

I don't know about you, but I'm feeling so inspired after hearing Jonathan Green's insights. He really broke down the practical ways we can use AI to grow our author business and make a serious impact, and I know the information he gave on nonfiction in specific has really really settled in with me right. There's a lot that I'm working on behind the scenes and it was like so many golden nuggets there. So if you want to dive deeper into what Jonathan's doing or check out any of the tools we talked about today, don't worry. I've got all the links and tools and resources we mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript over at authorrevolutionorg forward slash 258. So you can find everything really easy right there.

Carissa Andrews:

But before I go, I've got some exciting news to share. I've been working on something really special and you guys probably know about it. I've mentioned it a few times on the podcast, but it's my upcoming nonfiction book Write your Reality Now. This book is all about how you can use the power of your words and intention and the quantum field to shape your life the way you want to live it. I'll be launching the Kickstarter for it very soon. Fingers crossed it'll be going live by November 4th. It's going to be running until November 30th and I'm super excited for you to be a part of it.

Carissa Andrews:

If you're curious, you can always keep an eye on the campaign page at authorrevolutionorg forward slash Kickstarter. You'll be able to check out all the details there. Once it goes live. I'll be posting like the coming soon page very soon, but for right now it's just the redirect. Okay, so, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. Jonathan shared some incredible strategies and I hope you're walking away with actionable ideas to incorporate AI into your writing business. Don't forget if you want more details on Jonathan, his courses or the AI tools he mentioned, head over to AuthorRevolutionorg forward slash 258. And until next time, go forth and start your author revolution.

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Carissa Andrews

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