07:28Brad | AI & Automation · Tutorial
The AI Setup I Use to Run EVERYTHING (in one app)
A 7-minute walkthrough replacing the Claude Desktop app with VS Code as a full AI operating system for non-developers.
June 12thThe argument in one line.
AI can ghostwrite a nonfiction book that sounds like you, but only if you give it your transcripts, your chapter structure, and a style guide extracted from your own published work rather than just a topic and a prompt.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A workshop host or coach with recorded sessions who wants to turn that material into a published book without starting from scratch.
- A nonfiction author who has tried AI writing tools and received generic encyclopedia-style prose and wants to understand why.
- Someone with published books or substantial writing samples willing to use them as style-training inputs for Claude.
- A self-publisher targeting short, dense nonfiction books of 100-130 pages rather than long-form traditional manuscripts.
SKIP IF…
- You are writing fiction or memoir where the prose itself is the product and source transcripts are not available.
- You want a tool that runs automatically with minimal input; this process requires deliberate upfront setup and a real editing pass.
The full version, fast.
Most AI-written books fail because the author gave the AI nothing personal to work with. This video teaches a process where Claude works from your source material: workshop transcripts, dictated notes, and a past book uploaded so Claude can learn your sentence length, structure, and words to avoid. The result is a 24-25k word draft produced in roughly a day. The 20/60/20 formula governs the whole process: 20% is your vision and source material, 60% is AI drafting, and the final 20% is a human editing pass that makes the manuscript yours.
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00:00 – 00:40
01 · Skeptic to Surprise
Hook: host was skeptical, AI book felt like a shortcut that would produce something embarrassing.
00:40 – 00:54
02 · What AI Writing Is Not
Contrasts against the type-a-topic approach that produces encyclopedia prose with no personality, no stories, no voice.
00:54 – 01:55
03 · Cover and Series Branding
Screen shows Amazon listing for Get Paid to Teach; Claude helped design a consistent workshop series cover template.
01:55 – 04:56
04 · Train AI on Your Voice
Uploads a past book to Claude Cowork Author project; Claude analyzes it and generates a CLAUDE.md style guide with chapter format rules, voice notes, and word count targets.
04:56 – 06:20
05 · Avoid AI Tells
Explicit blacklist of phrases to remove: additionally, moreover, in conclusion, em dashes, not only but also.
06:20 – 09:25
06 · Feed Transcripts and Files
Workshop transcripts, planning workbook, and session recordings uploaded into the Claude Cowork author project folder; viewed and navigated in Obsidian.
09:25 – 11:19
07 · Outline from Transcripts
Prompts Claude to analyze all uploads and produce a 12-chapter outline with framework, opening story, subheadings, and exercise mapped per chapter.
11:19 – 14:13
08 · Draft the Book Fast
Chapter-by-chapter drafting via simple prompts; drafts visible in Obsidian; approximately 24k words produced in about two hours.
14:13 – 15:43
09 · Edit and the 20/60/20 Formula
20% personal vision upfront, 60% AI draft, 20% human editing pass. Host cites 12 books and 1,200 reviews with zero AI-detection complaints.
15:43 – 16:27
10 · Prompts, Questions, Next Video
CTA to download the AI writing prompt from description; link to the million dollar messenger path video.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- AI books fail because people give them nothing personal to pull from, not because AI cannot write.
- A CLAUDE.md style guide built from your own published book is more valuable than any generic writing prompt.
- Banning additionally, moreover, in conclusion, and em dashes removes the most recognizable AI-sounding tells.
- The 20/60/20 formula keeps AI as a drafting tool rather than the author: 20% your vision, 60% AI draft, 20% your edit.
- Workshop recordings are the highest-value input because they contain your stories, frameworks, and examples in your own voice.
- Claude Cowork plus Obsidian is a local self-publishing stack that writes and organizes files without cloud lock-in.
- A 125-page nonfiction book at 25k words is a deliberate product choice: dense enough to deliver value, short enough to finish reading.
- After 12 books and 1,200 reviews, not one review has flagged the writing as AI-generated.
- Dictation is a valid substitute when you have no transcripts: talk through each chapter out loud, transcribe the ramble, feed it to Claude.
- The chapter outline Claude produces from source material often surfaces structure the author did not consciously plan.
- AI should never invent frameworks or personal stories; its job is to organize and articulate what the author has already said.
Three inputs that make AI ghostwriting work.
WHAT TO LEARN
Giving Claude a topic and hitting enter produces an encyclopedia; giving it your transcripts, your chapter structure, and a style guide extracted from your own writing produces something that sounds like you.
- Workshop recordings are the raw manuscript: transcripts hold your stories, examples, and frameworks in your own voice, which is what AI needs to write something that cannot be copied.
- A style guide matters more than a clever prompt — uploading a past book so Claude can learn your sentence length, paragraph size, and words to avoid does more work than any generic writing instruction.
- The 20/60/20 formula separates preparation from drafting: the 20% you put in upfront determines whether the 60% AI draft is usable or needs to be thrown out.
- Banning a short list of AI tells — additionally, moreover, in conclusion, em dashes — removes the most common markers that make readers feel something is off.
- Dictation is a valid substitute when you have no transcripts: talk through each chapter out loud, let it ramble, transcribe it, and hand the result to Claude.
- The editing pass is still real work, but revising a 25k-word draft is far faster than writing from a blank page.
Terms worth knowing.
- Claude Cowork
- A Claude interface that writes output files directly to a local folder on your computer, organized by project, so every draft lives in a directory you can open in any text editor or app like Obsidian.
- CLAUDE.md
- A markdown file Claude reads at the start of a project session that stores persistent instructions, style rules, and structural templates so you do not have to re-explain your preferences each time.
- AI tells
- Specific words and sentence patterns that signal AI authorship to readers, such as additionally, moreover, in conclusion, and em dashes — phrases human writers rarely use but AI models default to.
- 20/60/20 formula
- A nonfiction book production framework: 20% is personal vision, stories, and source material loaded upfront; 60% is AI-assisted drafting from those inputs; 20% is a human editing pass to restore voice and remove anything that feels off.
- Obsidian
- A free local markdown editor that can point to any folder on your computer and display all files as a navigable vault, used here to read and edit Claude Cowork drafts without switching between file windows.
Things they pointed at.
01:55toolClaude Cowork
15:00bookThe 90-Day Author
Lines you could clip.
00:24
“I've read those books. You've read those books. They're technically accurate, but they read like an encyclopedia. No personality, no stories, no voice, just information.”
06:36
“It's pulling from your stories, your examples, your frameworks, your ideas, and it creates a book that cannot be copied.”
14:47
“I've published now over 12 books with the help of AI. And now over 1,200 reviews, I've yet to have one review that says this book was written by AI.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
00:00I'll be honest with you. I was skeptical. The idea of writing a book in a single day with AI felt like a shortcut that would produce something embarrassing.
00:07But I tried it anyway, and what happened surprised even me. Now before we go any further, I wanna be really clear about about something.
00:13This is not what most people think of when they hear AI wrote my book. You know what I'm talking about. Someone types a topic into ChatGPT, hits enter, lets it generate 200 pages on something they barely understand.
00:24I've read those books. You've read those books. They're technically accurate, but they read like an encyclopedia.
00:30No personality, no stories, no voice, just information. And readers can feel that.
00:36And it even shows up in the reviews every single time. What I did was completely different. The goal was simple.
00:43I wanted a book that sounded like me, because if it doesn't sound like me, what's the point? So let me show you my process step by step, and later in the video, I'll give you the master AI writing prompt that'll help you do the same. Let's go.
00:54So we're gonna jump into the screen, and first of all, this is the book. I already put it up on preorder, and this design, this cover design for the series is also something that Claude helped me with.
01:06I'm calling it the Market Your Message Workshop Series because I teach a monthly paid workshop, and I wanna turn those monthly workshops into books that can be helpful for people. And so the process that I went through, if we start first of all here, is brainstorming and finding a really good design that is gonna be the theme for my entire workshop.
01:28And so I won't take you through each of this, but basically, I ended up with this final design element that I decided to go with, and my whole series is going to to mirror the same thing.
01:42So you can see here, here's a different version for a different workshop. Here's another one, and so those will be coming in the days ahead.
01:50So that's the first part, is I got the book cover and started with that. Now, the next part of this process is to train AI on exactly what you want.
02:02It's ideal if you already have published a book or you have some writing, and it can know the style and the structure that you have. If you don't, that's okay too. But let me show you exactly what I did.
02:14So I like to use Claude CoWork. And inside Claude CoWork, I'll show you this, I like to set up my projects according to roles that I play in my business, from email marketer to boot camp coach, YouTube video creator, and then we have this one here, author.
02:30And so inside this author, when I created it, I wanted to have a conversation with it so that it could create the instructions according to the way I want my books written. And so if we go down here, we'll start here, and I'll show you the exact step by step I went through.
02:44So I uploaded one of my past books so I could understand the style, the structure, how I like to create these books, and I said, I would like for you to analyze one of my latest books so you can create instructions on helping me write future books. First of all, I dictated this all out. So if you see misspellings, it's just from the dictation.
03:00First, analyze the table of contents. Notice how I use 12 chapters plus introduction and next steps. This is intentional.
03:07My goal is typically to have about 30,000 words. That's roughly 2,500 words per chapter. And then I went through and I talked about the style of how I like to structure my chapters.
03:16I like to have three to five points. I want a practical exercise. I wanna have some key takeaways.
03:21And then I said, feel free to ask me any questions necessary to get your analysis right. And off it went. Went through the analysis, and then it created the book structure, the link, the chapter flow, and this is what it came up with.
03:38And if we go up here to the top, you can see now the claudiumd file, which is the memory of the workhorse for this section, this project, is in here.
03:49The folder is all about writing in Jonathan's style and his proven structure. Start with a framework. Every book is built on a name.
03:55I like to do my books. Again, we're talking nonfiction books. Transcripts first, then outline, then write in Jonathan's voice, check the word count target.
04:04It then has the big picture structure, uh, 12 chapters plus introduction and conclusion, the name frame. We open up every single chapter with an interesting story.
04:12It could be a personal story. It could be a metaphor, an illustration, story of some and so it's pulling from my transcript some of the things that I talked about in the workshop.
04:21Then it creates three to five subheadings inside of the chapter, and then it has a practical exercise, bullet point three takeaways, and the next chapter tees.
04:33So literally, you give it the actual structure that you want, and the more detailed you can get with your structure, the better result you are going to get. Alright.
04:44Let's get back into it. I even gave it some structure around the introduction and conclusion. I'll provide all of this for you, by the way.
04:50If you want this structure that I have, Look in the link in the description below. You can grab it.
04:56It'll also pull out all the common AI words and phrases that are that are tells that people know this was AI written.
05:04We're gonna remove all that from our book, and that's the way I like to do it. Got conclusion, and then the writing style.
05:11Now, you want to feed it some of your writing, if at all possible. Now, I wrote two books before AI even came around, a traditional published book and a self published book, and so I used those for it to find my writing style.
05:23Well, how do I like to write my sentences? How big are my paragraphs? What are the length of my sentences?
05:28What are common words that I use? Do I ask a lot of questions? What kind of words do I use?
05:34And so all of that has been diagnosed here. Now if you say, I haven't written a book, Jonathan, well, have you written a blog post? Do you have some writing?
05:41Have you produced an article? If you can have some of your writing, it can help to know exactly your style.
05:48Then it gets into crafting the prose, languages to avoid. Again, these are tells inside of AI.
05:55Additionally, however, moreover, in conclusion, on the other hand, this is because by doing x, you can y. Whether you're x or y, this is not only, but also avoid em dashes, which I just don't use in my writing. Use a comma instead.
06:08Use parentheses. Use transcripts as the primary source. All of this structural help do's and don'ts.
06:16Again, you can grab all this in the description below. The next part of this process before getting into the structure of the book is you wanna feed it your transcripts.
06:25Now, if you don't have transcripts, what I have students, my writing students do, is once you create an outline for the book and you have three to five sub points for each chapter that you wanna cover, use a dictation software and dictate the your ideas and thoughts out. They could be ramblings, you can talk in circles, it does not matter.
06:43Just get out all the information you can out of your head about that. Talk about your stories. Give examples, all of that, and then we're now gonna use that inside of this project so that it's not just pulling from AI's knowledge database.
06:58It's pulling from your stories, your examples, your frameworks, your ideas, and it creates a book that cannot be copied. So that's the really important part of this process. So what I do, just to back up here a second, is I use Claude Cowork because what Cowork does is it creates files on your actual computer.
07:19Each project is a folder, and inside each folder, you can have subfold And as you're creating things with Claude, it's producing these inside of these folders on your actual desktop.
07:32So you can see here, this is a draft, and it's kinda small. I'll click on it. This is chapter one.
07:36This is the draft. It's in a markdown file, and what I don't like is jumping back in between all of these documents.
07:45So what I do is I actually install Obsidian, and Obsidian use the free version for Obsidian. You download it onto your computer, and then, basically, you point.
07:55It'll ask you for a folder. You wanna create a folder or you wanna point to a folder. And what I do is I take my main folder, which I called Cowork OS, and I pointed Obsidian to that.
08:07And then now it's got all of my projects. If I just minimize these, you can see these over on the left hand side, author, boot camp coach, business owner.
08:17So when I click into it, I don't have to sit here and open up files. So if I wanna click on chapter one, I have it right here.
08:22I can even edit inside of here, which I will talk about later. I can edit my chapters in here as well.
08:29But the part I wanna show you is putting your transcripts in here. Now, again, it's pretty easy.
08:36If you get your transcripts, you just go to the file, like I have one here under author, and it's called the Get Paid to Teach Transcripts, and they're in here. I uploaded all kind of things.
08:46I uploaded my workbook. Now this is actually me planning my workshop, and Claude can read all of these.
08:54So I like to map it out, my workshop, having charts and graphs and things that I'm doing when I'm teaching. I gave it that. I gave it just the raw transcript from the recording, which is real easy to get these days.
09:08I've got the actual workbook that was the student workbook that I gave it as well.
09:15So you can see all of these things. So it's it's creating the book from all of these, and these are really sitting inside of here in that folder.
09:24Okay. So now that it's in the folder, now we can go back to Claude, and we can tell it analyze all of the transcripts and create what you think is a really good 12 chapter book outline based off of what I've already fed it.
09:42And so now it's going through that process. This is some of the conversation, and then it comes up with a framework and chapter map, and that's what we see over here. So I'll go back up here to the top, and you can see after reading the four boot camp transcripts, the workshop planner and the workbook, the boot camp grounds, the delivery chapter, and here we go.
10:02So then it gets into the framework, the big picture. It says, hey, there's really five framework phases here.
10:10That'll be five parts of the book. And then it says, hey, here's the introduction. Here, according to your prompt, these are the how we'll cover these particular parts for your introduction.
10:24Here's part one. Here's chapter one, the thriving paid teacher. Here's the main point.
10:28Here's the opening story we're gonna use. Here's the subheading type that I gave it, that come up with three to five subheads, and it said, here's the four subhead types.
10:39Here's what we think the exercise should be, and here's where we got it from. And then it just does that for chapter two, chapter three, chapter four. And as you're going through here, if you see something you don't like, you can tell it, don't do this story, do this instead.
10:52Let's tweak this instead of that. But you're basically looking over this very detailed outline that it's got from your transcripts or from your dictation, and it's gonna do a much better job when it comes to actually writing the book.
11:04So you can see here, it laid everything out. So that is the next step is we have it analyze our transcripts and our dictation, so you can create a really thoughtful, helpful, detailed book outline.
11:18Alright. Now, it's time to write the book. So this is what I was able to do in literally probably an hour or two, maybe less, and I was able to create a draft around 24, 25,000 words.
11:30It's not designed to be an 80,000 word novel, and that's not the kind of book I wanna write. I wanna write a book that's about a 125 pages.
11:38It's got the meat and the goods without all the fluff. So let's jump back in here.
11:43So the next part of this process was to actually write the book. So we'll go back up to the top here, and literally at this point, I'm like, hey, let's just write the introduction to get paid to teach according to our chapter map.
11:57So then it starts the process, it lets you know what it's doing, and then it creates it. Now you can click on this, and if it doesn't load over here, again, I can look at it right here inside of draft.
12:09Here's introduction, and I can read it right here. I'm gonna read some of this, just just a few of the the the sentences here, and you'll get a a feel for it.
12:17This really fits me in my writing style. Write very practical, short sentences, short paragraphs, and you can tell that it doesn't have the typical AI writing in here.
12:26Learning without action isn't growth. It's just a more comfortable kinda delay. We live in the most information rich moment in human history.
12:32Anything you wanna know is a search away. Yet, knowing more has never been the thing that changed a life. Information's everywhere.
12:39Transformation is rare. So let me ask you something, and be honest with yourself when you answer. How long have you been getting ready to finally teach what you know and get paid for it?
12:47A year, three years, longer? And then it goes into my story. I told myself I was preparing.
12:53Talked about that. Here's what I wish someone had told me. This is all coming from transcripts from when I taught the workshop.
13:00And if we bounce around here, you will find other examples. Here's one that I gave on my workshop. Late one night, I got hooked on a show about gold prospectors.
13:08You've probably flipped past one. A crew somewhere in Alaska burning through their savings on giant excavators tearing into the frozen earth season after season. The machines roar, the dirt flies, and the men keep glancing at the wash plant to see if any color comes through.
13:22So this was an actual story that I taught in my workshop, and so all of this content's coming from the transcripts. So when we come back here, we are just going to have it create a chapter, quickly read through it.
13:36We're not gonna edit it yet, but we're looking through to make sure it sounds and looks good. And then the same thing. Chapter write chapter one now.
13:43Now let's write chapter two. Hey, let's write chapter three. And if you see things that you don't like, you can just correct it.
13:49Say, hey, let's not use that as the opening story. I'm gonna dictate out another story. Let's use this instead.
13:55And you do this back and forth pretty quickly, literally probably within an hour. I had all the way down here 12 chapter drafts and then a conclusion, and then at the end, can see we were roughly sitting around 24,000 words.
14:13Now this is really important. You don't just take what it produced and go publish it.
14:20I still like to spend a few days, if not a couple of weeks, getting in there and reading it. Anything that doesn't make sense gets pulled out. Anything that I don't like, I'm gonna put in something different.
14:32But it's so much easier to work from a place of 25,000 words, and trying to figure out how to structure it and write it from scratch can feel very difficult. And this is what produces a book that's not AI written. It doesn't look like AI.
14:47And I've published now over 12 books with the help of AI. And now over a thousand or 1,200 reviews, I've yet to have one review that says this book was written by AI. It's because of the intentionality that I like to take.
15:01And this is something I taught in my book, The ninety day Author. The formula is this, twenty, sixty, 20. The first 20% should be your vision, your frameworks, your stories, your experience, your examples, and your vision, that gets put into it.
15:17And then the 60, which is the hardest part for a lot of people, is just getting a draft. And that draft AI is a really good ghostwriter if you give it enough information through transcripts, through dictation.
15:29And then from there, the last 20% is me getting back into it and making sure it sounds like me. That's a proven formula that can allow you to publish faster and publish more books while staying true to your voice, your mission, and what it is that you do. So again, if you want the kind of AI prompt that I like to use for writing that pulls out a lot of the tells, you can find that link in the description below.
15:52And also, what questions do you have about this? Happy to answer the questions? Just ask your questions down below.
15:56And then finally, if you're a writer or coach and you haven't hit that 100 a year, which is a milestone, a good milestone for a lot of personal brands because you're full time once you hit that mark, then I did an entire video that maps out the nine projects you need to install in your business. This is something I teach in my insider program, and I laid it all out in a complete video, and you can watch it over here.
16:21It's called the million dollar messenger path. Just click on the video, and I'll see you over in that video.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The title sounds like a stunt. Writing an entire book in one day with an AI model feels like the kind of thing that produces 200 pages of jargon nobody would voluntarily read. But the host's concern was not speed — it was voice. His process starts not with a topic but with a past book, a style guide, and years of workshop transcripts.
Named ideas worth stealing.
15:00model
20/60/20 Book Formula
- 20% personal vision, frameworks, stories, and source material
- 60% AI ghostwriting from those inputs
- 20% human editing pass
Positions AI as the drafting engine rather than the author; the author is the source of all ideas and the final editor of voice.
Steal forany content creation workflow where voice matters: courses, email sequences, sales copy
02:40list
Chapter Structure Template
- Opening story (personal, metaphor, or illustration)
- 3-5 subheadings covering the chapter points
- Practical exercise (15-30 minutes)
- 3 bullet key takeaways
- Chapter tease into the next section
A repeatable chapter scaffold that Claude follows once set in the CLAUDE.md; ensures consistency across all 12 chapters without re-prompting.
Steal fornonfiction book outlines, course module structures, workshop curriculums
05:10list
AI Tell Blacklist
- additionally
- however as opener
- moreover
- in conclusion
- on the other hand
- this is because by doing X you can Y
- whether you are X or Y
- not only but also
- em dashes as punctuation
A phrase-level blacklist baked into the CLAUDE.md that removes the most common markers readers associate with AI-generated text.
Steal forany AI writing workflow where the output needs to pass as human-authored
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
15:43link
“If you want the kind of AI prompt that I like to use for writing that pulls out a lot of the tells, you can find that link in the description below.”
Soft sell; the prompt is free. Secondary CTA links to a longer video on the million dollar messenger path.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
