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Lesson Info

Writing a Book with ChatGPT

Let's make chat GP T write our book for us. So here you're looking at the book that I created the 52 photography challenges book. I'm so proud of it. I keep showing it to you because it's so cool that it's hard book now, hard cover. And I want to show you the prompt that I used. So I already had the 52 challenges, but I could have easily asked chat GP T to come up with 52 weekly photography challenges. And I would have just prompted at that from there. I would have had that outline, quote unquote outline for the book. And here's the prompt I have for writing that this particular book, I start by prompting it and giving it a character. Basically, you are a photography teacher giving it a role. You are writing a book, inspiring beginner photographers to get out and take photos. Each week we share a photography challenge for our students. The first challenge is animals. Photography. Make a list of five tips for taking better photos of animals and you can see what it returned. It gave us. ...

It has like a title which I'm not gonna use, but it thought it was writing a book. So it gave us a title. Then it has the chapter challenge. One animals gives a little bit of information and then it has five tips for that topic. I gave it a little bit of appreciation, which I think it's funny. I don't need to do that. Good job. Repeat this for the next chapter. Although I'm not exactly sure it might, by showing appreciation or telling it good job, it might know that, that it did the right thing, but you could probably just write repeat this for the next chapter, which is the photography challenge patterns. So this is where it takes a little bit of time. And like I said, I was sick watching a movie with my kids on the laptop and all I did was copy that paste the topic. Then I challenged it to do the next five cha chapters. So I just included the chapters afterwards, all five of them. And it did that for all five chapters. Although what you'll notice if you do some sort of longer form chat GP T work, sometimes it pauses out. And so all I did I said was continue and this was actually with Chat GP T the 3.5 version because this is rather simple. I've used the Chat GP T four when I was taking my closed captions or transcript and converted it to written format because those were coming out better with the version four. But for this basic stuff, the 3.5 is doing fine. Then I expanded it to 10 chapters and I was just doing this slowly incrementally increasing it and it did a really good job. Um It didn't have any catch ups or anything. So that's all I did. And I basically, I just did that till it was over. Then at the beginning, let's see. Where am I after it was all done? I asked write an introduction chapter to this book explaining what it is, who it's for, how to best use it briefly. Explain who the author is. I include myself, gave it some more context and it wrote an introduction to the book for me which I then took and edited. I added some links and made sure it sounded better. Uh coming from me, I had it right. A bonus chapter at the end, a 1500 word bonus chapter titled Get inspiration to take photo photographs in your own backyard. Give it information there and it came back with a chapter with 10 tips for doing that, which was pretty awesome. I also had it, write a conclusion chapter to the book. And then I also, you see here what I did, I wrote a description for Amazon which will come up later. But another thing I did was I had it right, a copyright page. So here I have write a copyright page for this book. And since it's all in this one chain of prompts. It knows what we were asking about and knows the book it's writing and it's all, it's taking that information and it's all here. I had to do a little bit of customizing and editing of this, but it's a pretty darn good copyright page that I use for my book. So that's how I did it for the 52 photography challenge book. Let's look at how I would do it for our new book, which is the landscape photography book. So if I have created the outline and maybe I'm happy with the outline or I've given it a revised outline, I would then tell chat G BT to right out this first part. So I would say right out the first chapters of this book and then I would just paste this, you could do this one out at a time. Now it's seeing it as one chapter. The introduction is the chapter rather than each of these being a chapter which I think makes sense for for this introduction, we just have one introduction chapter and you can see that it's writing for me. It's right in the full chapter. Now, while it's doing this, I want to talk about how you can then edit this to make it sound more like you. There's a couple of approaches, you can give it a style so you can have this book, say you do a couple attempts with this first chapter. And if you like it, you like it. If not, if you want it to be more funny, more casual, more professional, you can ask Chat GP T to rewrite that chapter but be more funny. Be more casual. Write it for a different audience. You can say write this book and you might want to do this at the very beginning. Say this is a book for elementary school students or this is a book for teenagers. This is a book for young adults and it will actually change the way that it writes the book based off of that prompt. So here we have a pretty long book that it's writing, which is pretty cool. And then, for example, here, let's just say rewrite this chapter, make it more casual and down to earth, the author should be fun. So it's going to take that and it's gone a little bit too far. Why landscape photography is the bee's knees? That's not necessarily what we want. But instead of the beginning being, what was it? Landscape photography has long been one of the most popular and enduring forms of the photography, photographic art. It's a little bit bland. Say, hey there, fellow photography enthusiast. So you've decided to take the plunge and immerse yourself in the wonderful world of landscape photography. And why wouldn't you? It's only the coolest, most rewarding and downright breathtaking genre of photography there is. So it's a little bit more fun um it might be a little bit too much. So we might kind of tone that down. Maybe we don't say the author is funny. We just say be a little bit more casual down to earth and see how that goes. And you want to do this for the first chapter before you continue, rather than having it rewrite the whole book because you want it to be writing each chapter the way that you want. Another thing you can do is you could actually train it using your own writing. So you have blog articles. If you have a video script that you can download from youtube, they provide the closed captions on youtube, you could actually plug it in and you can train chat GP T and say this is how I talk rewrite or you, you are an author and you are going to use a similar tone as this video and then you paste the script or you paste the article or you provide a link to a blog article that you've written emails that you've written. You can actually train chat GP T to sound like you, which is a more advanced way to do this. And if you are writing as yourself using chat GP T, I would highly recommend doing that first. The other thing that I've done and I've started to do with my courses is convert those two books to written text and I'll show you the prompts for that So here is the landscape photography book. So this is the prompt that I gave it for converting my course or it could be videos to written format and this was with GP T four, the content or the quality was higher. So these are closed captions from a video lesson in a course on landscape photography. You are a writer, converting these videos into a written book with professional and natural language. Any reference to the video video lesson or similar should be changed to references to the book chapter, et cetera that you are writing. This was something that I had to edit because it talked about the video when it converted it because in the course I'm always talking about like in this video, I'm gonna show you blah blah blah or whatever. Turn these captions into a chapter of this educational book, complete this task for the entire video. If there there are ever this should be ever but it knew ever references to photos that are being displayed on screen, make a note of insert photo here to remind the book editor that photo is being referenced in the book and needs to be added later on the video captions for this less and are and then I just simply took the captions that I downloaded from my course video and pasted them there and you can see. So here's like an example of the captions. It has all the numbers and stuff that come with the caption file, I just pasted it. Chad GP T knows that that's irrelevant. And then it turns chapter one, what makes a good landscape photo in landscape photography? There are several elements, blah, blah, blah. And it just kind of took what I've written, which is personalized and converted it to a written format. And then here you can see that it has those notes for photos where I'm on camera saying in this photo, you can see that the photographer used certain composition technique or, or whatever it is and that's important to have because if it's in the book, then it wouldn't make sense without the photo. And so I train chat EPT to tell to put that in the book. So I can easily see when I'm editing it where to add photos. I believe I added a little bit. Uh I changed that prompt a little bit later on. I said there may be times in the video that I'm referencing a photo that's visually displayed when this happens. Add a note and remind the book editor that a photo is being referenced in the book, include information about what that, what photo should be added. Because this is sort of next level instead of just like having a note, I wanted to know exactly what the photo was about so that my editor or myself, I could easily find it, right? Because that would be kind of hard to like just find a random photo. And here we have insert photo here. Example of Big C California insert photo here, example of Big B Bridge in different weather conditions. This blew my mind that it could know how to do that based off of what I was saying, I mean, it makes sense if I was hiring someone to try to convert my video to a book that they would be able to know, you know, listen and understand that I'm talking about a book about Bixby Bridge. I might have said something about that, but it condensed it and it adds that note and it made creating this book and editing it so much faster. So these are just ideas for how you can change the prompt. This is what we're talking about. When we call, we talk about prompt engineering, we can engineer the prompt to do exactly what we want from it. The simplest form is just simply asking, here's the chapter, write it out, but you can go even further changing the tone, giving more direction to make it turn into something truly unique. All right, thanks so much for watching. Basically what you need to do now is just go through all of your chapters and have chat JP T write it out. And then we're gonna take all the that content and we're going to start formatting it for our Kindle book in the next lesson.