The AI Writing Trend No One Is Talking About

Why would you write a book when you can make a hundred times more money writing a long form AI prompt? Nobody is talking about this AI trend and I think it is a tidal wave hiding in plain sight. If you write nonfiction, content doesn't matter. If you're an author, you want to be an author, or you're just someone who writes content on the Internet. The old model was to sell access to your thoughts, inside stories and ideas in the form of a book. And the price point for a book has historically been $30 or less, right? Depending on hardcover, paperback. But now with AI, there's a completely use case for that book that you've just written or the book that you want to write. And this has raised a really interesting question for me as both a writer and an author. I could write a book, 300 pages. I could sell it for 15 to $20. I would guess with my size audience, if I self published it, that book would maybe make me like 100 grand in the first year. That sounds amazing until you start to think through. I could write the exact same book. Every single word is the same. The but I could sell it as a long form training prompt. And all of a sudden that book doesn't have a price ceiling of $30. I could charge $300 for it. I might even be able to charge $3,000 for it, depending on the information, the problem it solves for the person who's reading it. Or I could take that exact same book and I could wrap a SaaS tool around it and instead of selling a $30 book once, I could sell access to the information in the book, which is what powers the AI wrapper and platform for $30 a month. So it's a fundamentally different business model. The point is, it's actually the same information. A book and a long form training prompt are the same thing. And in the age of AI, you can now monetize long form text based content in new and exponentially more valuable ways. Now, every time I come up with an idea for a nonfiction book, I can't help but ask myself the question, why would I sell this as a book when I could make 100 times more money selling it as a long form prompt? Which is what I want to jam on today. Okay, first of all, why books have always been training prompts for human beings and why that information is better leveraged inside of AI? Second, how proficient nonfiction writers have built one of the most valuable skills in the age of AI they just aren't monetizing it effectively. And third, why I Believe once nonfiction writers and authors start to see their craft through this lens, they are going to write fewer and fewer nonfiction books because the opportunity cost is going to be too great. They're going to recognize that they're leaving too much money on the table. Again, nobody is talking about this AI trend. And I think it is going to dramatically change the way nonfiction writers monetize their knowledge. So let's riff on each of these points. What is a nonfiction book? Well, the reason I say that nonfiction books have always been long form training prompts for human beings is because, you know, what is the goal of reading a nonfiction book? Well, the measure for success of reading a nonfiction book is either entertainment. So that was fun. That was interesting. That told me something I didn't know. I always think of like the book Freakin Freakonomics falls in this category, right? If you've ever read the book Freakonomics, it's all these interesting stats and just reflections on society. Nonfiction book. You read it, you're like, oh, those are a bunch of really interesting things. I didn't know. They're fun dinner party facts. But you don't really do anything different after reading that book, right? It's knowledge, it's interesting, but it's mostly entertainment. Malcolm Gladwell books are very similar, right? You read the Tipping Point, you're like, that's interesting, but. But it doesn't really change your behavior in any way. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a certain type of nonfiction book. The other type of nonfiction book is knowledge. It's very how to. And the measure for success is that you, the reader, you now know the right way to do something, which in theory means it changes your behavior. So if that is the goal of a nonfiction book, AI is just leverage. And AI is leveraged specifically through the repetition of tasks. So it's worth considering the outcomes of these two different paths, right? If I write a book. If you write a book, that book will achieve its measure for success. That nonfiction book, not with 100% of readers, right? With a very small percentage of readers. Because first you write the book, you explain how to do something, you hope that it changes people's behavior. But few people are going to read that book, right? It's not going to be everyone on planet Earth. It's going to be the people in your ecosystem. So a few people read that book and even fewer people finish the book and even fewer people implement the knowledge from the book and then successfully change their behavior. But if you write the same book and that Book trains AI with so much context that it successfully generates a result over and over and over again. Then you achieve the measure for success more objectively across a wider number of people, right? Because when a human being reads a book, a book is really just a training prompt for your brain. You read something, you learn it, you see the world differently, or you adopt some new methodology or way of doing something and the ultimate result is you hope that it successfully changes behavior. But human beings are fickle. Just because you tell them the answer doesn't mean they're going to go do it. Most of the time you have to hear something 10 times, 100 times, a thousand times before you change the behavior. Simplify and think about it for a second. AI objectively accomplishes the measure for success more often and more reliably. The problem, and the continuous problem with AI is that yes, it can achieve that if you train it correctly, which is no different than a human being. But when you train AI correctly, it is able to generate the result more objectively more often. And so it's interesting to think about, right? The prompt version of your book will lead to a greater share of positive outcomes than the book version of your book, right? Ten people read your book. Only one person out of every ten successfully implements the knowledge you helped. One out of ten people change their behavior. The prompt version of your book, let's say it's wrapped in a SaaS wrapper and it acts as a long form prompt. 10 people use the SaaS wrapper. Maybe 4 people out of every 10 successfully generate the result. Behaviors changed because AI is helping them achieve that outcome objectively more often. So you actually help more people, which you know. If that's true and your goal is to help as many people as possible with your nonfiction writing, it's worth considering that the book version might not be the most helpful version anymore. And I think this is one of those things that you have to really sit with this for a second because it requires you to see the world in a completely different way. And I've found I've been writing on the Internet for 15 years now, maybe more. My entire life, all I've wanted to ever do is write and be a writer. And I love literature and I love the idea of being a writer. But at the same time, you have to look at the ways that the world is changing. And fundamentally that means letting go of your expectations of what it means to be a writer, especially with nonfiction work. A lot of the best selling nonfiction books, Thinking Fast and Slow is a great example. They're based on data, they're based on studies, they're based on topics where the author has spent 10 years digging into a specific domain and really crystallizing their thoughts and creating frameworks and. Right. It's very detailed thinking. And I think the same way that people romanticize becoming a fiction writer and associating it with someone like Hemingway, you know, it's like you go off to another country and you're in the jungle and you are inspired and you write this amazing short story. Right. People do that with nonfiction as well. And nonfiction, they sort of idolize as this person is. Oh, they're this industry leader, and they're so ahead of their time, and they spend all this time thinking and, you know, they have their cabin in the woods and they go away and they write their perfect book. And you have to recognize that that might not be the best version of your knowledge anymore. Not only is it not the most monetizable, but it might not also be the most helpful. When you really sit there, it's like you have to separate the ego desire of. I want to be seen as this fancy schmancy author. And what is the real desire that you have in the world? What is the goal that you're trying to accomplish? Helping people has nothing to do with you. It's like you have some other goal. And so I think this is one of those things that requires some time to sit with. And I think that a lot of writers are dramatically underestimating what this is going to do to the landscape. Which leads to the second point. I think the vast majority of nonfiction writers and authors don't realize that they have built one of the most valuable skills in the age of AI they just aren't leveraging and monetizing it the right way. Important context here is the nonfiction author's career path. Most people don't know what business they're actually in. They don't get what game they're really playing. So a little crash course here for you. Nonfiction authors don't make very much money off of their books. The typical advance for a nonfiction book is between 20 grand and maybe 100 grand. Okay. And that advance is spread across two to four years. So you're not talking about a $5 million advance here. Okay. And when you see a nonfiction author get a seven figure advance, it is always based on either celebrity or audience. So either it's, you know, Matthew McConaughey writing about his life. Nonfiction. Okay. Seven figure advance, sure. Or it's Ryan Holiday. Half a billion views on his stoicism content every year, every couple of months. I don't know what his stats are, but has a massive distribution engine. Right. He gets a seven figure advance, but even that, if you've got $1 million advance spread across three or four years. Right. It sounds like a lot of money, but you have to remember that then they don't get a royalty until that advance is paid out. And the royalty on a typical book, if you go with the traditional deal, is between 10 to 15%. So oftentimes you're talking about a lump sum payment. Maybe it's a couple hundred grand per year over three years. Then you get a 10% royalty on the back end of that, and that's if you sell enough copies to recoup your advance. And so my point in explaining all of this is that the vast majority of nonfiction authors are not making crazy amounts of money, not even like semi crazy amounts of money off of their books. Their books are not. The money makers are. All right? And this is epitomized by all of the ghostwriting companies that have come out. I've been part of this space too, so I know it well. But all of the ghostwriting companies that come out that help people write books and ghostwrite their books for these industry leaders and how do they phrase it? They phrase it as the book. Your book is your new business card. So you have to understand that nonfiction books, where all the money is, is not in the books themselves. Okay? The game isn't about selling books when it comes to nonfiction. The game. And the reason that so many people, especially like industry leaders or people who want to build personal brands or be seen as an industry leader, the reason they write books is to leverage them for other opportunities. And those other opportunities are almost always more lucrative. And the big two are speaking or consulting. So you write a book about an industry or a niche, and then you get speaking gigs on the back of it, or then companies reach out to you because they want you to consult for them on the back of it. Right. You look at all the big nonfiction authors. James Clear. Yeah. He wrote Atomic Habits. Total lottery ticket. You're not going to recreate that. But even still, what does he do? He speaks. And he does consulting. Ryan Holiday, in addition to his books. What does he do? Speaking and consulting? Mel Robbins. What does she do? Yeah, she has books that sell a ton of speaking and consulting. That's actually the business model that you're in. And 1% of 1% of nonfiction authors, then, yeah, they make some money from their books or they get a big advance once every four years or something like that. Right? But that is very different than the world of fiction. For example, the world of fiction. You've got James Patterson, who's written 150 novels, right? John Grisham, 100 novels. Fiction is more about volume because you are monetizing the library of books, nonfiction, that is, you're not in the same business. You're in the business of writing a book in an industry, in a niche and then laddering it up to more lucrative opportunities. Now, here's what's interesting. This is how it's been in nonfiction for the past, I mean, at least 20 years, you know, I mean, definitely before you could go all the way back to the days of Napoleon Hill. The book is the entry point for other opportunities like speaking, consulting, advising, come work with my business, et cetera. With AI though, you have a whole new career path emerging and all sorts of new business models emerging for nonfiction authors. Because if you take your long form book and you have to realize that your long form book is really text based insights and findings and stories and examples that make there's no reason why that can't all be treated as a long form prompt. When I sit down to write AI prompts, the way I write an AI prompt is really no different than the way that I write a book or a book chapter. So you have to start looking at your book or your books or the content that you create. Nonfiction content as training data. Now what are all the ways that you can monetize that training data? Well, like I mentioned earlier, you could take a book, you could take 300 pages long form prompt, you could build a whole micro SaaS tool around that. The prompt is actually the IP. That's what's so interesting about all these like ChatGPT wrappers and things like that. If everyone is leveraging the big AI models, the first differentiator that everyone talks about is, well, it's all about the wrapper. The wrapper being the front end platform, the user interface. And yes, that can be a differentiator, right? Instead of having someone interact with ChatGPT directly, you can make a lot of those decisions for the person. Reduce the decisions down into a simple platform that you interact with. Couple buttons, these generate these outputs, right? And so the wrapper, the UI is a differentiator. But I think the real IP and this is what like the opportunity that so many people are, are missing right now is yes, you have a wrapper, but inside of it is a 300 page book. And that Book is a long form prompt that gives very specific context to the AI model that is powering the wrapper, that is the true ip. Anyone can copy a front end design. It's very difficult to look at a front end design and go, I'm going to recreate it. Wait, why aren't I getting the same output? The reason you're not getting the same output or as quality as output is because the models have different context, the models have different training data. And if one model has a 300 page book that hasn't been published anywhere else, and that book lives inside that model and gives very specific context to that micro SaaS platform, the output of that micro SaaS platform, aka the final product, is going to be dramatically better than anyone else who copies just the front end design. They're completely different things. And so you have to start looking at the book that you write as massively valuable ip. And so you don't just have this model where you write a nonfiction book, you sell it on Amazon or you take a trad deal and it goes into bookstores, whatever, and then you sell a couple thousand, 10,000, 100,000 copies and you ladder it up to speaking and consulting. That's great, you can do that. But I mean, why would you not just take the same book and get a designer to wrap it in a micro SaaS platform and then instead of selling 20 or $30 books, you have a platform that leverages your book and you charge 20 or $30 a month. You just completely changed the business model of selling books. You're not selling one off books, you're selling subscription and access to the information inside of the book that yields some sort of output. You could do the same thing for B2B. I look at all of these big companies that want to leverage AI. What is the single biggest bottleneck? The single biggest bottleneck, especially at large B2B companies, is not the ability to build front end or even backend systems. They all have massive teams of developers and designers and all of the talent they need. The fundamental problem, the core bottleneck, is not the building of the tool, it's not the front end design, it's the ip. It's the thinking. The thinking is always the highest leverage thing, right? So if you're salesforce and then Malcolm Gladwell comes along and Malcolm Gladwell's like, I've spent the past 10, for whatever reason, I don't know why he would do this, but you get the point. He's like, I spent the past 10 years being obsessed with sales I've done all these interviews with all of these like industry leaders and I've extracted all of their most valuable frameworks and I've distilled them down and like examples and context and explanation and all. And I wrote a 300 page book. Everything you could possibly need to know about this specific sales framework. You could sell that as a book and he might sell 100,000 copies. Or it's worth asking the question, what would happen if he went to a company like Salesforce and said, or I won't publish it as a book and I will sell it to you as unique ip? How much does Salesforce buy that for? If you're a multi billion dollar company all of a sudden buying a book for a couple million dollars, $10 million if it successfully solves a repeatable problem, and there's costs and ROI associated with that, there is no reason I can see a world where a billion dollar company buys a book as a long form training prompt, aka IP for $10 million. And what's so fascinating about that is all of a sudden you go, so wait, that means that there's more than just the big five publishers in the world. You don't just have to write a book and get it bought by Penguin Random House or HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and they're going to pay you a fraction of that. They're going to be like, sure, we'll buy your book for 100 grand and we'll give you a 15% royalty. You change the context of that conversation and you go to a massive technology company and you're like, I'm not going to publish this commercially and I'm going to sell this to you individually as ip And I can see a world where very smart nonfiction writers and authors start to realize that the most lucrative way of monetizing their way of thinking and their insights and their research is actually not in books anymore. And this has a lot of really interesting implications. And I think it's going to be one of those things where once writers start to see the world this way, they're not going to unsee it the same way that I have as of recently. You know, every day I come up with a different, oh, that would be a great book to write. And in the past year, I've come up with a dozen different nonfiction book ideas. And every time I've started to outline one of them and just put some ideas down on paper, you know, seeing how much potential does this have, more and more I ask myself, why would I write this as a book, because it's not the most lucrative way to monetize that knowledge, that information. What would this look like if I turned all of my thinking here into a really long form prompt and I got a designer to build a ChatGPT wrapper around it? What would this look like if I wrote this out and I bundled it with a low ticket product? So I give some education on how to use it and I train people on how to use this prompt, But I've distilled all the frameworks for you. All you have to do is copy paste this prompt into a chatgpt model or Claude or Gemini, and you'll get similar outputs. Because I'm giving you the training data now. I'm not selling a $30 book. I'm selling a $350 text and video course with an incredibly valuable asset inside of it. I could do that with a high ticket group coaching program. Hey, I'll train you on all these skills. And by the way, I will show you how to automate all of them. And I'm not going to just show you how to automate them with AI, but I'm actually giving you the training data for each individual thing you're trying to automate. It costs ten grand. The more entrepreneurial you're willing to be as a writer, the more other skills you build as a writer, the more money you will make. If you want to just be a writer, that's fine. But just know you're going to continue to operate in a legacy system. And you can't look at other writers who have chosen to adopt other tangential skills and go, why aren't I unlocking the same outcomes? Why aren't I making the same amount of money? Because you chose not to. You chose to only be a writer. And so I think this is going to lead to some really interesting shifts more broadly in the publishing landscape. Okay, so third, and lastly, here's what I think is going to happen. All of these other business models that are built on AI are exponentially more lucrative than the legacy nonfiction book publishing business model. All right, so just play out what happens as more nonfiction authors start to realize this. I think less smart people are going to write books. They just will, because they're going to start to realize the opportunity cost compared to what was possible five years ago, even 10 years ago. The barrier to entry has come down already by 90%. And so if you're still sitting there going, it'd be really hard for me to build a ChatGPT wrapper around a 300 page book, aka long form prompt. Like, first of all, it is way easier today than it was five years ago. And I guarantee you it'll be even easier and more accessible five years from now. So the barrier to entry is just going to keep going down. And so I think more and more nonfiction authors, but also just writers, digital writers, people who create nonfiction content on the Internet, are going to start to embrace these new business models, which means I think there's really going to be three types of people who continue to write nonfiction books. Bottom of the barrel, you have AI spammers. So these are people. There's so many tools out now and coming out that help people do this, where it's really just based on Amazon SEO. So these tools, they will look inside a gazillion different subcategories on Amazon. They will look for pockets where there's search volume for specific keywords or key phrases, but not any books or very many books that deliver on that search volume. And then they'll use AI and go, oh, like a bunch of people are searching how to buy my first rental property in Arkansas. Great, let's capitalize on that search volume. AI helped me write a 200 page book about that. I don't care about quality. I'm just trying to capitalize on existing demand and search volume. Pump out a book that is happening every second of every day on Amazon right now. And so many AI books are flooding the market just trying to capitalize on a little bit of individual search volume. And because you can use AI to write these mediocre books, it doesn't matter if each individual book is only making you like a couple hundred bucks a month. You can churn out hundreds of these books each month, and all of a sudden you're generating serious revenue. So you have the AI spammers. And I think that's only going to continue. And whatever it is, what it is, the second group of people is just going to be uneducated nonfiction authors. Okay, so this is going to be the group of people who don't embrace or don't want to embrace AI or these new business models. They just want to keep operating in the legacy system. They don't want to let go of the old dream of what it means to be a quote unquote professional writer. And as a result, they are going to earn a fraction of what their knowledge is worth. And that's just how it's going to be. They're going to fight it, they're going to resist it, they're going to purposefully Remain uneducated, and then they're simultaneously going to complain about how it's so hard for them to make a living as a writer. And I've watched this same trend exist in a lot of different forms over the past decade. And this is going to be the most accelerated version of that same fundamental decision. It's people who embrace new technology and people who don't. You could see the same thing happen in the late 2000s, early 2010s when Amazon self publishing platform was really picking up and you had all these like very mediocre but entrepreneurial people and entrepreneurial writers start self publishing a lot of content on Amazon and they started earning way more than more professional writers with more status that had taken traditional deals. It was the same thing. It was just people embracing the new technology versus the people who chose to not embrace it. And so this is just going to be a more accelerated version of that. And then the third group of people who I think will continue to write nonfiction books as they have been, will be already rich industry leaders. So someone like Ray Dalio might continue to write books because he's already made all his money building a multi billion dollar hedge fund. Right. So I could see these types of people continuing to write legacy nonfiction books for status, for reach, perceived value, building their personal brand, giving back. Right. Like I get, I get it. Everybody else and anyone with an ounce of entrepreneurial spirit is going to start to realize that writing nonfiction books yields pennies on the dollar. And they will instead focus on writing 300 page long form prompts and monetizing their knowledge in all of these new ways. And I'll be honest, I do not really know the impact that's going to have on the broader world. I don't think any of us know what this new technology is going to do across every sector. The only thing I do know is that it's happening. And I'm always very aware of when I notice my own thought patterns start to change. And I have noticed a massive shift over the past year or two where I've been coming up with nonfiction book ideas for a decade, you know, and I've written ten different nonfiction books. And I've always wanted like, I always enamored with that and I always wanted to, and I always thought that was so cool. And I love writing nonfiction. And more and more I'm getting to a place where I'm having a harder time rationalizing writing my next nonfiction book and my next nonfiction book because I can see that the model underperforms by such A dramatic amount that it's like I can't stomach investing 300 hours into writing a book and selling it for $20 when I know I could instead sell it for 10 times that, 100 times that, just in a different business model. And I think what's really accelerated, this is AI aside, what's really accelerated this is also building and selling digital products. Because a low ticket or even a high ticket digital product, text and video course, maybe you add on some coaching or a community element, right? But really this idea of selling information on the Internet, the same thing is also true there. It's like, why would you spend all this time writing this nonfiction content, explaining how to do something and then charging $20 for it, when all you would have to do is take the exact same content, literally change zero words, but record some videos of you giving additional context and talking over it. And you could charge $300 instead of $30. Same thing with paid newsletters. A paid newsletter is really just a book that never ends. So why would you write a standalone book that gets, especially with nonfiction, probably gets outdated two, three, five years later. Most nonfiction books, especially how to books, are out, have a very short shelf life. Five years or less. Why would you write something that has a short shelf life and you can only sell for 20 or $30? There's a. There's a perceived price ceiling and it's a standalone. People buy a book once, they typically don't buy it twice. And if they do, it's because they gifted it for a friend, right? You could take the exact same content and instead drip it out infinitely around a topic in a paid newsletter, and now you can charge $20 a month. Completely different business model. So as I've embraced more of these new business models and I've monetized my nonfiction knowledge in these different ways, all roads for me are leading to a place of why would you write a nonfiction book? And I think that is a really interesting question to sit with because it almost is accelerating the broader problem that I've always seen in publishing, which is if you have a. In nonfiction, if you have a big audience, you've built yourself as a creator, a digital writer, a YouTuber, even an industry leader who's built an audience or email list or someone, you will almost always make more money self publishing. And I tell this to everyone. And yet the vast majority of people, very smart, very business savvy people still take the traditional deal and they take it because they want the perceived sale status. It's not about money. It's About I want to be chosen by a publisher. I want people to think that I'm a big deal. And the AI trend here is going to take that problem and accelerate it to a degree that I think people aren't really aware of yet. Because right now, if you had self published it, maybe you'd make five times more money or ten times more money than the traditional deal. But if you were to not even publish it as a book, but instead publish it as training data or a long form prompt inside of a micro SaaS tool or inside of a B2B consulting relationship or something like that, you might make a hundred times or a thousand times or 10,000 times more money. And so at what point do all of these industry leaders and all of these people who have insights, nonfiction insights, what is the tipping point at which the opportunity cost becomes so great that they start to go even with the perceived status of being chosen by a publisher, I just can't rationalize it. Publishers willing to give me $100,000 advance, but I could treat this as a training prompt and I could monetize it over here and I could make $10 million. And that's the big question that I'm continuing to sit with is what is the point at which all of these really smart people start to realize that the status isn't worth the opportunity cost of the money that they're giving up? And like I said, some people are never going to ask the question. Some people are never going to embrace it. Some people are going to purposefully remain uneducated. They're going to cling to the legacy, their idea of being a writer. Oh my gosh, mom, check this out. I got a publishing deal, right? Some people are just never going to get there. But I think a lot of people will. And as more and more smart people embrace these new business models and stop thinking of their insights as just books, but actually long form training prompts, there's a lot of knock on effects to that. That's. That's less smart people writing books. Implications for the world. That's less smart people writing books AKA fewer available products to buy from traditional publishers. Interesting, right? That's more differentiated SAS tools. That's more ip. Like there's, there's just so many implications to that. And so I really just wanted to make this video and share this because I think the age of AI is changing things so quickly that it's not necessarily about giving answers right now. It's about asking the right questions. And so my goal here isn't to tell you, you know, here's the. Here's the answer. My goal is to tell you these are questions that I am currently wrestling with. And I can see the ways that wrestling with these questions is already changing the way that I start to make decisions and make decisions about how I want to deploy my time as a writer and how I want to monetize my insights and my knowledge as a writer. And so I encourage you to sit with these questions, too. And if you're sitting there thinking, you know, oh, I want to write a book, especially a nonfiction book, I think we've officially entered the beginning of an age where the first question you should ask yourself is, does it have to be a book?