Any journey book or movie gets me .. so I watched The Last Bus last evening. I was watching as it certainly ticks the journey genre that I love – but there was a surprise in it…yesterday was Anzac Day, a day to commemorate the Australian and New Zealand soldiers who load down their lives in World War 1. But it has become a chance to honour soldiers of all ilks and ages.

For starters, you can turn the text in your book into an Audiobook. I’ve covered this in a previous blog post and you can read all about how to convert your text into an audiobook here.

That said this post is going to look at how you can turn your words into a video. I will cover step by step all the things you need to do to create a video with your words in just 60 seconds.

Step 1 To Create a Video With Your Words – Generate a script

Firstly, you can use text that you already have written. It could be a piece you’ve already worked on or you can generate your own text using ChatGPT or Canvas AI content creator.

You could begin by putting prompts into ChatGPT or Canva unless you already have a topic in mind. For instance, you can start by naming the genre and what your central characters will be if it’s a fiction piece. Or if it’s non-fiction ask the AI to generate topic ideas around your selected idea.

You can build on this query to create an outline or draft and then build on it by asking the AI to generate more prompts.

For more about how to generate this kind of content, you can read up about it in my blog post on AI tools for authors. The next step is to convert this text into audio.
One important thing to keep in mind once you’ve generated the content from an AI tool is to use an AI detector to check how authentic your work is. It’s vital to make changes to the text it generates to make it sound more human and to give it your own voice. Remember AI is just a tool to give you ideas. The real writing comes from how you polish it up afterwards.

Step 2 To Create a Video With Your Words – Convert Text to Audio

Secondly, our next step would be to convert your text into audio. I used a very cool AI tool called Eleven Labs to convert my text into audio. You can check out the tool here and sign up for free.

Hold your horses! We are not finished. Here comes the most interesting part. We’re going to combine the audio we have with images. After all, it’s not a video until it’s visual right?

Hold your horses though, we’re not done. Here comes the most interesting part. We’re going to combine the audio we have with images. After all, it’s not a video until it’s visual right?

Step 3 To Create a Video With Your Words – Generate Images

To generate images, you can use this tool called Midjourney Bot. You can sign up to discord by creating an account and then visiting the Midjourney discord page to complete your sign-up.

On the Midjourney server, you can then create a newbies channel.
Now for the magic use the command /imagine and begin entering your prompt. You should try to be specific about the kind of image you are looking for and experiment with different prompts.

When you press enter, you’ll get a set of 4 options for your prompt. You can then upscale or create variations of these images and then save those images.

Step 4 To Create a Video With Your Words  – Merge

Now that you have all the elements you need to put together your video. You need to merge your text, audio, and image to create a video.
For this final part, you’re going to use an AI tool called D-ID.

Sign up for a free trial and let the magic begin. You can use the audio you generated from Eleven Labs and upload that to the generator.

Merge all the elements to generate your video, and you’re all set.

I’ve helped 10 other authors publish their books and become Amazon bestsellers, in addition to writing more than three best-selling books of my own.
This is for you if you are a writer and you want to have a book written in 2023. But I have a confession to make. Do you know it used to take me 10 days to plan a book? I used to make everyone who coached with me take 10 full days to write a book plan. Then I wondered why it was so hard to get them motivated again. However, enter the game-changing artificial intelligence and ChatGPT. Now I find that we can do 20% of the work of the book now in a very short time.

How Can You Use AI To Write Your Book In 24 hours?

To begin with, 80% of the work will be completed within 20% of the time using AI. So cancel those 10 days for planning. We can plan the entire book in a single day using ChatGPT tools, which I’ve discovered, take away all the fuss, bother and boring things to do with writing a book.

Additionally, if you have got writer’s block or want to write a book but you’re scared of all the work around it. Further, if you have ever written a book and then panicked at the amount of promotion and marketing you have to do, relax. Because now, all those boring jobs can be done by chat GPT. Leaving you and me free to write the purple prose we want to write. Write the good stuff with the perfect words our readers want to hear from us, not from an AI robot. But all those boring tasks? Let’s leave it to AI.

Are You Motivated To Write Your Book?

So if you are one of those people who’ve always wanted to write your own book and you are ready to commit, keep reading!
As a published best-selling author and coach, I’ve had 10 best-sellers last year, all from people who had never written a book before and thought they could never write a book in their life. They have now published authors, best-selling published authors, writing life-changing books. Some of those books really make me want to cry. They are so awesome. And you can do it too.

Create a Roadmap To Write Your Book in 24 hours

If you’ve been thinking of writing a book, then this is the year when you are going to be a best-selling author. The time to start is now. You’re in the right place. But first, we start with a plan. But if the thought of a plan makes you want to run away and hide or if all the promotional and marketing effort makes you want to run away and hide, don’t worry. It’s exactly the same thing. But now we have tools to help us. We have a writing assistant who can help us. We have our artificial intelligence to help us.
And stay tuned because I’m running an experiment now and I want to see whether I can give you the tools to do this in 24 hours. The full plan for your book, the outline, the targets, the promotion, the marketing material, everything so that not days, but at the end of the 24 hours, you will be ready with your book plan and first draft all on the path to writing a bestseller. Because remember, if you write a book without a plan, you are planning to fail. You must get that plan done.
Unfortunately, getting the plan done can be a major pain in the posterior.

Can You Take Up This 24-hour Challenge To Write Your Book?

If you are ready to join this experiment to write your book and devote 24 hours of commitment to writing that book. If you’re prepared to sit down and listen to me and use ChatGPT and do the work, you are going to have your book done. You will have your book plan & first draft complete in 24 hours. And that is going to make you an author in no time. So much closer to achieving your goal.

All you need to do is click the button to join this challenge. this is not a workshop where I give you the prompts or tools and make you sit by yourself and write with the robots. No, it doesn’t work that way. Book writing does not work that way. I am going to be with you all the way, coaching you, helping you in those 24 hours to get your book outlines, your book promotion plans, and everything you need to know about getting that book to a best seller in one single day. And I’m not superhuman, but I can help you in those 24 hours, so take the plunge and sign up today. 

If you’re as interested in AI experiments as I am, I’ve talked more about how you can use AI to help you write your book in another blog post. You can read more about it here.

I’ve been doing experiments with AI for a while now. I’ve done numerous meetups and sessions online about how AI can be a useful tool for writers. If you’re interested in learning more about ChatGPT, Canva, OpenAI, Quillbot and more join me in my other sessions. I am picking up on this discussion to talk about something really useful for you as an author. 

If you’ve been with me on one of my coaching sessions you’ll know exactly how to publish and go bestseller on Amazon. What you might not know is how you can use an AI tool from Amazon to set up audio for your book. 

It’s pretty magical to go from here to audio that can stream to someone who has never been to the Himalayas, or who has thought that their dreams were lost forever.

AI is not something that replaces the writing, it is really an enabler – we need to harness how to use it well.

How To Use AI to Create an Audiobook

It is the first step in my six steps to relaunch a book.

Because this is an experiment where I’m using AI voices from Amazon. 

More specifically, Amazon Polly. Polly is a cloud service that converts text into lifelike speech. As an author, it’s quick and easy for you to convert the text for your book into audio. 

Amazon Polly also supports multiple languages and uses a variety of realistic voices that can be adjusted to suit your audience. 

This is the quickest, and cheapest way to convert an existing book to an audio format. Fiction and business books do really well as audiobooks, travel books not so well – after all, if you are travelling wouldn’t you like to see the information?

Before you start you need your book content available to cut and paste – Generate the latest version of the book as an .rtf file. I would have preferred a text file, but that isn’t possible from the application I use to format my books.

A Step By Step Guide to Create an audiobook for free Using Amazon AI

1. Set up an AWS account with Amazon, with an S3 tier. Set up a bucket for your audio files.
2. Select Amazon Polly the AI audio application from Amazon.
   Select the voice you prefer, in a variety of languages – in English alone there are US, British, Australian and Indian. I recorded all four and asked my launch team which one they preferred.
3. Start recording by cutting and pasting into the Text to Speech box.
   Click Listen to listen back to uptown 3000 characters. Test this a few times.
   Use SSML switch to add some codes to indicate which words are Spanish, for example, or to add a longer break between sentences. Download to the S3 tier. If there are errors, fix them.
4. Download from S3 to your drive.
   You can listen to it here, and maybe repeat from step 2 if you aren’t happy.
   Rename the file to a sensible name.
5. Create your blog post/social media post, and link to the file on S3 or platform, such as Adilo.
6. Set up a podcast, or streaming service, such as Anchor, or soundcloud. Or create a page with the files as a bonus for your readers.

Your audio is now live! You have your book in audio content.

I followed the same process to create an audio out of my book Chasing Himalayan dreams.

Here’s a clip from when I joined Holly Warton’s podcast Into The Woods to talk about my book Chasing Himalayan Dreams.

I know everyone’s going crazy over ChatGPT, and if you don’t want to know about it, that’s okay. However, I’ve been having great fun playing with artificial intelligence and similar resources for nearly a year now. 

I’ve mainly been using it for art because I am a writer, not an artist. In my experience, I’ve been having a great time with it as an artist of words. When you can write good words- you can make great art. Now, this art can be used for many different things. I know there is a lot of controversy over its use. But there’s one thing we’re forgetting, we all use artificial intelligence all the time; when we make a google search, look for audible content, even scroll through social media, you name it. Sometimes, you don’t even know that you’re using artificial intelligence. So why don’t we use these? It’s just an app, and it’s not going to do you any harm.

An AI Story Writer Experiment

What’s more, earlier this month, we had a session on AI for Authors. It was an experiment using artificial intelligence for authors, covering all the kinds of things it can be used for. You can view a clip of that below. 

In the first place, one of the things I did during this session was to use it for content. I generated content for a non-fiction & fiction book and some art from artificially produced words. Now, obviously, I have no idea how you are going to use AI, but this is what I’m doing with it – trying to increase my productivity. It’s just like how, once upon a time, we used to handwrite books, right? Now we use a computer. Before that, we used typewriters. Does that mean we’ve lost our artistic licence and given up to the machines? No, the fact is you cannot win against machines. So this is not a fight against the machines but a race with the machines. 

A Simple AI Story Writer You Already Signed Up For

Even though I have used a lot of artificial intelligence apps, I’m signed up for quite a few of them, but I’m just going to talk about one, and you’ll be surprised which it is. It’s just Canva. 

Likewise everyone is talking about different AI story writers, and we have Canva, our old favourite. Obviously, canva is trying to be everything to everyone, and it’s got art and documentation. Now you can generate your words out of Canva. As promised, this isn’t a marketers pitch. I’m not trying to sell you anything because I’m not an expert. But certainly, if you want to write a book, come and talk to me. But for artificial intelligence, we’re just having fun here. 

Getting Started With Your AI Story Writer

Firstly, if you log into Canva, you’ll notice you can open a Design Visual doc. It starts off with some deep and meaningful quotes. What you need to do next is to click on your cursor and choose the function – Add magic. So if you double-click on magic, it becomes the prompt to get some content. 

Secondly, you can follow this guide based on our session to begin using this tool yourself. We started with ten plots for a children’s book on cute monsters and some of the plotlines we found were – 

As you can see, there are lots of plots here. I’m really quite amazed because while I could have probably thought of these plots, it might have taken me more than 2 seconds.

Next, we picked one of the plots and went on to ask for a prompt to start writing.

How to Get More From This AI Tool

Tip. You can use up to 200 words in your prompt. Not bad. However, if you look closely, it’s just suggested a random plot. It didn’t take the one we chose and was very generic. We made the request more specific, and voila, an entire plot line sat right there on Canva.
You can continue to ask the AI story writer to build on the plot by asking for more details and being more specific about the content you want.

Equally, we could have actually finished the story right then and done the whole thing. An author did just that, he wrote, published and illustrated a children’s book in 24 hours and put it up on Amazon. At first, it was popular, but he got a lot of backlash about it later.

Besides, you’re always going to get backlash from people who don’t understand. Even I got a bit of backlash when I put this up on a group somewhere. I put it on my page and invited people to come in while I did AI experiments. And someone said, oh, my God, I can’t believe we are so lazy now to do the writing. Another response said- what’s writing coming to if an AI story writer is going to do it? All I’m thinking is, hold on, are we going to go back to 16th-century Elizabeth in England and chastise Shakespeare for copying all his plots and stories? There’s nothing new under the sun. We’re just trying to use technology. So you’re going to get a few trolls about it. But, I’m still happy to write because, as we know, I think we’re a bit smarter than the AI, but it can give you this bulk of stuff to work with. 

Generating More Content From The AI Story Writer

Thirdly, in the outline above, it’s obvious the AI story writer has used the classic three-act or the five-step, which we have in every story quest; there is a good side, then there’s a danger, while the hero has to fight against it. This would have been enough for a children’s book, but it needed more emotion. Because so far, we only got a description without anything to grip us. Yes, there was evil, and the main character conquered it – end of the story. 

But that’s not what a good story is. It has to have some emotion. We entered more prompts to get some emotional content, and this was what we ended up with –

So we continued to pick elements and asked the AI story writer to expand on what kind of kingdom it was.

Tell us more about the ancient Dragon.

We had to continue to work this into the story. But still, that’s a pretty good start.

What I hadn’t figured out from this was; how should we talk more about the brave monster ready to defend the kingdom? We wrote to the AI story writer to describe the physical look of the brave monster.

So you can see, it’s doing much of the heavy lifting. We’ve already got 1000 words in the story, and you can take it where you want.

Do you know what it’s really doing? It’s taking the loneliness out of writing. Very often, writing is a very lonely job.

Canvas AI story writer can generate artwork for your fiction book!

Finally, you can use AI to generate art. So for this part, we used the Canva app’s text-to-image function. All you have to do is describe the image you want to see. You can choose between the different style options it has, like, a pattern, painting, or drawing. For inspiration, it gives you what kind of prompts you can feed in to get your artwork.

For instance, what you can do for the artwork you like is drag it and put it into your uploads. So you don’t lose it. And these images allow you to generate about 100 a day, and each prompt will give you four. With this you can create about 20 prompts.

At first, we got very general patterns and had to start narrowing them down by making more specific descriptions. Sometimes with AI, it helps give it exactly what you want. Or else you do nothing and type your search ‘a monster’, and the AI story writer does what it likes. So that’s the way to use AI.

How To Use an AI Story Writer For Your Non-fiction book.

In the same manner as before you generate new content for your non-fiction book. Firstly, decide on a genre or a topic of interest.

We experimented with – mental health in the post-pandemic age.
The result was an entire outline neatly broken into five concise sections that followed the problem-solution format.

Secondly, we then followed the same format and AI to build a non-fiction piece on mental health problems or the emergence of new mental health issues.
For this non-fiction book, we were being specific by giving it an outline. It then just gave us steps like an opening strategy, which was quite different from the fiction piece.

Another factor we also experimented with because why not?
Specifically, would it be possible for us to even bring in relevant references through an AI story writer?

Thirdly, we began with this prompt – tell me more about expert references to the causes of mental health problems.
At this point, it was thinking, and we had to change it to leave out some words because the AI couldn’t make any medical recommendations.

This is what we ended up with.

What we could then do was take one and break each of these up into more detail. And literally, you can write your whole non-fiction book here. I wouldn’t be publishing this on Amazon, but if you wanted to write a lead magnet, this would also help you.

Using Canvas AI to Generate Images For A Non-Fiction Book

Here’s where it got more interesting as we sought to create images using Canvas AI. We tried for photos of mental health patients. It started to get into a series of errors that prevented it from giving any health-related images.
So we tried a social setting of a group of people. The image results had some weird distorted faces.

We then looked for a diagrammatic image of a brain inside a head. In many mental health books, you get that kind of image of a brain.

Further, we also tried to look for an infographic about a worldwide pandemic to see what it would come up with. Although it did generate an image, the content on the infographic was incoherent and vague.

Additionally, we found out that the more searches you try, it won’t allow you to search for a boy, girl or child. You have to say, a young person or an abstract image of a nurse.

This was just a start and an introduction to how to use an AI story writer to improve your productivity as an author. It works for fiction and non-fiction content with varying results because the non-fiction had some restrictions related to the topic we chose. However, it is probably worthwhile investigating how the AI story writer generates content for other non-fiction topics.

If we had chosen to write a non-fiction book about cycling or bicycle races, we would probably have gotten some good pictures. I hope my experience has made you more open to using an AI story writer as a tool to write.