This is a real ebook, title page, contents, and it was written with a free AI. No paid plan, no special software. In this video, I’ll write one with you start to finish. It works with ChatGpt, Gemini, or Claude, whichever one you already use. And not the way most tutorials do it, with one giant prompt and a copy and paste. One chapter at a time with a check for repeated points, a check for madeup facts, and a check for the phrases that make a book sound like a robot wrote it. You’ll see every step, including the ones most tutorials skip. And at the end, I’ll show you three places to sell it, and what each one takes from every sale. Quick bit of context if you’re new to this. An ebook is just a book you sell as a file, usually a PDF. Someone pays, downloads it, and reads it on their phone or laptop. And ChatGpt, Gemini, and Claude are AI assistants. ChatGpt is made by OpenAI, Gemini by Google, and Claude by a company called Anthropic. The free version of any of them is enough for this. Here’s the whole route in one breath. Six stages. First, a topic someone would actually pay for. Then a short brief that tells the AI how the book should sound. Then the outline, then the chapters, one at a time, then the checks, and finally turning it into a PDF and picking where to sell it. What you need is a free account with one of those three, a Google account for Google Docs, and a few hours spread over a couple of days. So, why not just type, “Write me an ebook about this,” and be done. I’ve watched a lot of those tutorials and in my opinion, the books come out generic. The same point turns up in three chapters and nobody in the video checks a single fact. There’s a practical problem, too. Free plans have usage limits. When you hit one, you wait before you can carry on. And Claude’s own help pages say it plainly. Longer conversations use more of your limit. So, one enormous chat that writes a whole book is the fastest way to hit the wall halfway through chapter 5. The fix is simple. Give every chapter its own fresh chat. And give the AI a short brief it can read every time, so the book still sounds like one book. All three have a feature for exactly that. I’ll show you each one in a minute. Stage one, the topic. The most common mistake here is a topic that’s far too big. How to make money online isn’t a book. It’s a library. A topic that sells is narrow and it promises a result. So, I’m going to ask the AI to be honest with me about mine. My topic is a beginner’s guide to getting your first affiliate sale with zero followers. An affiliate link is a special link that pays you a commission when someone buys through it. So, I’ll paste in this prompt. I will give all these prompts in the description below. It asks whether the topic is narrow enough and to turn it into one promise. And here’s what it came back with. One line starting after reading this, you’ll be able to. If it still sounds vague, ask it to try again or narrow the topic yourself. It’s worth getting this line right. That promise matters. Every chapter has to move the reader towards it. Stage two, the brief. This is a short note that says who the reader is, the promise, roughly how long the book is, how it should sound, and a list of phrases the AI must never use. There’s one more rule in here that does a lot of work. If the AI isn’t sure about a fact, it has to write the word check in brackets after it. That gives me a trail to follow later. Now, where it goes depends on your AI. All three are free. In Claude, it’s a project. In Chat GPT, it’s also called a project. And in Gemini, it’s called a gem. Each one is a home for one piece of work. You add the brief once, and every chat inside it can read it. I’m using Claude here. So, I’ll make a new project and add the brief to its knowledge.
Stage three, the outline. Inside the project, I’ll start a chat and paste the outline prompt. It asks for seven chapters. Each one gets a title, one sentence on what the reader can do after it, and a word count. And it sets three rules. No two chapters cover the same ground. Chapter 1 gets the reader to a small first action, and the last chapter tells them what to do next. So, look at this. Seven chapters, each with its own job. Now, read it like a buyer would. Do any two chapters sound like they’d say the same thing? Merge them. Is a chapter in the wrong order? Move it. Is a title dull? Rename it. This is the cheapest place to fix the book. Moving a chapter now takes 10 seconds. Moving it after it’s written takes an afternoon. Once I’m happy, I’ll add the final outline to the project, too, next to the brief. Stage four, the chapters. This is where the book actually gets written. And here’s the habit that makes this work on a free plan. Every chapter gets a brand new chat inside the project or inside the gem if you’re on Gemini. So, I’ll start a new chat and paste the chapter prompt. It says which chapter to write, how long, and to follow the brief and the outline. It also tells the AI to skip the chatter. No, here’s your chapter at the top. No, let me know if you’d like changes at the bottom, just the chapter so I can copy it straight across. And then it writes. Now, before I copy anything, I read it. Two quick checks. Is it roughly the length I asked for? And does it sound like the brief or like a press release? If it’s way off on either, don’t patch it by hand. Tell the AI what’s wrong in one line and ask for the chapter again. That’s usually faster. Now, the step most people miss. Before I leave that chat, I ask for a short summary of the chapter, four lines, the main points, and any examples it used. Why? Because the next chapter is written in a fresh chat. It hasn’t seen chapter 1. Without a summary, it will happily explain the same idea again with the same example. So, I paste that summary into a separate Google Doc, chapter summaries, and then I update the project with it, so every new chat can read what’s already been covered. On Gemini, there’s a nice shortcut here. If you add that Google Doc to your gem from Google Drive, Gemini’s help page says changes to the file show up in the gem. So, you just keep the doc up to date. That’s the whole trick. The outline says where the book is going. The summaries say where it’s already been. It’s the difference between seven chapters and one book. From here, it’s a loop, new chat, chapter prompt, read it, copy it across, ask for the summary, update the summaries. The chapter prompt for chapter 2 onwards has one extra line. It tells the AI to read the summaries first and not to repeat anything already covered. And this is what that buys you. When a later chapter needs an idea from earlier on, it points back to it in a line instead of explaining it all over again. If you do spot a repeat, it’s usually because a summary was too vague. Make that summary more specific and ask for the chapter again. Now, at some point on a free plan, you’ll probably hit the limit. The AI tells you, and you have to wait before you carry on. The good news is nothing gets lost. The brief, the outline, and the summaries all live in the project. So, when the limit resets, I open a new chat and carry on from the next chapter. Stage five, the checks. And this is the one I’d never sell a book without. AI writes facts with exactly the same confidence, whether they’re true or not. A price, a rule, a percentage, they all sound right. So, for each chapter, I paste it into a fresh chat with this prompt. It asks for a list of every claim a reader could check. Numbers, prices, rules, names, and how sure the AI is about each one. It doesn’t rewrite anything. It just gives me a list. Then I check the ones that matter myself on the real source, not by asking the AI again. So this one, let me open the official page and see if it’s right. If it is, it stays. If it isn’t, I fix the sentence. And if I can’t find a source at all, the sentence goes. And remember those check tags from the brief. I searched the book for them, too. Everyone gets checked or the sentence goes. The second check is quicker. The phrases that give AI away. You’ve seen them in today’s fast-paced world. Let’s delve into unlock your potential. Nobody talks like that. And readers notice. The brief already told the AI not to use them, but some slip through anyway. So, I keep a short list in the paste file and I search the whole book for each one with controll and F. And there’s one. The counter at the top shows how many times it turns up. For each one, I either delete the phrase or I paste that paragraph back into the AI with a short rewrite prompt. It says, “Keep every fact, cut the filler, same length or shorter.” And I read the first line of every chapter out loud. If three chapters open the same way, I change two of them. Stage six, turning it into a book. The simplest route costs nothing. In Google Docs, I add a title page,
make each chapter title a heading, and start each chapter on a new page. Here you can add images and illustrations to make things easier for your readers. Then Google Docs can build the contents page for me from those headings.
And when it’s done, I download it as a PDF, open it, and check the page numbers in the contents match the real pages. Claude can also make a Word file or a PDF for you on its free plan. Just know that making files uses more of your usage limit than a normal chat. Now, if you want it to look like a designed book with a proper cover and layouts, there’s a tool called Designer that turns a document into an ebook. It’s a onetime price, $27 when I checked. Last stage, where to sell it? I looked at three places and checked their fees on the 7th of October. PayHip has a free plan. It takes 5% of each sale and PayPal or Stripe, whichever handles the payment, takes its own fee on top. Gumroad has no monthly fee either. It takes 10% plus 50 cents per sale and 30% if a buyer finds you through Gumroad’s own marketplace. The upside is that it handles sales tax for you and Amazon’s Kindle store. One rule worth knowing, if AI wrote the text, Amazon wants you to say so when you publish, even if you edited it heavily afterwards. If you only used AI to brainstorm or tidy up your own writing, you don’t have to. So, which one? If you want the smaller cut of the first two, PayHip’s free plan. If you want sales tax handled for you worldwide, Gumroad. And if you want Amazon’s shoppers, the Kindle store with that one box ticked honestly. Now, all that copying between chats, the brief, the summaries, the checks, it works, but it’s the slow part. So, I made a tool that does that part for you. It’s called Ebooksmith. It works with the AI you already use, Free Chat, GPT, Gemini, or Claude. For each chapter, it hands you a prompt that already carries the outline and a summary of every chapter written so far. You paste the reply back, and it checks the length and keeps the summary for the next one. You can also add images, links, etc., and export your document as PDF, doc, or text file. Then it goes through the whole book, the robot phrases, the points you’ve made twice, the facts you still need to check, and it lays it out as a proper PDF with a contents page that has real page numbers. It opens in your browser like an app. Nothing to install, and it works offline. The links in the description. So, that’s the whole route. A topic with one clear promise. A brief the AI can always see an outline you fix before writing. chapters in fresh chats with a running summary, a fact check on the real source, a search for the robot phrases, and a PDF from Google Docs. None of it needs a paid plan. It does need a few hours and a bit of copying between chats, and writing the book is only half the job. Getting it in front of people who want it is the other half. That’s a big topic of its own. Every prompt from this video is in the description. They work in ChatGpt, Gemini, or Claude. Swap in your topic, your reader, and your promise, and you can run the same steps today. If this was useful, subscribe. There’s more like this coming. Seven chapters, seven fresh chats, one book.