The AI RevolutionAI in Publishing: Transforming How Books Are Written, Edited, and Marketed
Scroll down for a free AI training hosted by one of our co-founders, Rasmus Mikkelsen!
AI is one of those topics that gets thrown around a lot and twisted by news articles and headlines. But AI isn't so scary when you realize it's been around longer than the Internet. It's also the reason many industries like farming and factory work are monumentally safer for humans these days. In fact, artificial intelligence is one of the fastest-growing markets in the entire world. For publishing, that means writing, editing, and marketing books like a pro in half the time, thanks to AI, without having to rely on traditional publishing houses (or anyone else, for that matter).
This blog post covers how AI is making self-publishing even more accessible to complete newbies, and it also shares some mind-blowing statistics about just where the future of AI and publishing is headed. (Bet you can't guess how much the industry is expected to be valued at within the next decade).
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Overall, there are five ways generative AI is changing the publishing industry:
Every business takes an investment of time, effort, and funds. When we're first starting out, most of us have to sacrifice our time and effort because the funds aren't there.
It's like trying to ride a bicycle uphill. We have to push and work so hard, knowing that eventually, we'll build up enough energy that we can stop pedaling for a little while and just steer (until the next hill). AI is like adding a motor, GPS, and all the bells and whistles to that bike.
With AI on your side, you still have to steer your business in the right direction and make the hard decisions, but you can get where you want to go much, much faster, and with much, much less energy.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Grammarly already have a dozen uses for publishers, but here are just a few:
The problem is that there are so many different AI tools on the market, and often, each one has its own subscription fees. Publishing.com is trying to change that.
For the past year, our team of engineers has been hard at work cooking up a first-of-its-kind AI publishing tool specifically designed for self-publishers. While it can't do everything on its own yet, it comes pretty dang close. We have SO much planned.
In this free training, Rasmus Mikkelsen (one of our co-founders) reveals the first public preview of Publishing.ai and demonstrates just how insanely useful AI-powered tools already are.
The first step of the publishing process is landing an idea and bringing the bones of your manuscript to life. Here's how AI tools can help!
First things first, natural language processing sounds a whole lot more complex than it actually is. It basically means that instead of thinking in binary code with 1's and 0's, computers can now "think" and "act" a lot more like a human brain using the words we naturally communicate with.
You don't have to have any coding experience whatsoever to interact with large language models like ChatGPT. You can just have a casual conversation and type in requests that you'd ask a colleague. The biggest difference is that while virtual assistants and all of us humans get tired, have to take breaks, etc., machines that use artificial intelligence have unlimited energy day or night.
Some of the most popular LLMs on the market right now:
You can always edit "bad" writing, but you can't edit a blank page.
AI tools like Publishing.ai can already generate full chapters of written text for all kinds of genres, from nonfiction books to historical fiction (though certain tools are better for one genre over another). See for yourself why we're considered the best AI book writing software.
Some popular automated writing tools:
Non-fiction books are stronger with evidence and facts to back up your claims, which makes sense, right?
Doing this research might have taken the average self-publisher weeks or even months in a pre-ChatGPT world. Now, you can generate a list of facts and sources in less than 5 minutes.
Of course, the caveat here is that you'll still have to fact-check everything, but that's still way faster than tracking down everything from scratch.
Even Pearson (yes, the school textbook Pearson) is using AI-generated content to help students learn more. There are unprecedented opportunities for learning and teaching, and even though AI has already been around for way more than a decade, we're really just at the beginning of seeing what it can do.
It's not uncommon to go through multiple rounds of revisions, whether you take on the writing and editing yourself or hire a ghostwriter for help. AI tools can help with that, too!
These days, AI-driven writing tools can help you during pretty much any stage of your publishing process. Like Rasmus mentioned in the video, Grammarly is pretty much spell-checking on steroids. Tools like this can strengthen the quality of your work and catch errors as well as suggest alternative phrases or words you might like instead. And the less time you spend on editing and proofreading, the more time you have to be creative and make personalized content.
Other AI-driven editing systems include:
Some AI-driven tools can also be put to work, making sure your manuscript is consistent and accurate during the final polishing stages.
This might include detecting inconsistencies in capitalization, hyphenation, and formatting or providing suggestions on word choice or phrasing based on context (which is especially useful if English isn't your first language). You can also double-check that your writing conforms to a particular style guide (MLA, APA, Chicago) or that books in a series are formatted the same way.
Lastly, AI-based tools can help verify the authenticity and validity of the information in your content. For instance, they can automatically cross-reference claims or data points within your document against a verified database or source to add credibility to your work and massively save time on manual fact-checking.
Some popular consistency and accuracy checkers include:
Marketing isn't everyone's favorite thing, but it's necessary to connect with new readers and get more eyeballs on your work. AI technologies can make it a lot less painful!
As humans, we can only really hyperfocus on one thing at a time. AI, on the other hand, can use neural networks to talk with other computers and analyze millions of pieces of content in literal seconds. Think about how powerful that is, especially for understanding your readers better.
With AI's advanced data analysis capabilities, you can identify the preferences and interests of your specific target audience and create more effective marketing campaigns that position your books in front of the right readers.
Some common AI-powered targeting strategies include:
Once the readers are engaged, you can use AI's predictive analytics to anticipate market shifts and keep optimizing your marketing efforts. This is especially useful if you're publishing on a budget and really need to make sure every dollar counts.
Some key reader analytics you can track with AI include:
Pro Tip: When you publish with Amazon, you get instant access to your KDP dashboard, which collects all kind of sales and royalty data for each of your works for free!
A lot of marketing fundamentals can be traced back to one of the OG direct marketers, Dan Kennedy. He talks about crafting the right USP (unique selling proposition) to reach the right people at the right time. That's exactly what your book has to do to sell well.
Instead of relying on traditional channels and methods for book distribution, AI enables dynamic content distribution, tailoring the delivery based on reader preferences. This means your books can reach the right audience at the right time and in the right format.
Here are some ways AI enables dynamic content distribution:
Some of the debate surrounding AI in publishing has to do with the legalities and ethics of it all, which is completely understandable.
Here's an overview:
Generative AI works by mixing and matching millions upon millions of bits and pieces of the content it's trained on, which means it may occasionally produce similar work. That's obviously a pretty big concern among many publishers and authors in the industry. The thing is, this problem isn't just related to AI. You could easily have the same problem working with a ghostwriter (and many publishers have also experienced that).
But at the end of the day, originality only really becomes a real problem if you're relying solely on AI to do all your reading, writing, researching, and thinking. It doesn't matter what industry you're in, and you don't need a degree to know that that's probably not the best idea.
Human creators who use AI as a copilot have the biggest advantage here because they can analyze vast amounts of existing content, spot market gaps, and make data-driven decisions for their publishing business without wasting their time or energy on busy work. This makes fact-checking and editing 1000% easier to fit into even the most hectic schedule.
AI can't be inherently good or bad—it's simply a tool.
How the battle between 100% AI-generated content and copyright ends is as good a guess as anyone's right now, but AI certainly isn't going anywhere.
Not when Forbes has found that:
That's also why we constantly try to hammer the difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted content.
Let's talk about the pros and cons of incorporating AI into the creative process:
AI is opening doors for more and more people looking for a change.
If you're looking to learn directly from the leading AI experts of the world, these are some upcoming events that might be handy:
Yup! You can absolutely publish a book written by AI with just a few caveats.
First, certain platforms like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing require self-publishers to declare whether their content is AI-generated or AI-assisted for research purposes.
Second, artificial intelligence runs on the "GIGO principle." In other words, "garbage in, garbage out." If the models are trained on poor data or given poor prompts, they're doomed to produce poor outputs. At the same time, humans aren't immune from producing poor content, either.
Book publishing will always be about doing right by the readers and giving them both what they want and what they need, no matter how you go about the content creation process. If you decide to use AI, there should still be a human review and quality check every single step of the way.
The AI Publishing Academy has everything you need to know about book publishing (yes, everything) neatly packaged into bite-sized self-paced modules and video walkthroughs.
Get rid of all the guesswork and learn how new publishers produce recurring income from the royalty business model with just a laptop and a free Amazon account.
Quick Disclaimer: It WILL take work. We can show you exactly how to find profitable ideas hiding in plain sight and turn them into a fully polished manuscript. We can even reveal all the best Amazon ad secrets from an expert who has made over $500,000 from his books alone. What we can't do is actually publish the book for you. That's on you! If you're willing to swap the Netflix and couch time for the next season of your life, knowing it'll pay off in the future, we might just be the right match!
Nicolas and Marie talk about meshing the publishing life with married life and how they manage:
Irenne talks about juggling two kids, a business, and publishing in a language that wasn't native to her:
Savera, the "Book Review Queen," gives the publishing rundown and all her best advice for the newbies:
Integrating AI into the publishing process might initially require some investment in software, but even the subscriptions often give you the option of going month-to-month, and you can cancel your plan at any time. In general, most tools will set you back between $9.99-$30/month, which is easily offset by all the other benefits:
Our AIA community has collectively said goodbye to...
Instead, our students are...
Human authors and publishers + AI can be a really beautiful thing.
Stop by our free webinar to see how it all works!
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