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The AI Revolution

AI Book Writer: Pros and Cons for Self-Publishers

AI is here to stay. Here's what using an AI book writer means for self-publishers.

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Perhaps you’re on the fence about using an AI writing tool with creative projects. On one hand, AI writers can generate content quickly, helping you save time on drafting and editing. On the other hand, there are concerns about the quality and originality of the content produced by AI, as well as the potential loss of personal touch and creative expression involved in the writing process. These are all perfectly valid concerns, but in our experience, many self-publishers don’t realize there are hundreds of uses for AI that don’t involve passing over 100% of the process over to the robots.

In this article, we’ll delve deeper into the pros and cons of using an AI book writer so you can make an informed decision about whether this technology is the right fit for your self-publishing journey. We’ll also include some prompts you might consider testing for book titles, pen names or just make your writing journey smoother, so make sure to stick around to the end!

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What Are AI Book Writers?

AI book writers are tools or book writing software that use artificial intelligence or AI algorithms to generate content, make suggestions, and assist in the writing and manuscript process.

Some common features of these tools include:

Natural Language Processing: AI writing tools work by analyzing vast amounts of data and translate it into easy-to-understand human-like text in a variety of languages, voices, and tones.
Grammar and Style Improvements: AI tools can help detect and correct grammatical errors or make suggestions for clearer and more concise writing.
Semantic Analysis: By studying the connections between words and phrases, AI can generate more contextually relevant content.
Customer and Market Research: AI can crawl your competitor’s listings to see what readers like and don’t like about their books, giving you a better idea of how to differentiate yourself in the market.

Wanna know what Amazon REALLY thinks about AI? Read more!

Pros of Using AI Writing Software for Self-Publishing

First, we'll go over the advantages of using book writing tool.

Efficiency and Speed

With a lot of different AI writing tools at your disposal, writing and editing can be significantly streamlined, which are usually the longest parts of the publishing process. What used to take someone years under the traditional publishing model can now be done in just a few weeks with AI and self-publishing.

Here’s a list of just some of the other publishing tasks you can use to speed up the book writing process and refine your writing skills:

Brainstorming book topics
Organizing information
Editing and proofreading
Conducting customer and market research
Finding the right keywords for your book description
Coming up with a catchy pen name
Putting together an author bio
Writing ad copy
Improve character development
Overcome writer's block
Coming up with future book ideas to make a series or collection

Cost-Effectiveness

Another huge advantage of using AI to write a book for self-publishing is its cost-effectiveness. Traditional publishing often requires investments such as hiring editors, proofreaders, and marketing services, which can easily set you back for months or even years.

With AI, you can reduce or even eliminate some of these expenses and access:

Affordable drafting and editing services
Personalized marketing suggestions
Automated social media content or ad production

This can save you thousands of dollars that you can invest into other areas of your self-publishing business.

Data-Driven Writing Assistance

Across education, healthcare, and publishing, AI is gaining more and more abilities by the day.

As of writing this post, AI book writers can:

Develop extremely thorough book outlines for short and long books
Provide suggestions based on genre-specific trends
Identify the right vocabulary and slang for your intended audience
Predict which titles and subtitles might perform better based on customer psychology
And so much more!

Pro Tip: ChatGPT technically has a knowledge cut-off for free users, but they are slowly rolling out a plug-in that lets premium users connect it to the web. Even if you have a free account, the knowledge cutoff is still within the last couple of years, so the AI tool can analyze decades of information to help you make better business decisions.

Cons of Using AI for Self-Publishing

Here are some of the downsides of using AI in the self-publishing industry.

Lack of Originality and Creativity

The anti-AI crowd has been pretty vocal about its perceived disadvantages for all creative industries. One of the major concerns is the lack of originality and creativity in AI-generated content. Because AI learns from existing texts, it tends to produce derivative work that might already exist in some form. This can lead to less engaging and impersonal content that might limit the reader's interest in your book and/or accidentally produce plagiarized work.

Pro Tip: From what we’ve seen, plagiarism is pretty rare, but there are easy safeguards you can put in place for your business, like making heavy edits and running all your work through a plagiarism checker like Copyscape or Grammarly.

Ethical Considerations

Some people think using an AI writing assistant to produce a manuscript is completely unethical. To that, we encourage our students to be open-minded about the difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted content. Amazon differentiates between the two but allows both.

Books that are 100% created with AI at the click of a single button just aren’t that good (yet) and will more than likely produce a poor reader experience—so that’s what’s classified as AI-generated content. Then there’s AI-assisted content, which uses AI-powered tools as more of a copilot. There’s nothing wrong with bouncing ideas off of someone else or polishing your work. This is actually doing your readers a favor!

Pro Tip: There’s a big difference between taking shortcuts and running your business more efficiently.

Reputation

You might be wondering: Can readers distinguish between books written by artificial intelligence and those authored by humans?

The truth is that most AI detectors these days are even struggling to distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated text. Some dead giveaways that a text is 100% AI-generated include:

The same word or phrase being repeated an unnatural number of times
Seemingly unnecessary introduction and conclusion paragraphs sprinkled throughout a chapter
Tons of verbs or adjectives that just feel out of place
Long-winded descriptions of pretty basic things

At the end of the day, it boils down to the same thing we’ve said 100 times—readers will spot rushed content a mile away no matter who or what produced it.

Impact on the Publishing Industry

Changes in Traditional Publishing Roles

With the emergence of AI book writers, the traditional publishing model is becoming even more obsolete. Editors, proofreaders, and self-publishing companies are starting to offer the option between using AI or leaving it out of the manuscript process based on budget and scheduling needs. If you do decide to allow AI, they take measures to check the credibility and authenticity of any outputs generated by these tools.

Market Saturation Concerns

The popularity of AI book writers could lead to a surge in published material. More books in the market, however, may not necessarily equate to quality. Some concerns include:

Overcrowded marketplace: The ease of creating and publishing AI-generated books could result in an abundance of books with minimal value.
Decreased reader interest: With a myriad of books to choose from, readers may experience decision fatigue or a lowered interest in purchasing new books altogether (not likely based on our experience in the industry).

Here’s the thing: People will always be able to spot crappy content, whether it’s AI or human generated. If you put your all into producing the best possible book you can in your niche, an overcrowded market simply won’t matter. Your work WILL stand out for all the right reasons.

Legal Implications of Publishing a Book Written with AI Assistance

Some of you may be wondering, can I publish a book using just AI? Copyrighting 100% AI-generated material is definitely a legal gray area right now, but we would not recommend it, given all the reasons we stated earlier in this blog. As long as you edit AI-assisted content to add your personal touch and take regular precautions against plagiarism, you shouldn’t have any problems getting copyright protection for your work.

Practical Tips for Self-Publishers

Choosing the Right AI Tool

The AI market is exploding with new tools—literally thousands of them are available for free right now.

Here are the AI writing tools we generally recommend:

Chat GPT-3.5 and Chat GPT-4 are probably the most popular content tools available at $0/month and $20/month
Grammarly also has a free version and a premium version for proofreading, editing, and plagiarism detection
DALL-E is an image generator that’s built into the premium version of ChatGPT, but Midjourney is also decent

Some Useful AI Writer Prompts and Tips

As promised, here’s a list of specific prompts and prompting tips you can use with an AI writer to make the publishing process smoother:

AI Prompting Tips

There’s no shame if you’re new to the AI game. Here are some tips to help you get started with prompting:

Be Clear and Concise: Start with straightforward prompts. The clearer your request, the better the AI can generate relevant responses. For example, "Write an introduction for a blog post on sustainable living practices."

Specify the Tone: Indicate the desired tone of the content, such as formal, casual, humorous, or inspirational. This helps in aligning the output closer to your vision.

Request Examples: If you're looking for inspiration or ideas, ask the AI to provide examples. For example, "Give me three examples of catchy email subject lines for a book launch."

Iterate for Perfection: Don't settle for the first response. Refine your prompt based on the initial output or ask for variations to explore different angles or deeper insights.

Use Open-Ended Questions: Encourage creativity by asking open-ended questions. Instead of "List the benefits of meditation," try "What are some unexpected benefits of daily meditation?"

In the next section, we’ll equip you with three AI prompts you can start using today!

AI Prompt for Book Ideas

Prompt: Please niche down [TOPIC] into more specific sub-topics.

This one is pretty straightforward. You can follow up by asking ChatGPT for more ideas as many times as it takes to land one that captures your interest. Examples of sub-niches for gardening include gardening in small backyards, vegetable gardening, and gardening on a budget. You’re looking for the “Goldilocks” of topics here—not too broad, but not too specific—just right.

AI Prompt to Find a Good Pen Name

Prompt: I am a [insert age and gender] and best-selling author in [insert niche]. Generate a list of 10 author pen names that an audience made up of [insert demographic information for your audience] would enjoy.

You can then follow up with a request for more names as many times as you need before you land on a pen name you really like. From there, you’ll need to search for the name on Amazon and Google to make sure it isn’t taken.

AI Prompt for Book Titles

Prompt: Please review the following book title. Feedback to me (using H2 headers and bullet points with relevant emojis) if the title clearly defines the topic of the book and includes the desired outcomes for people in that niche. Please give specific examples of how I can improve it [BOOK TITLE]

This exact prompt is from our AIA student master sheet, which includes over a dozen time-tested and proven prompts for creating manuscripts that actually sell. We’ve taken years of self-publishing research and hands-on experience to create prompts for every single step of the publishing process, from idea generation to marketing.

Are AI Book Writers Good or Bad? The Verdict

One of the core values at Publishing.com is having a Great Freakin’ Attitude, so feeding into all of the fear and uncertainty surrounding AI (or any topic) isn’t really our thing. We’re also not in the business of making up other’s minds. You get to decide whether AI book writers are “good” or “bad,” but hopefully, we’ve presented enough evidence to bring you more clarity.

For people with limited time or a limited budget, AI can be life-changing because it gives you the power to work on your side hustle anytime you want from anywhere in the world. Even if you only have a few hours a day, you can fit in a solid brainstorming or editing session while your kiddos nap or first thing in the morning before anyone else wakes up. It’s like having 24/7 access to your very own personal assistant and business partner.

Full disclosure: We’ve been hard at work creating the AI manuscript copilot of the future. It’s called Publishing.ai, and it’s unlike any AI book writer out there. It’s not intended to replace humans or great freakin’ content, and although it's only open for students right now, we hope to share it with you all very soon!

Wanna Know What the Publishing Life Is Really Like?

Renee tried other publishing courses that wasted years of her life and never brought in a single dime. Then she joined AIA, and her first book started bringing in nearly $10k per month.

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Amber juggled a full-time job with her publishing business and still made $1k in a single month with a single book. If you ask her what she was most excited about, though, she’ll tell you how much it means to her to empower and uplift other women on their health journeys.

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A scary lung cancer diagnosis could have completely derailed Richard, but instead, he used it as fuel to craft the life he always wanted. That decision led to making over $3k/month in truly passive income.