Authors and Artificial Intelligence Should Be Friends

Don’t be scared. Artificial intelligence isn’t here to replace authors. It’s on our side, really, and the best thing you can do as an author is tap into the power of AI to boost your career. How? That’s what we’re about to discuss.

What exactly is artificial intelligence in publishing?

One simple definition of AI is when computers or computer systems are “able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.” When we bring that definition into publishing, the tasks mentioned in the definition don’t exclusively relate to writing. In fact, the uses surrounding writing are more ubiquitous.

How should publishers use AI?

The number one way publishers should be using AI right now is with marketing. AI tools can automate processes and help direct promotional strategies for releases. For example, when promoting a title through Amazon, keywords are what largely determine the success of a campaign. AI tools can study the contents of a book that is ready to be promoted and come up with keywords that will drive discovery.

Taking that a step further, it’s possible for AI tools to generate keywords taken from potential consumers. It can scan reader reviews and public conversations - via social media, for example - and generate what is called user-centric keywords based on those scans.

Another use for artificial intelligence in publishing is recommendations. Netflix uses AI for recommendations and they estimate that they’ve saved about $1 billion because of this. Publishers can leverage AI to recommend similar books within their catalogue. If a reader liked this thriller, then here are others that fit that same vibe.

How authors should use AI

OK, enough about publishers. How can we authors use AI to our benefit? Let’s think about this: they’ve been trying to get AI to generate novels and that hasn’t really worked out. For whatever reason, the technology just can’t perform at any standard that would be acceptable in literature.

But that’s fiction. In the non-fiction world, AI tools have had more success. Let’s start small. First, so many of us despise social media. Or maybe we don’t despise social media, but we hate having to post x number of times a day or write blogs to engage with our audience. It’s time-consuming and not what excites us about writing.

AI today is capable of creating articles - readable, high-quality articles - in a matter of seconds. All you need to do is feed the AI tools content from your book and let it do its thing.

Now you have a full blog post on whatever topic you’re writing about. It’s up to you to take that content and repurpose it on your social media platforms. And since you don’t really need to think about the content, you just reduced the amount of time you’re spending tweeting or posting, which hopefully makes social media more bearable. You’re also engaging with your audience, which is necessary in this era of writing and being an author.

That’s one way you can use AI. The other way is a bit more grey. Let me explain. First, keep in mind that I’m still talking about non-fiction here. With that in mind, you can take the same process I described above and use it in reverse. That is, you can feed AI tools articles that you’ve written and it can pump out a full book. Where the grey part comes in is that how can anyone know or control whether or not you used articles you’ve written or articles written by someone else?

We can depend on people to be moral human beings, but you know how that goes. Plus I get a bit of an icky feeling when I think about AI writing a book for me. Maybe icky is too strong of a word; what I really feel is uncomfortable. I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but there’s something in my gut telling me that this isn’t a good idea.

But for those of you who are moral and have written several articles that you want to turn into a book, this is an option. The tricky thing is that these AI tools aren’t super accessible. There are some companies that already use similar AI. Forbes uses an AI content management system called Bertie. This tool scans trending topics in real-time and makes suggestions on what the writer can cover. The AI even gives headline and image suggestions.

AI tools are also capable of putting together personalized emails. For those of you with a newsletter or with hopes of starting one, this can also be helpful. Again, accessing these tools isn’t simple yet. They’re expensive and mostly used by large corporations or publishers.

But this is Writers Are Superstars, and our goal is to connect publishing with pop culture. AI is used in so many industries in helping to make work more efficient. It hasn’t been at the forefront of publishing yet, but we’re keeping you ahead of the curve.

What do you think about AI? Can you see yourself using any of these tools in the future?