AI Marketing Tips Every Author Should Know

AI has been in the mainstream for a while now, and we know a few things for certain. 

1. The sky hasn’t fallen. 
2. The world hasn’t flipped upside down.
3. The creative industries haven’t imploded in on themselves. 

Do we hear a few whispers in the crowd replying, “… not yet at least.”?

We also know that there’s this taboo mist around using it. Because using it means sacrificing your morals and dignity, right?

But there’s a fine line that separates you from the naysayers.

You find the line by asking, “Are you a user, or an abuser?”

Users see AI as a tool to assist them. An abuser sees it as an opportunity to cut corners to find cheap, short-lived success.

We’re here to provide guilt-free ways to use AI for good – not evil. We’re sharing tips that will save you time and money on marketing so you have more time to spend on writing your books. 

The robots are here to stay. But so are we. 

Where We Stand on AI in the Author Industry

To say there is a debate around AI usage in creative works would be an understatement. AI, in our opinion, should be a tool, not a replacement. AI can’t give you opinions – it will even confirm this if you ask.

And sometimes, the information it provides isn’t even correct. When you sign up for a platform like ChatGPT, it will caution you to fact-check its replies.

And does anyone remember the weird 6th fingers and 3rd hands in images produced by Midjourney? While they’ve largely been ironed out, some of these weird-looking fingers still don’t look ‘normal’.

Nonetheless, with the recent trends has come AI book writing software and people using AI images for book covers.

Enough can be said for jobs lost to machines that develop and package products, but where development occurs, progress is made. Shouldn’t AI just follow suit as with the other Technological revolutions?

It should do the nitty-gritty, manual labor, not replace creators, authors, and artists entirely. 

Art is a creative activity, not a menial activity that we need to take off people’s hands to give them time to do something else more meaningful.

So, yes, you can say we don’t believe AI should write books, or replace our world’s creators, entertainers, and artists.

If you’ve ever Googled “Can I use ChatGPT to write a book and sell it,” we just want to take a moment and say, “We’re not mad, just disappointed.”

BUT (there’s always a but).

There is a way AI can help you. When the world is moving forward, you can stick your head in the sand and throw a tantrum, or you can find a way to move with it in a way that’s comfortable for you. And most importantly, morally right for you.

The Truths About AI Marketing For Authors

Since its ‘inception,’ AI has lacked handrails – or in legal terms, laws. Like a child or teenager, it pushed boundaries to see how far we’d let it go and who would stop it. As the global collective of parents, we’ve let it rebel and that’s how we’ve gotten here.

If you search ‘AI book writer’ you’ll see the stuff of nightmares. Software designed to supposedly write as good as a human or better. ‘Because AI doesn’t have biases or limitations.’ 

Excuse us?

We’d argue that humanity’s downfalls and shortcomings make books more interesting to read. Even a book that you hate can raise countless discussions with friends.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re not here to talk about writing a book with AI. 

We’re here to discuss how to use it for your marketing because authors can use all the help they can get to sell their books.

But first, listen up.

We’re not lawyers, and we haven’t studied every court case or incident involving AI’s battle with artists and companies. What we’re going to say in this blog is based on our opinions. 

But there are some caveats for you to be aware of before you get going with AI marketing as an author. 

We’re calling this next part the caution section. Every truth we currently know about AI and its usage for authors, we’re discussing below.

We’re not holding punches.

AI laws change constantly

We’re watching laws around AI and guidelines change in real-time. So, before hopping on any bandwagon, keep up to date with how your usage can be impacted by laws.

Copyright laws and such may shift. If you’re using AI to generate permanent content, for example, a book cover, you may suddenly lose access to those generated materials. 

(Plus, book covers are art forms too. You’ll likely want a professional to take a look at that or to DIY with the help of Canva or Photoshop or an alternative like Gimp).

AI laws vary by country

As with any laws, they differ from country to country. What applies here, might not apply there.

So, be sure what you generate and use from AI is kosher in other countries too.

Ai is kind of a thief, depending on how you look at it

One of the many reasons people are upset over AI is because it was “trained” off of existing work out there without permission. 

It accessed libraries of data and studied them without telling anyone what it was up to.

Because that’s how machine learning, the smaller concept within AI, works. It learns from what’s out there and adjusts itself to give the correct information based on what you need from it. 

On the one hand, it sucks that it’s built on the hard work of many that didn’t give their consent to have their work studied to essentially replace them.

On the other hand, humans do the same thing in their own way. Almost every human creation ever conceived had at least some inspiration from somewhere else. It’s just much harder to know exactly what came from where with human thought.

Amazon wants you to explain your use of AI

When you’re publishing a book through Amazon KDP, you are required to disclose if you’ve used AI-generated content in your book through either images or text. They thankfully make the distinctions quite clear here.

If you don’t want to click off the blog, basically if you’ve used AI to come up with new ideas that you execute yourself or use AI to help refine or improve your own content, you have nothing to worry about.

With pure AI creations, you’re not the owner

As of right now, if you use copy or images generated by AI, per US law, there is no way to become the copyright holder of what is used. 

You’re better off using AI copy and images for impermanent places like Facebook ads where you’re using the content for short periods.

This doesn’t apply to works that used some AI in their creation but are still largely based on human intervention and creation. For example, book covers in which the artists used AI to create some elements, and then compiled and photoshopped different elements together to create an entirely new composition, could be copyrighted because the element of human authorship is present.

AI doesn’t have to steal creative jobs

If you’re feeling a twinge in your soul for using AI instead of hiring someone else to help you, then just hire someone!

Get yourself a social media manager who can use AI along with their skills to create posts faster. There are ways to use AI without it feeling like a soul-sucking activity. 

We’ll cover these ways further down in the next section.

Your readers will notice AI sooner or later

Whether it’s a weird shadow or 7 toes on your book cover, AI can’t create perfect book covers. And I’m sure you’ve seen long posts on social media repeating themselves or not saying anything of actual meaning. These probably come from AI bots.

You’ll soon be writing for the generation growing up with these AI tools and they’ll be able to easily tell when you’ve used it.

The dangers of using AI as an author

Think how lazy the world has gotten over the years. It’s powerful to have knowledge at your fingertips through a mobile phone but, how much of it is absorbed and kept in our minds?

And we’re not talking about reciting a funny meme, we mean genuine knowledge. 

The same can be applied to book marketing with AI. Relying on this tool too heavily for writing, and even marketing, can hurt your skill levels and improvement.

Using ChatGPT to skip a few steps in the writing process either slows your development as a writer or makes you lose touch with your foundations.

Hone your craft and use AI to assist you, not replace the crucial steps that make art, even Facebook images, enjoyable for others.

The risk of losing the joy of making new things

Speaking of enjoying your work…

We’re in the age of grind culture (or maybe that’s always been around). So, everything is about getting things done faster, better, and for the profit line. 

With the introduction of technology, the writing industry has followed in those footsteps. You’ll see phrases like, “Write your book in a week.”

Sounds great to pump out books quickly like that – but we have to ask the question: Where’s the fun in that?

Not to get too philosophical, but does ramping up productivity just for the sake of it, mean anything in the grand scheme of things if you’re not doing it for your happiness?

Yes, this blog is about making your marketing efforts easier, faster, and better, but that’s so that you can get to writing your book – the actual fun part of being an author. 

No author relishes the dreaded book blurb or tests countless Facebook creatives like they have no other job to do. And if you do relish those things, we love that for you!

As you leave this section and hop onto actually using AI for yourself, here’s our ultimate advice for those already keen…

Tread carefully when adopting AI for your benefit and watch that it doesn’t suck the joy out of what you’re using it for.

How You Can Use AI For Marketing As An Author (Without Feeling Guilty)

We think we said enough of what’s on our minds when it comes to using AI for books. The slate is clean and you know the dangers and the things to look out for.

Next up, we’re talking absolute guilt-free ways you can use AI to market your book, with a little added bit for how to use it in the other writing processes.

Note: We’ll be primarily using ChatGPT for examples, but you can check out Claude, which is another we can recommend. But these 2 aren’t focused on marketing type of copy specifically. They’re general and dynamic.

If you want to test out some others (caution they’re not all free like the 2 above), you can check out these marketing-focused AI copy generators: Jasper, Copy.ai, and SudoWrite.

Finding the words: AI Copywriting

Ask anyone, and they’ll confirm that book writing and copywriting for marketing purposes are 2 completely different skills. They overlap in some ways but they’re not the same at all.

And so many writers hate writing marketing copy. We’re going to show you how using ChatGPT or other AI systems can assist with book marketing.  

These tips will save you time and you’ll get good sales copy out of it.

Caution: How does AI affect writers 

A quick word before you jump into using AI for copywriting!

Because many are using these platforms, it’s likely what you ask for will have been generated and used by another author. 

AI may plagiarize and duplicate existing work, leaving you at risk of looking like a copycat – which is why humans are so important when it comes to using AI.

Your powers as a wordsmith will come in handy when using whatever the AI platforms regurgitate to create something that is still yours. 

Lastly, double-check the facts. AI is popular as a research tool, but it’s taking what it knows from the internet. 

And we all know you can’t trust everything you read online.

Writing book blurbs with AI

We once said in another blog on blurbs, “A book blurb has the power to confuse the reader or turn their interest into a sale.”

That’s a lot riding on something that’s about 200 words and sits on the back cover of your book. It can feel paralyzing to even get started. 

And that’s most of the problem when it comes to getting your blurb done: getting started.

Obviously, ChatGPT does not know your book as well as you do, but it can help you get going. Here’s an example of how you can use Artificial intelligence in writing your book blurb:

This is the prompt we used to get ChatGPT up to date with a story I’m sure you’ll find familiar:

And this is what ChatGPT provided in response:

We can all agree it doesn’t hold a candle to the actual blurb, but as you can see it draws many similarities. The keywords and the structure have a lot in common with the original. 

Using this you can see how your storyline fits into the examples the AI gave and work from there. After, if you still feel it’s lengthy, you can ask it to edit it down without losing the theme and concepts.

Top Tip #1: You can ask it to provide a few variations that start and end differently to get your juices flowing.

You can also use the same method to help you write an author bio! We writers are chatty, so it can be hard to sum ourselves up without going on and on…

So, give the AI your bio and ask it to refine it to something more concise that suits your author brand.

Getting the right ad copy

So, you’re thinking about doing some Facebook ads for your books, but coming up with copy for it seems like a lot of work – and you’re right, it is.

When it comes to doing ads, it’s the luck of the draw (or rather the algorithm and the users) that determines success. You don’t have all day to prepare the perfect primary text and headlines.

Here’s how we’d prompt a primary text using the blurb from Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places:

These are some of the options it gave:

None of these are particularly good on their own. But it gives you some ideas to work with that you can mash together and edit for something very engaging for potential readers. 

The layout of the text is definitely on the right track. Some of the lines are a little bland but there are a few that are actually worth using.

For example, we really like ‘Was He Guilty, or Is the Real Killer Still Free?’ and ‘What Really Happened to the Day Family?’ as potential headlines.

Top Tip #2: You can tell it what you like about its answer and ask it to give you some versions using that to narrow in on an idea that will work for you.

Your social media posts will never be dull

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut when posting on social media. You’re an author, not an influencer.

And influencers have a hard time coming up with ideas too! 

We know AI writing can be a bit boring and predictive on its own – making for some generic posts-  but we think it can work best when you’re asking it research-based questions to help inspire you.

This is what we asked:

ChatGPT was not short of ideas (there were 11 categories in total, but we’re just showing a snippet!):

Top Tip #3: AI has been around for longer than just the siege on our creative territory. There are AI platforms out there that can help you schedule your posts, potentially saving you hours of admin.

Get your author website copy

It can be hard coming up with copy to fit on each page of your author website (on top of actually designing one).

You can look at examples here of author websites, but you still might find yourself stuck on how to put your vision on the landing page.

Simply prompt your AI platform of choice to provide copy, page by page, for the sections you’d like to have on your website.

Newsletters & Blogs 

We highly suggest you avoid having newsletters or blogs written by AI. Fans won’t appreciate the lack of effort in a completely AI-written post and it probably won’t be anywhere near as good as what you could’ve written.

But AI can still help you get your newsletters and blogs done faster if you know what to ask for. They can help with:

• Coming up with subject lines and headings.
• Topics and ideas for new posts.
• Editing out grammar or spelling errors (Grammarly, anyone?).

For example, we asked the AI to help us out with a headline for this blog. It didn’t quite understand the 52 characters part because it gave us 52 options! Perhaps we could’ve phrased it better…

Here are the first 10 ideas it provided:

Refining the writing process

You can use the below tips to help with writing your book, but they work just as well with AI book marketing:

• No shame in brainstorming: Creativity can’t always flow, so ask the AI for ideas that you can play around with and make even better.
• Have it lend a hand in editing: It’s very easy to miss simple mistakes when you’re proofreading, and it’s time-consuming. You can cut some of the menial labor of fixing simple mistakes like tense or changing from POVs by asking ChatGPT to assist.
• Be a dictator: If you can’t get to a keyboard, or type fast enough to keep up with your brain, you can use AI platforms to dictate and it will type for you – a win for disabled authors too!

AI Book Marketing Imagery Made Easy

You’re experienced with the written word, so it’ll just take a bit of practice to get used to using AI for copy. But now you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone (unless you’re a designer as well as an author).

We’re primarily going to be talking about Midjourney in this section, but it’s no longer free as of July 2023. There are alternatives like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Leonardo.Ai, Dreamstudio, etc. 

You can also generate AI images with Adobe, Shutterstock, Getty, Alamy, etc. but they won’t be as good as what Midjourney can do.

Note: We’re not going to include any tips on creating book covers because copyright laws around using AI imagery for permanent marketing do not exist at the time of writing this blog.

AI character illustrations

Just like with all types of marketing, humans are drawn to humans. It gives us something to connect with. 

So, if you want to get potential readers and fans excited about your new release, you can hop to Midjourney and get some character illustrations. 

You can use these in the following places:

• Social media posts as images or videos
• Book trailers
• Book teasers 
• Newsletters
• On your website alongside character profiles, here’s an example.

Since we’re using Midjourney, we’re going to show you how you need to go about prompting. It’s not as simple as logging on and typing. Midjourney is used through Discord, so make sure to follow this sequence first: Set-up.

Once you’re done, you can open the server, type /imagine, and click on this option:

This is what it will look like for our character profile example:

And this is what Midjourney produced:

Select the image you want by clicking one of the numbers preceded by ‘U’ (U1 is top left, U2 is top right, and so on). You can also click on the buttons with ‘V’ on them to get variations of the option you like.

Keep in mind that you can change the size of the images by adding –ar 3:2 for an image with a greater width than height. 

We opened the image in a browser to get a better view of it, and this is what it looks like:

The top 2 are unusable as is. In the first one, she isn’t even holding the wand, and God only knows what she’s wielding in the top right image (along with a second wand if you missed it).

For now, we don’t plan on reasoning why the wand in the top left floats, so our favorite is bottom right. Her hair part might look like the Nile River, but the rest of it is pretty engaging. She looks like she means business.

Top Tip #4: You can use this like you would Pinterest! If you’re struggling for inspiration on a character’s appearance you can put a prompt into Midjourney and see what it comes up with. 

For example, in the image above, we clearly wanted a wand but a staff would be really cool to wield magic from right? 

AI Ads for authors 

We’ll let you in on a little secret when it comes to Facebook ads…the creative is the most important part! 

But it’s so difficult to get right. Anyone who’s done ads will tell you how much effort goes into testing creatives. It feels like a never-ending loop.

You, or your designer, don’t have the time to make new ad creatives every other day. It’s time-consuming, and it feels like you’re wasting perfectly fine creatives that you put so much effort into just because Facebook and its users don’t like them.

When you come over to the dark side and embrace AI marketing as an author, you can essentially use an AI platform to do unlimited creatives for testing.

Here’s the prompt we’ve chosen and the result (as you can see we left the aspect ratio out since Midjourney’s default fits Facebook ad creatives – a square):

We don’t like these so instead we made one with a 3:2 aspect ratio and found one we liked:

Pretty cool, right? 

We opened this in a new tab and copied the link. As you can see below we typed after the prompt — sref and pasted the link at the end. 

Here’s a close-up of the newest options Midjourney provided:

It’s almost too hard to pick! Although the bottom right looks a bit warped, we think it adds an urgency to the image, like their worlds are about to collide. 

Whichever one you pick, Facebook is not guaranteed to like it, so you can create a few variations and test them to your heart’s content.

To make sure readers know it’s not just some random social media post, plop a picture of your book in the corner or add a review quote at the bottom and you’re ready to go!

Top Tip #5: You can use freeflo to find styles to use for ‘– sref’ in your prompts. They have so many art styles to pick from that’ll help you get the style your readers would enjoy seeing on their timeline. 

A+ Content on Amazon made with AI

You can add images, videos, and customized text placement on your book’s Amazon page through your KDP to provide more details that could entice readers.

Here’s an example from The Lost Bookshop:

As you can see you don’t need to push the boat out and go crazy with creatives. 

You can create scenic visuals to add to your A+ content and use the AI tool in Photoshop to extend it to fill in the details of the image. This gives you space to add text inside the image. 

All you need is 3 lines that hint at the plot and the conflict (or reviews) and 3 images that fit it. Sounds simple enough, right?

Below is the prompt we used. We went with a wider ratio as the banners on Amazon look like the length of a phone sideways which is 1080×1920, also known as 16:9.

This is what Midjourney came up with:

As requested, the left-hand side has a lot of space so you can add text.

But if you want to do a longer banner like the example further above, as we suggested, you can get a smaller image and extend it using the AI Photoshop tool.

Top Tip #6: You can also use AI tools in Photoshop to extend your eBook cover to fit the size of a paperback cover for printing. 

Getting The Most Out of AI as an Author

Here are a few extra tips around research that are not only related to AI Marketing for authors but will help you on your way to publishing a book. 

Note: Many use ChatGPT just as they would Google to research. But you can get more specific unlike with Google.

1. Comparable authors

You can ask it to find authors in your genre that would be considered competition, so you can see what they’re up to in the space. 

Remember to check all the names because they could be either irrelevant or not real people.

2. Market information

Prompt it for reader profiles to see what type of people read your books. This can help you with marketing tactics as well as writing your book – you’ll learn more about their favorite tropes.

3. Specific data

You can query for market trends, genre trends, or any other data such as a list of bookstores you can contact to sell your books, etc.

And So…

We know we said these were guilt-free tips to use, but if you’re a creative person with friends in the industry, your heart can’t help but go out to the ambitious souls that have been affected by AI. 

But with every introduction of new technology, we all have to onboard it and stay with the times or we’ll get left behind. Use these tips with care so you can get back to the whole reason you’re a writer: to write stories!

Plus, we have one last way to save you some time with your book promotion…your author website! We take pride in our creative efforts to provide websites that represent the author perfectly. And we’d love to do the same for you!

Fill in this inquiry form, and we’ll see how we can take the load off your back so you can focus on what makes you happy.