Many authors consider using AI to be ‘cheating’, and, at the other end of the spectrum, people are using AI to write books from end to end.
Traditional publishing houses don’t like AI and will require you to sign a statement that says AI did not write any part of your book. Amazon has a similar requirement for books listed, you must declare if AI has written any part of your book, even if that’s two paragraphs in chapter 8!
So does that mean that you can’t use AI in your book writing process?
In reality, you should not ask AI to write your book, because you look your voice and authenticity, but it has many other advantages to offer that are legitimate.
Get organised
Tell it what you’re trying to do and it will give you guidance.
You’ll find it a great way to help you to plan your book’s structure and arrange the content in a way that works well for your reader.
This is where AI can be invaluable in getting your chapters sorted by subject and generating ideas for what to include in each chapter. It’s not writing the book, but helping you to structure it.
Get interviewed
Effectively you use AI as your coach. Coaches are good at asking questions and so is AI, providing you give it the right brief.
If you have some ideas for a chapter, but you feel it’s missing something, ask AI to interview you on the subject and you’ll find that you’ll start generating material you may not have thought about. And you’re doing the writing, not AI, it’s just providing the catalyst.
Get reviewed
When you’ve written your first draft, upload it into your AI and ask it to provide feedback and suggestions. This can highlight where there is something missing or something is hard to understand for the reader.
It’s probably better to do this on a chapter by chapter basis, rather than uploading the whole book. And focus on feedback and suggestions, don’t ask it to actually edit your book. While AI is improving all the time, I’ve seen some examples of where AI ‘editing’ has resulted in an overabundance of adjectives and a lot of unnecessarily flowery language.
AI isn’t a cop out
As with anything you ask AI to help with, the secret of success is in the brief. You need to spend the time creating this, so the AI has as much information as possible. This may mean you end up writing a full page of instructions first, but the outcome will certainly be better than just a simple one liner.
AI is your assistant, not your replacement!
