The rise of AI-generated books is sparking concern among many. We all know the book market is huge, yet the speed at which new works are being added prompted Amazon to place a ‘3 books per day’ upload limit. I think we all agree that’s more than a little worrying.
It’s frustrating, too. Vying for a reader’s attention has always been challenging, but this new competition has some authors fearing it will soon become too hard (and expensive) to grab the reader’s attention. Dread rises in the form of a question: in this widening sea of books, what are my chances of being found and read?
It’s easy to give over to anger and depression when things change, especially when it feels unfair and unjust. But as authors have always done, we must use our emotions to fuel transformation.
The board has changed. It’s time to change with it.
We’ve weathered disruptions in the book industry before, and while AI is reshaping all industries, as people, one of our biggest strengths is our ability to adapt. Marketing will become more challenging for authors, but we can use our human edge to come out on top. It’s time for us to push ourselves and leverage our strengths, showing readers we have much more to offer them than machines.
Let’s talk about how we do it.
1. Write an amazing book.
Seems sort of obvious, right? Sure, but the real message here is that AI books will only get better in time, so we must continue widening the gap. Readers will have many choices on what to read so our books should be exceptional. To date, many authors have focused on volume to make a living, but moving forward, writing better books will become as important (if not more).
Amazing books in the age of AI should contain something else, too: emotion, insight, and depth rooted in human experience. This is something that machines can’t replicate (although they will try). As humans, we understand how isolating life can be when we experience certain things that stir deep emotions, struggles, insecurities, and vulnerabilities. Who better than us to create authentic characters that our readers can truly relate to and connect with? (Read: How to Leverage Humanity in Stories to Outshine AI.)
2. Embrace authenticity, building trust and connection.
AI isn’t only impacting the book industry–it’s everywhere, with readers being as exposed to it as us. AI curates searches at Google, chatbots claim the bottom right corner of every website. Meta AI bots piss everyone off with their uncanny ability to ignore hate speech but flag that cute picture of someone’s cat as harmful and inappropriate.
Fake social profiles. AI-generated images everywhere.
Every third ad is a new AI tool or service.
It’s the gold rush of AI, but guess what follows? Saturation. People get sick of all things manufactured, simulated, and fake. It’s early still, but a looming saturation is coming. Authors should be ready because, in an increasingly artificial world, people will crave one thing above all else: Authenticity. They will be drawn to human presences, voices, and interactions.
This is an incredible opportunity for authors. By recognizing the universal need for authenticity and connection, they can draw their potential readers in by being someone who shares their human side!
Go deeper with your interactions with readers. Think about points of common ground: What experiences do you and your readers share? Which of your thoughts and perceptions will resonate, making them feel seen and heard? How can you share anecdotes, ideas, sparks of humor, and bits of your personal life alongside discussions about your creative work? What topics and themes in your book suggest areas of common interest? Start some conversations.
It might take practice, but being open and authentic can turn readers into lifelong fans…of you. These relationships are incredible–knowing people are in our corner sustains us when life gets hard. Too, not only will devout readers look forward to the next book, but they’ll want others to discover your books, too.
3. Create a “clubhouse” for your readers.
Adding to the point above, I have always believed marketing is about relationships, not sales. We build strong relationships by caring about others, making them feel valued, and giving them something they need. When this is done right, sales follow naturally.
It’s great to use social media as a way to find potential readers and connect with them, but trying to be everywhere at once is overwhelming. People can become fatigued by social media too. This is why thinking about creating a meeting spot away from the noise of the online world can be a great way to forge meaningful bonds with readers.
Your “clubhouse” can be anything that works for you: an online community or group, a personal newsletter or Substack, a private forum attached to your site, etc. Whatever your clubhouse looks like, don’t bombard folks with promotion. These people aren’t dollar signs and trust me, AI will be targeting them everywhere, trying to sell, sell, sell. So be different. Focus on the relationship: share content they’ll like, ask and answer questions. If you’re communicating through a newsletter, be the person they are always happy to hear from! Your clubhouse should make people feel seen, cared about, and valued.
4. Think we, not me.
As the fight over a reader’s attention heats up even further, we may think we need to isolate ourselves from other authors because they are our competition. Not so. Human authors are our allies.
No matter how well you write or how big your audience is, you only have a sliver of the potential reading audience. Authors with similar books also have loyal readers, and many are different from your own. Collaborating with authors who write similar, high-quality books can be a win for you both as you’ll each reach new people.
Collaboration is about more than sharing audiences—it’s about creating a sense of camaraderie. Readers will notice and appreciate authors who prioritize relationships over sales pitches. Too, every author has unique experiences, ideas, knowledge, and connections. Joining forces with other authors and sharing what you each know means less trial and error.
5. Educate yourself and watch for scams.
Whenever there’s a disruption, people look for opportunities to monetize whatever has changed. Part of thriving as an author will be staying informed and watching for profiteers selling “easy solutions.”
Self-publishing created a ramp-up in vanity presses, predatory promotional and editing services, and low-skill freelancers looking to bleed authors of their cash. This era of AI will be the same.
If you need AI solutions for marketing, research before investing in courses, ad services, or tools. Look to trusted industry leaders like Jane Friedman, David Gaughran, or the Alliance of Independent Authors for guidance. Don’t fall for pressure tactics, FOMO, or fear-based marketing. And remember, if someone is selling something that seems too good to be true, it probably is.
One area to be especially cautious of is Ads. As the book market becomes increasingly huge, pay-to-play platforms (Meta, Amazon, etc.) are the real winners as people run ads (or more ads) to gain visibility. Likely we’ll see a rise in ‘Ad experts’ pitching their company to run your ads or use their AI tools and platform solutions. Some may be a good investment. Others will drain your pockets. Investigate and talk to other authors. Make sure the ROI is clear.
6. Decide how (and if) you’ll use AI as an author.
AI is a threat and a tool. Creatives (and folks in other industries who had their content scraped without content) are rightfully upset about AI. But it’s here to stay so we will all need to eventually decide if (and how) we’ll use it. This is a moral question and a practical one.
You may decide that while you’re morally opposed to using it to write, you use AI solutions to help you with other tasks–researching, marketing, time management, whatever. Or you are a firm no. But whether you use it or not, it’s important to understand how others are incorporating it, and the impacts this may have on our business.
The Key to Thriving:
Using Your Humanity
AI may be here to stay, but so are authors. We can’t control AI’s disruption over our industry, only how we respond. By focusing on what makes us uniquely human, we can create stories that resonate far more deeply than AI-generated books. Best of all, by simply being ourselves, we can forge genuine connections with readers and fulfill a universal longing for authenticity—an ironic consequence of the rise of AI.
Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.
I’m curious, Angela, about your plans for incorporating AI functionality into the tools you offer. I see enormous potential for writers to benefit from having a powerful ‘copilot’ as they build their story bibles, develop character backstories, and refine their beat sheets. There are tools out there, like Sudowrite, that serve a similar purpose, but I believe that with your established databases and templates, AI could really help writers like me connect and integrate the vast amounts of content, making it easier to develop and make sense of our ideas, perhaps more effectively than others can. I would love to hear your thoughts and any plans you may have regarding this!
Thanks for asking! Becca and I are looking at how to incorporate AI in an ethical way. We agree it can be useful and would be especially helpful with our tools but again, we need to make sure we do it the right way.
It is a big problem, Angela. Largely because I don’t think a lot of readers care. They just want a story that entertains them. Look at how successful some badly written books have done–becoming best sellers.
We need to train readers! (Probably like training cats.)
Great information and recommendations, Angela. The volume is hard to comprehend. Amazon is placing a ‘3 books per day’ upload limit? Yikes!
Is there a way an author can legally prevent AI from using the author’s material to educate the bot? I thought I saw this somewhere.
Kay, there is no legislation around this, and unfortunately, it’s not often clear what constitutes a copyright breach. For instance, we know ChatGPT has used our books to train their models, but because the AI output is stated differently than our original content, and because they’re adding other information to it, there’s an argument that it has been transformed from the original so it’s not a breach of our copyright.
One thing we’ve done is add a clause to the copyright page of each of our books that states that our content cannot be used to train AI models without our consent. You can find that clause here: https://authorsguild.org/news/practical-tips-for-authors-to-protect-against-ai-use-ai-copyright-notice-and-web-crawlers/
As a tool, AI is useful; for research, for example, and I even used it one time to brainstorm an idea for a scene. But writers and music guilds should get a law that prohibit the use of AI to “write” a whole song or book or a play. You can write the book and have AI correct grammar or style or even ask it to suggest changes or alternatives, so you can give a more polished manuscript to the editor and discuss the changes suggested by the AI. But never have it to write a whole book. As I see it, that’s cheating. And, as for visual arts, those images never should be permitted to get to the level of a human-created work or a photograph and always should be stated clearly that they’re not human-made and to be sold and bought by a fraction of a human-made artwork, the same as reproductions. The legislation is always two steps behind science; in this matter, science fiction has been showing us what would happen when AI goes unchecked, and it’s time to legislate accordingly. But, those in power are into AI, so…
Agree, legislation is really needed. We need clear framework around fair use and people should have to opt in to being scraped, not be forced to opt out.
The one thing to remember though is that even using it to improve your sentences to clarify what you are writing or to use it for research and brainstorm, someone’s work was taken to train AI to have those capabilities. I’m not saying people shouldn’t use AI – everyone needs to make their own decisions, just clarifying that technically there is no use of it that if free from an ethical conversation.
Is there anything explicit that tells a reader a book was written using AI? As a reader, I would want to avoid those books and as a writer, I would want to be able to convey to potential readers that my book was written without using AI.
Hi, Rebecca. Any messaging around this is purely voluntary at this point. But certain organizations are working toward and sharing about practices that authors can use. Angela and I have been looking into Created by Humans, an organization that is working on licensing arrangements so authors can control how (if) their works are being used by AI. They also have come up with a symbol they’re encouraging people to add to their books as a sign that it was written by humans. Again, it’s nothing official (not like a copyright symbol or a trademark), but it’s one way you can signal to readers that your works are written by a real person. If you scroll to the bottom of this page (https://www.createdbyhumans.ai/manifesto), you’ll see a place to download the image.
The Author’s Guild is also talking about a way their members can certify their works as “Human Authored.” https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/07/authors-guild-human-authored-label-ai/
Lastly, other authors are adding clauses to this effect to their copyright pages. As an author, you have that option, and as a reader, you can check that page to see if the author has said anything.
Hi Rebecca,
Right now the Author’s Guild is working on a Human Authored designation that can be added to the cover of a book and this will tell your readers it is not AI-generated. https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/07/authors-guild-human-authored-label-ai/
Whether it will be recognized/carry weight beyond the reader knowing it is human authored that we will have to see. Right now Amazon forces a person to clarify whether a book uses AI (they have parameters for what this means). I think one we have clear legislation around the use of AI we’ll see the commercial side of things respond to protect themselves legally.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this subject. Enlighting.
Thanks for stopping in, Carol 🙂
I always enjoy reading your thought provoking musings. Thank you.
Thanks, Mike. I think we all will have to find a way forward, and as always, it’s about putting readers first that lights the way. 🙂