AI for Authors, Not Your Mother's Bot

Tools for authors that will free up more time for you to do the writing

Welcome to your nightmare?

Starting this with a quick note about how thrilled I am that I’ll be able to share the book launch for Florida Girls on Fox News’ “Tampa Bay Reads,” airing at noon on May 28 with Linda Hurtado Bond. The booking is a much-needed boost from the universe!

Now for the post you were expecting…

The first time I watched a demo of a bot voice [successfully!] interacting with a human client who wanted to make a restaurant reservation, I thought, If 75% of our thoughts are the same every day, it that so surprising?

And still, I was shocked at how well it worked. Not shown, the gazillion fails.

That was a few years ago, and since then, AI tools have only gotten better. But they’re still jenky. Will they replace me? Maybe? But if AI can help the planet through addressing climate change, drug development, disease diagnosis, and surgical advances, well, I suppose I’ll have to retrain.

But I’m not so worried. Years ago, when I worked with the esteemed professor and crime statistician Alfred Blumstein, as much as he loved his crime-predicting algorithms he had no problem admitting they would always be flawed. Why? Because there’s no accounting for human behavior. And so it’s my belief that the human ability to make decisions that confound AI augurs well for writers—our stories will go on.

In the meantime, can AI help me?

What I’ve put together here are the ways I’m incorporating AI into the administrative tasks that make me want to poke my eyes out with a fork. Things like coming up with social media hashtags and video post ideas, book marketing ideas, and reader analysis. I’m also enjoying playing with AI for certain design elements.

Fair warning, the bot will keep everything you feed it. Since I've been using social media for about two decades, the AI-verse has already scraped plenty of data from me. Now it's my turn to put them to work. From what I can see, the more data they have, the better my results are. Here’s what I’m playing with:

1. Book Marketing Brainstorming

The hardest part of book marketing for me is brainstorming, because I’m a one-woman storm. Enter Claude, my current favorite AI interface. I’ve tried a few, including ChatOn, AI ChatBot, and ChatGpt Open AI (which has the advantage of being free). The videos aren’t meant to be an exhaustive list so much as a way of showing you what these platforms can do. Note, these are not affiliate links.