With the rise of AI and ease of using Chat GPT, many authors are now using AI to finish a book. From editing a manuscript to designing book covers, even to marketing your book, AI offers faster, cheaper alternatives to traditional creative processes. But does using AI to write a book take away from the creative process? And is the quality the same as when a human does it? In this post, we’ll explore the pros and cons of using AI to finish your book, and what this means for readers and authors alike.

Using AI to design your Book Covers

Regardless of the famous saying, we do judge books by their covers. An appealing cover is the first thing that you see when you’re in a bookstore, or even just scrolling on socials. Designing a book cover is a skill, and that of course comes with a cost attached. Many authors are now considering using AI to create their book cover, is it worth it?

Using AI to generate ideas

AI can be great to kick off the creative process. You can put your books themes and tropes in there and generate mood boards or garner ideas. However, this can be overwhelming, and can impact the impression you want to give. If you’ve ever used Canva’s ‘magic media’ to design an image you’ll know how hard it can be to create exactly what you have in your head! You might need to amend and change the prompt the multiple times. It can then be tricky to remember your original idea when there have been multiple AI versions.

AI art still has many issues: we all know how AI can’t draw hands, and words turn into gibberish. There are other tells that many readers can, and will, spot. A lot of AI created covers have a yellow tone that is immediately recognisable as AI. It can also miss the ‘magic’ that a human generated piece of art includes. AI in the book world is controversial, there is regularly new booktok drama about the next book with an AI cover. It is worth bearing this in mind and considering the implications of this if you choose to go down the AI route to finish your book cover.

Finally, we work with a few designers if you want to speak to someone about designing your cover. Damonza are a cover art specialist, and Victoria is the artist we used ourselves on our coloring book!

Using AI to Edit your manuscript

You’ve written your book, you’ve poured your blood, sweat and tears into it, and now it’s the really hard part. Editing. All books, and all authors, need editing. It is an essential part of the writing process. Using AI to finish editing your book is something that we all do- whether we are aware of it or not! Anyone who writes in a word processing programme uses spell check. Those red squiggly lines that come up: that’s AI. While this use of AI is commonplace and well accepted, Generative AI (for example, Chat GPT) is more controversial.

Chat GPT, or similar Gen AI programmes, can be great at reading your work and suggesting edits. However, we need to consider how much editing we want to be done by AI. Relying on AI to rewrite sections of your book can remove your own unique voice and quirks. Some of the best authors have a recognisable style: imagine if Sally Rooney had put her books through AI and it added quotation marks!

It can be really easy to ask AI to check a paragraph or chapter, and then just copy and paste the edited version. But how often can you do that until the work is entirely written by AI? We risk losing the uniqueness that we love about reading when we make books something that can be churned out by a computer.

Is it obvious when text is AI edited?

We’ve all heard of em dashes and how people think that is the main tell for whether AI has edited something. Personally, I think that there is a place for em dashes in everyday work, and it doesn’t automatically mean that AI has been involved. There are other tells, however. As mentioned above there is a loss of ‘voice’ and some of the natural rhythm of a sentence. Also, AI typically tends to edit line by line, and can miss differences in continuity. If your main character is blonde in chapter one but brunette in chapter 4, a human editor should notice that, AI is unlikely to.

As with any AI editing, it is important to read through and check the work yourself. There are multiple instances of Chat GPT prompts being included in the final work from a copy/paste that has not been proof read. This is something that readers will notice, and will immediately flag as AI. There are many freelance editors available on job sites such as Fiverr. We also recommend The Manuscript Mechanic to support you with your writing and editing.

Using AI to Market your book

Finally, you’ve written your book, you’ve designed a cover, now you need to market and sell it! This can be one of the trickiest aspects for new authors, so something that they will turn to AI for. You can ask Chat GPT to create a marketing plan for your book, and it will spit out something that sounds pretty good. However, there is still a lot of work and expertise required to bring that plan to life. AI models quite often have an information cut off date so don’t necessarily have up to date information on trends or creators in the bookish space. As we know, social media moves fast. What was trending last week is old news today.

If you are wanting to work with influencers to create a social media marketing plan, you need connections and expertise. Blindly reaching out to people you find on Bookstagram will take you a lot of hours and will not necessarily give you very much return. BookInfluencers.com has run over 1000 book tours, we know how to find the right creators for your book and how to get the best value for your money.

Final thoughts

So should you use AI to finish a book? That’s up to you. AI is here to stay. Whether you love it or hate it, that is a fact. For all of us in the artistic realm there are definitely positives and negatives to the AI debate. We need to decide individually where we fall and what we are comfortable using AI for, and what is better to be done by a human. Human creativity and connection is something that AI is unable to replicate. The programme may have been trained to know what a sentence should look like, but won’t recognise the poetry inherent in human written text. It may have seen 10,000 covers, but won’t understand why we are drawn to a specific style. While there is a place for AI in the process of finishing your book, human creativity still reigns supreme.

Recommendations

• If you use AI at any stage, always get a professional to check the work before your book goes live
• There are freelance professionals in many industries that you can use while finishing your book, we recommend Damonza for cover design, The Manuscript Mechanic for editing and, of course, Bookinfluencers.com for marketing
• Be aware of the feelings and opinions of your target audience around the use of AI. 
• If you choose to use AI in finishing your book, be prepared to state this in a disclaimer, and as with the point above, be aware that some readers may be put off by this.