Authors who learn to use AI find that they have more time to write better books, but most authors either don’t use AI at all or use it poorly. So let’s fix that.

You’re about to learn where to start.

What tools are worth using?
How do you get AI to generate something useful rather than just generic slop?

The good news is that you don’t need a tech expert to make AI work for you.

I like to think of myself as an early adopter, but there’s one person who has beaten me to every technology.

She started a podcast before I did. She was on Patreon before I was. And when I told her I had created AI Thomas and thought I had created something new, she told me she’d created something similar a few months before. Joanna Penn is a New York Times bestselling author, USA Today bestselling thriller author, and the host of The Creative Penn podcast.

Thomas: Joanna, you and I are early adopters, but many people aren’t. They’ve been hearing about AI, and when they finally give it a try, they find ChatGPT to be a blank page with a chat box.

Where should the beginning author get started with AI?

Joanna: You and I have been using AI for years. The day it launched in November 2022, I was on there, and you probably were too, so we are way past the era of early adopters. For anyone thinking, “I’ll just wait,” we’re past that now. At this point, using AI systems as part of your creative and business process flow is a really good idea.

To begin using AI, go to ChatGPT.com or get the app. Make sure you’re downloading the correct app because there are loads of bootleg versions. Once you have the right one, you’ll see a chat box. We’re used to Google’s white box after years of using it, and that’s both a positive and a negative. The positive is that you can type anything in. The problem is that many authors still type the same kinds of queries they would type into Google. For example, “Who is the prime minister of the UK?” That’s a Google-type question. In fact, if you ask Google now, you’ll probably get an AI-generated answer anyway.

We need to think about using ChatGPT beyond asking one-off questions. Instead of treating it like a database (ask one question, get one answer), we should think about what we want to achieve and how AI could help us the most.

For example, you could say to Chat GPT:

“I am author J.F. Penn. Here’s my website, jfpenn.com and my Amazon page [insert link]. Here’s my Instagram account. Can you analyze my author platform and tell me what my author brand is? Can you give me five potential taglines? Tell me what I’m doing well, what niches I’m hitting, and who my target audience is.”

It’s not about one question. It’s about giving the AI a goal with as much context as possible. That’s a much better way to use the tool.

Think of it less as giving a task and more as working with a coworker. In the past, you might have hired someone on PeoplePerHour or Fiverr who was multifunctional. Now you have these powerful tools that can do so much more. That’s a good place for authors to start.

Thomas: I love that as a starting point because it begins with a strong prompt like, “This is my website. How can I make it better?” That’s a great opening prompt for two reasons. First, it gives you immediate feedback on things you can improve. Second, it introduces you to the AI because it has to get to know you. Unless you’re already famous, the AI doesn’t know who you are or have context for your books.

A decent website with an about page, a page for each book, and other introductory material gives the AI valuable context.

When you get started with AI, don’t feel like you have to make it productive right away. When I started using ChatGPT, I was just playing with it.

A fun way to play with AI is with images. If you’re a novelist, ask ChatGPT to create a picture of each of your characters. You don’t have to do anything with them; just play. You can say, “No, she doesn’t have brown hair. She has blonde hair.” You refine the image through conversation, and that gives you practice using the tool. The first image won’t be perfect, just like the first text response won’t be perfect. But if you interact with it, you can hone it in.

In Scrivener, you could even put those images next to your character notes to make it more enjoyable to use. By keeping the pressure low at the start, you can explore the tool without worrying about productivity.

Become like a child with technology and just enjoy pushing the buttons.

How should authors approach AI responses?

Joanna: You are right about holding it lightly. People often dismiss AI too quickly. They’ll say, “Oh, that’s wrong,” or “It hallucinated and made that up,” or “My character doesn’t have that color hair,” and then dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

But it’s more like a conversation, as you and I are having now. Sometimes you agree, sometimes you disagree, and you go back and forth. That’s how ChatGPT and the other tools can function as coworkers. You are collaborating, co-creating on whatever you are doing, and you need to hold what it gives you lightly.

One of my favorite uses is generating book titles, character names, and lists. It’s excellent with lists. I might say, “Give me 20 possible names for characters who grew up in Japan,” or “Give me 20 possible titles for this short story collection.” Titles for short story collections are notoriously difficult because collections are very thematic. The AI will give you 20 options. If you review them and don’t find one you like, say, “Give me another 20,” and so on. It’s an iterative process, and a more playful attitude of holding it lightly works well.

Are certain tools better for different creative tasks?

Joanna: ChatGPT is not the best for creating images. I can spot them a mile off now. While ChatGPT is the best all-rounder, there are specialist tools in other areas.

Whether you’re working on an audiobook or a video, you need to consider what the best tool is for that task. You can ask ChatGPT itself what tool is best. I did this earlier while preparing for our chat. I asked, “Give me the latest list of the best tools for AI images as of today,” and it gave me a report.

You can also ask it, “How do I prompt for this particular thing?” and it will actually write you prompts. That is a magic button. For example, I asked it to write me prompts for MidJourney that I could use as backgrounds for my book covers and flat lays for social media. That sort of help is invaluable.

What is the most important tip for prompting AI?

Thomas: This is the most important tip in the whole episode. Lots of people ask for a library of prompts, and you can generate PDFs full of them. They are useful for brainstorming and for realizing, “Oh, I didn’t even know AI could do that.”

But you don’t need a huge library if you understand this one tip: Instead of saying, “Do this for me,” ask, “How would I do this?” or “What advice do you have for doing this?” or “Generate a prompt for me to do X.”

Then you look at the prompt, see what assumptions it has made, and tweak it. If you just say, “Create a picture of my character,” it will make its own assumptions. With the generated prompt in hand, you can refine those assumptions. If you also provide part of your manuscript or a sample photo, you’ll get a much better first result.

From there, you can still converse with it. This isn’t about one-offs. It’s about a sequence of steps:

ask it to generate a prompt
feed that prompt back in
tweak the prompt to your specifications

That’s the process most AI gurus use before creating the big PDF of prompts they hand out.

How can AI help with data and reports?

Joanna: It’s also important not to assume that AI can’t do something. I’d been waiting for AI help with publishing reports. I publish wide, in all formats across all the platforms. Each month, I get reports in completely different formats.

People have built some tools to help with this, but they never include everything. I’m not a data person, so I’d been waiting for ChatGPT, or the more agentic AI, to do this for me. And now, within ChatGPT, it can.

Inside the text box, there’s a plus button with an agent dropdown. I can upload spreadsheets and ask it to reformat them into one master sheet, generate graphs, and so on. I used to pay someone to do that, but it was out of my control, took extra time, and was quite frustrating. Now I’m doing it myself with ChatGPT as my coworker.

How do I know which tasks to use AI for?

Joanna: When considering what tools and tasks AI can help with in your author business, think first about what you do and don’t enjoy. Many authors don’t enjoy marketing or data analysis, and those are great starting points for using AI.

You could also ask ChatGPT to list every step an indie author needs to take to publish. Make sure you’re on GPT5 with the “thinking” model. Once you get that list, you can go through and ask yourself which tasks you love and which you can outsource to AI.

How does AI make marketing easier?

Thomas: I’m very aware that marketing isn’t what authors wanted to do when they started writing books. That’s one reason I created the Patron Toolbox, which is a suite of AI marketing tools. I’ve gotten surprisingly little pushback from anti-AI people because the tools do tasks authors almost universally hate. By not touching the writing side of the business, the tool has been far less controversial. Even if you don’t like marketing, it still has to happen.

Split Testing

Joanna: Most of the things authors don’t like are marketing tasks, such as writing pitches or sales descriptions. ChatGPT is an amazing copywriter.

In fact, I’m using it for my author newsletter. I still write the email myself, but then I paste it into ChatGPT and ask it for ten subject line variations. I split-test those headlines using Kit (Affiliate Link). In almost 20 years of being an author, I had never split-tested headlines. I could never be bothered to come up with another headline to test. Now, I’m split testing every email I send. Even that small change has made me a better marketer. A 1% higher open rate might mean more book sales.

Thomas: When you only have one title, split testing is extra work because you have to come up with alternatives. But ChatGPT can generate ten alternate titles for you. You can say, “Give me 10 more email subject lines that are more exciting, or more click-baity, or more emotional.”

Right, and then you review the list and think, “I actually like several of these.” Now you only have to pick two instead of picking the final one. I’ve been split testing from the beginning, and I’m constantly surprised. My ability to predict the winner is very low.

Reader Personas

Joanna: Another tip is to ask ChatGPT to create five different reader personas. It’s brilliant at personas, which are another nightmare task for authors. Then you can say, “If Sally, who loves Christian fantasy, is one of my readers, and Joe, who loves gothic cathedrals, is another, write different headlines for each of them.”

This ties into what we said earlier about analyzing your website and your brand. AI can identify who your potential customers are. All these tasks you’ve been telling us to do for years can now be done so much more easily, and that makes a huge difference.

Thomas: It does, but it also raises the level of competition. Now that it’s easier, more authors are doing these advanced techniques. If you’re against AI, you’re left doing it all yourself. You used to be able to skip these steps because few authors bothered, but now more authors are using these techniques.

Context Engineering and Prompts

Thomas: A big part of using AI effectively is giving the AI context. Think of it as another person who needs to get to know you. On a first date, you might say, “Here’s my website. What do you think?” But as you continue, and as the AI gets to know you better, it does a much better job evaluating things.

If you say, “I write thrillers, give me reader personas,” it’ll give you generic personas, which aren’t very helpful. What it really needs is not just a better prompt, but better context.

How do you approach context engineering for ChatGPT?

Joanna: First of all, I want us to stop using the word “engineering.” You’re just talking to the AI. Engineering” makes it sound more complicated than it is.

What you do need to do is read the terms and conditions of the tool you’re using. Once you’ve done that, I think the best context you can give it is to upload your book or books.

Once you’ve logged in and created an account, you can enable memory in the settings. That’s also where you can turn off “training for everyone,” which means your work would otherwise go into the model. But remember, it’s not a database.

As Thomas and I have talked about before, we actually want AI to know our work. I want my work to be in the model, so I leave that setting on. But that’s up to you.

Once logged in, I upload my book. For example, I uploaded the finished draft of The Buried and the Drowned. Then I asked it for 10 alternative titles or a sales description. The prompt was very basic. I asked, “Can you write a sales description?” Even though the prompt was basic, the result was better because it knew me and my work.

I’ve uploaded all my books and enabled memory. It makes the responses so much more personal. It’ll even say things like, “I could help you with an idea for a story that’s very J.F. Penn,” and because it knows I’m into gothic cathedrals at the moment, it might suggest a gothic cathedral setting. That sort of personalization comes from giving it context.

If you have a whole series, it depends on how long it is. Within a project in ChatGPT, you can upload more knowledge to the project. Or you can upload one book at a time and ask it to create a report on that book, which you then add to your project knowledge.

The reason most authors aren’t getting the best results is that they refuse to upload their work. They’re worried it will pop out somewhere else. But it’s not a database. If you’re unsure about uploading your work, ask ChatGPT to explain why it’s not a database. That’s the best way to learn. Uploading your work is the best way to get personal, contextual help.

Should authors upload their books to AI?

Thomas: We’re in a transition right now, very much like what happened with radio. When radio first came out, record labels hated it. They thought, “How dare you play our records for free!” But eventually they realized radio was good for record sales. By the 1960s, labels were actually paying radio stations to play their songs. It became a big scandal. The practice, called payola, is still illegal today.

We’re in the same place with AI. Many authors say, “How dare you upload your book to AI?” But others are saying, “It’s quite useful to have AI familiar with my book.” Soon it may even be, “I’ll pay you to read my book and recommend it.” It’s a whole mental shift.

Now, I don’t think uploading your book is really “training” the AI in the way some people imagine. I was talking with someone who said, “The way to do it is to use incognito chats and upload your book to all the different AIs to train them.” But I don’t think that’s how it works.

Joanna: That’s the database idea again. The truth is, no one knows, but people worry about that. Personally, I want more of me out there, even if it’s one grain of sand among all the grains of sand in the world. I want my work to be part of the future.

If an author hires someone to market their book, they might pay $1,000 for sales descriptions, TikTok videos, or a marketing plan, and you still give them your book. Why is it different to upload your book to ChatGPT? Yes, you can use ChatGPT for free, but for $20 a month, you get access to the thinking model, which I think is a very good idea.

Paying for ChatGPT is far cheaper than hiring a professional, and you still give them your book so they can help you.

Is it worth paying for ChatGPT?

Thomas: I’ve always been a big fan of paying to be a customer rather than being the product. That’s why the $20 subscription is such a good value. If you don’t pay, you don’t get privacy controls. With the free version, everything is used for training all the time.

If you’re nervous about AI having access to your book, pay the $20 and uncheck the box. I think it’s even unchecked by default now, though they may change the defaults in the future. As a paying customer, you control whether your data is shared.

Beyond privacy, you also get better models. ChatGPT hides all its different models behind the scenes, but you get the stronger ones if you pay. People who complain that AI produces rubbish are usually just using the free version. The paid version is better.

Joanna: Yes, and I think most people on the $20 plan can use the dropdown and change models. They actually brought that back because people wanted their old models for different tasks.

You shouldn’t have to think about which model to choose. It should choose the right one based on your prompt. If you ask, “Who is the Prime Minister of the UK?”, it will use the simplest model. If you ask for a deep research report comparing UK and US politics, it may use GPT-5’s thinking model. And that’s only available at the $20 level. You can get so much more at that tier.

What is a deep research report, and how do you use them?

Thomas: A deep research report is quite remarkable in what it can do to aid your research for a book. You do a lot of research for your fiction. So what is a deep research report, and how do you use them?

Joanna: One of the short stories in my The Buried and the Drowned short story collection is about freediving at the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand, where I once lived and scuba dived. That was about 15 years ago, so I wanted to refresh my knowledge.

I can go to the text box and say, “Please research the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand. Give me all the flora and fauna, examples of freediving sites, what’s special about the area, the Māori myths, and the dangers.” You can go in all sorts of directions. Then you click the plus button, select the dropdown for deep research, and make sure you’re using a thinking model if you have access.

Once you hit enter, it may take 10-30 minutes, depending on the scope of your request. It will return 20-40 pages of fully referenced details. Essentially, it’s browsing on your behalf. This is a kind of agentic AI.

I also always ask for “10 books I can read about this place.” You can download the report as a PDF and use it however you like.

I then upload that deep research report back into my ChatGPT project knowledge. From there, I can say, “Let’s brainstorm this short story using the report as context and setting. From a freediver’s perspective, what hooks might we use?”

For nonfiction, it’s just as powerful. I uploaded the third edition of my Successful Self-Publishing book and asked for a deep research report. I said, “Assess everything in this book and tell me what I need to update for a 2025 edition.” The last edition was published three years ago, and it produced an incredible report. It’s essentially like paying a PhD-level researcher, so don’t shrink from what you ask it to do.

Thomas: When you use deep research, getting the prompt right really matters. It can run for 30 minutes, so if you don’t prompt it correctly, you’ll get a report that misses the mark.

Joanna: To be fair, that’s never happened to me, because I use long prompts of 100 words or more. The key is to treat it like someone working for you. You have to communicate what’s in your head. We’re writers. We’re good at expressing ourselves with words.

Thomas: GPT-5’s deep research has a feature that asks clarifying questions before running for 30 minutes. That’s incredibly useful because we often assume the AI knows what’s in our heads. Sometimes it guesses well, but sometimes it doesn’t.

If you’ve uploaded your books and used ChatGPT consistently while logged in, it does a better job of knowing you and making accurate assumptions. But those clarifying questions are helpful for guiding its research to produce a more accurate and helpful result.

What are your thoughts on AI-narrated audiobooks?

Thomas: Let’s talk about audio. I know you’re a big fan of ElevenLabs. As we’re recording this, ElevenLabs is about to release a marketplace where people can upload books, turn them into audiobooks, sell directly to readers, and earn 60% money back. Audible is about to do the same. We’re on the cusp of a tsunami of AI-narrated audiobooks. You’ve been doing this for years before it became popular. What are your thoughts?

Joanna: First, let’s address the quality. People say, “Nobody wants to listen to that,” but they’re wrong. I’m primarily an audio consumer. I listen at 1.5x, 1.75x, sometimes 2x. Nobody who listens to audio regularly listens at 1x. To be fair, a lot of nonfiction books have sounded robotic for years.

ElevenLabs has stolen the crown for best model, and their version three is even more emotional. They have fantastic voices. My novel Death Valley is narrated by my voice clone. Normally, I narrate my books myself, but the cloning is excellent if you want to use it.

The biggest problem with AI audio is distribution. Audible, the largest market, only accepts AI audio from indie authors if we use AVV (Amazon Virtual Voice), which you can find on your KDP dashboard. It’s only available in some countries. They don’t currently allow ElevenLabs, though I believe that will change.

Eventually, everything will be allowed because it’s about the customer. When ebooks on Kindle launched in 2007, people asked, “Where are the gatekeepers?” The gatekeeper is the reader or listener. If every book is available in audio, whether AI-generated or not, the listeners will choose.

Right now, ElevenLabs is excellent. You do have to pay for the better models, but it’s not much. For around $100 to $200, you can produce your whole audiobook. You can upload it to platforms like InAudio (formerly Findaway Voices), Spotify, YouTube, or sell it directly through BookFunnel, Shopify, or Payhip.

What you can’t do at the moment (August 2025) is upload those files to Audible. But I’m sure that will change.

This is not a one-click process. Like with all AI tools, it’s not “upload book, click publish.” You have to listen, give direction, and make adjustments.

Thomas: And by direction, you may not realize how much control you now have. You can type [whispers] or [sarcastically] in brackets, and the AI will perform it that way. It’s not changing the voice; it’s still Sarah’s voice, but Sarah will say it sarcastically if you tell her to.

If you’ve got a 10-hour audiobook and you’re giving direction in every paragraph, is that a massive amount of work, or can it do it automatically?

Joanna: We can now do multicast audio, which used to be prohibitively expensive. But yes, if you’ve got a 10-hour audiobook, you can click generate, but you still need to proof-listen.

The key question is cost. A professional audiobook narration costs around $250 to $350 per finished hour. So a 10-hour audiobook could cost $3,500 to $4,000. Is it worth it to you?

With ElevenLabs, you can pay a couple of hundred dollars and invest maybe 20 hours of your time to produce it yourself. That’s the difference.

Some companies are springing up to do it for you at a lower price point than human narrators. We’re in a transitional moment. It feels chaotic, but this will soon be normal.

For example, ElevenReader, one of their apps, lets you switch voices to famous people and have them read to you. That’s where we’re heading.

Are AI voices going mainstream?

Thomas: Young people who spend a lot of time on TikTok or Instagram are already consuming a massive amount of AI voices. I don’t spend time on TikTok, but I spend a bit of time on YouTube Shorts, and my wife sends me some Instagram reels. Some of those videos are humans talking to the camera, but a surprising number of them are actually AI voices. More and more, people don’t realize it is AI. If you’re on TikTok and you can’t see the person speaking, you can assume it’s an AI voice. Even if you can see the person, it may still be AI.

Joanna: It may still be, because AI-generated video is also very good. I use AI an awful lot, but I have a clear boundary between what is human me and what I won’t do. For example, I publish all my books under my own name. I will never one-click a book and publish it. People who do that usually don’t use their own names; they use pen names.

Every line I publish is human-written and or human-edited, even if I use AI in the process. If I use my voice clone, as I did with Death Valley, I label it as my voice clone.

I won’t do an AI video of myself. You are still you, and I am still me. If we change that, people will always doubt it.

Are AI book trailers finally effective?

Thomas: You’re making AI book trailers now with real Joanna Penn’s voice.

I’ve hated book trailers for years. We have episodes from a decade ago about how awful they were.

People paid thousands for what was basically a slide deck of stock photos and text. Book trailers were so ineffective that they were actually negatively effective. Amazon even banned authors from uploading videos to their book pages. Readers and publishers could upload videos, but authors were uniquely banned because the trailers were so poor.

Now, it’s possible to make a higher-quality video. You can still make AI slop, but you can also make something good. I wonder if we’re crossing from book trailers negatively affecting sales to positively affecting them.

Joanna: Especially with Kickstarter launches for fiction, you need to give people a sense of the characters, the setting, and what’s going on.

I use Midjourney. I’m visual and do a lot of photography, so it suits me. I used Midjourney back when it was on Discord, and now it’s on Midjourney.com, which is much easier. You can type prompts, or go to the “Explore” view, click on images you like, see the prompts, and copy them. You could also upload your book to ChatGPT and say, “Generate 10 prompts I can use on Midjourney,” and play from there.

How do you make your AI book trailers and animations?

Joanna: Midjourney creates still images, and then you can click animate with various settings. For my trailers, I create my character and then animate it or create important visuals. In my book Blood Vintage, there’s a vineyard shaped like a labyrinth. You can’t get drone footage over a labyrinth vineyard, but I created the picture in Midjourney and animated it to sweep like drone footage. It was brilliant.

This isn’t one-and-done. I didn’t type a prompt once and use the first image. It takes patience and iteration.

Once I have the clips, I drop the short videos into Canva.com, stitch them together, and add music. You can use Canva’s music, generate custom music with ElevenLabs, or find royalty-free tracks elsewhere. We’re at a point where this is actually fun. Google Gemini’s Veo is very good, but I prefer the Midjourney aesthetic. Runway is also strong, so if you know film direction, it’s incredible. People are making films with Runway. There are so many options.

Thomas: I’m preparing an episode about jobs you can start now to serve authors. One is making book trailers with AI tools. That skill set needs to be learned, and for the next 18 months, there’s a business opportunity there. I don’t know if it will still be a business two years from now, but it could be profitable in the near term.

Making a trailer for a short story collection is hard because each story is its own universe. It’s like a trailer with a bunch of mini trailers inside it, but Joanna has done it.

Joanna: On the YouTube video of this episode, I’m showing The Buried and the Drowned. The cover, the sprayed edges, the custom endpapers, and the social media images are all done with Midjourney. The book trailer is also Midjourney. You can now do so much that wasn’t any fun before.

This is fun for me. I love making trailers and playing with Midjourney. Lots of people don’t. I’m not a massive fan of spending time in audio. I love ElevenLabs’ output, but others love the process. In our community, Simon Patrick is excellent with audio. As we lean into what we love, the jobs will shift.

My cover designer, Jane, still assembles the assets into proper formats. Collaboration remains important. My editor, Kristen Tate, knows I use AI. She uses AI in her editing process with client permission and teaches other editors how to help authors with AI. The better you are at your craft, the better you’ll be at using these tools.

Earlier this year, I explored screenwriting, and then Veo arrived, before GPT-5, and I realized the world had changed. The best people using AI will become even better. My strength is here in the writing and book community, so I’m leaning into that. I want to encourage people not to be depressed. The better writer you are, the better you will be at using these tools.

How can authors become better writers with AI?

Joanna: Another helpful addition in ChatGPT is a “learn along” or “study along” guide. In the text box, click the plus and select that mode. You can say, “Teach me how to write dialogue,” or “Help me improve setting or character.” Tools like that will help us get even better.

Human Elements: Taste, Voice, & Audience

Thomas: We have a saying here in the States that money can’t buy taste. Some people are wealthy but don’t have good taste, so they adorn themselves in gaudy gold. That’s often a mark of new money. The same is true with AI. AI can’t develop your taste. In fact, the more you’re able to do with it, the more your personal taste is revealed in what you create.

As you’re using AI, start with the things you hate. Many people say, “I love writing. I don’t want AI to take that away from me.” If you love writing and you’re good at it, that should be the very last thing AI touches, if ever. But if you’re terrible at reviewing sales reports from Amazon or Audible, and you can’t make heads or tails of them, that’s where AI excels. Computers are brilliant at spreadsheets.

Every year, we do the Novel Marketing Conference, and afterward, we survey attendees. In the past, I allowed long essay responses. Big mistake. Give authors a blank box and they’ll write you a book. We’d end up with 500 pages of qualitative feedback. How do you make sense of that? For the last two years, I’ve uploaded those spreadsheets into all the major models (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT) to benchmark them.

All of them did a great analysis. They each offered slightly different insights, but they all highlighted the same themes of what people loved and what needed improvement. I’d much rather read a synthesized report than wade through spreadsheets myself.

So start with the things you don’t enjoy so you can free up time for the things you do. Some authors love first drafts. Others find drafting brutal but love revision. If you hate editing, AI can help with that. If you hate brainstorming, AI can help with that. Play to your strengths and outsource your weaknesses.

It’s the same with humans. My dad, a successful business owner, told me when I started my first business, “Only do what only you can do. Delegate the rest.” If you hate accounting, hire a CPA part-time. Build your team around what you do best. The same principle applies to AI. It’s not about replacing you. Done right, AI puts you in your zone more often, which raises the quality of your work.

Joanna: For years, people have told us, “You must do this, you must do that in marketing,” and many of us have thought, “But I just want to be a writer.” If you can outsource those tasks or pay $20 a month for a tool that does what you could never afford to outsource before, that makes a huge difference to the time you have for creating.

Your thoughts about tastes are related to an author’s voice. We all have an author voice that comes through in our books. Outsourcing to AI allows us to lean into that. It allows you to do what you love and strengthen the skills you’re already confident in. That’s your zone of genius, as Gay Hendricks puts it.

In this age of AI, I can say, “No, I won’t do that task. Either ChatGPT or Gemini can do it.” This really is a wonderful time to be an author. It feels as exciting to me as it did in 2007, when I first came into this publishing world. Things are changing, yes, but we’ve surfed the last 15 years, and now we can surf the next 15. We’re only at the beginning of this shift.

What role do audience and voice play in AI use?

Thomas: We’ve talked about taste and voice. The third piece is the audience.

ChatGPT isn’t going to buy your book. Maybe it buys one copy to train on, depending on how the lawsuits go, but it’s not your customer. Human readers are your customers. You want to thrill your human readers. AI feedback only helps you serve those readers better. It’s easy to get ChatGPT to praise your writing. It’s far harder to earn a five-star review from a human reader.

The human elements of taste and voice clarity are essential to protect. That’s why you want AI and your human editors to help you refine them. Otherwise, why should anyone read your book instead of someone else’s? Your voice is what sets you apart, and your audience defines who you’re trying to thrill.

Not every reader likes every book. Knowing your audience guides so many decisions, and this circles back to context training. Don’t just upload your manuscript. Describe your target reader. Tell AI, “This is who I’m trying to reach.” The AI knows what to do with that.

Where can authors learn more about using AI?

Thomas: If you want more help with AI, Joanna Penn has done something innovative. Instead of creating an AI course, which would be out of date in six weeks, she runs periodic webinars.

I paid to attend one, and I can vouch that it was excellent. Joanna opens up her entire workflow, shares the prompts she uses, and demonstrates the tools step by step. She stays current with what’s breaking in the space. Every time we email, she’s like, “Did you hear about this new thing?”

Check out her webinars. It’s cheaper if you become a patron of her podcast first. Pro tip: if you’re already supporting Novel Marketing on Patreon, it’s easy to add hers too and save money.

Keep that attitude of play. Don’t let dystopian films rob you of the fun. There’s so much to explore and so much to play with.

If you want more AI coverage, we share news on Author Update, and Joanna covers it at the start of each of her podcast episodes.

Connect with Joanna

Website: TheCreativePenn.com
Podcast: The Creative Penn Podcast for Authors
YouTube: The Creative Penn
Fiction: JFPenn.com

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