Back in May, I released an episode called Your Author Toolbox: Time-Saving Tools for Busy Authors, where I demonstrated several tools I built to help authors sell more books and save time. Since then, I have created dozens more tools you may not know about, and today I want to share them with you.
All the tools can be found at PatronToolbox.com.
PR Tools
Media Hook Brainstormer
The Media Hook Brainstormer is a simple tool. You upload your manuscript, and it analyzes the content temporarily. It does not retain a copy or train on your work. All of these tools use API-level access, which offers the highest level of security available from major large language models.
There are three general levels of AI access. The lowest is the free consumer app, where you have no meaningful privacy protections. The next level is the paid app subscription. The highest level is direct API access, where you pay for tokens. All of the tools I’ve built use that highest level, where I pay for tokens.
Once you upload your manuscript, the tool identifies potential media hooks for PR. It works for both fiction and nonfiction. It suggests news angles to watch for and strategies for connecting your book to relevant news stories so you can position yourself as a follow-up story.
Listen to the following episodes to learn how to use the technique of newsjacking to promote your book:
- How to Create Press Releases
- How to Work With a PR Firm to Promote Your Book
- How to Get More Book Reviews With Joe Walters
Press Release Drafter
After identifying your media hook, the Press Release Drafter helps you create a professional press release.
Many authors, and even companies, never issue press releases because they do not know how. This tool removes that barrier.
You enter your name and what you want to announce, such as a new book, an award, a major milestone, or an event. You include your genre, book title, and the hook generated earlier, or write your own. You can provide details in bullet form, paste the contents of your website’s About page, and add your contact information. Then you click “Draft Press Release.”
The tool produces a properly formatted press release. I also have a blog post explaining how to distribute it, but distribution only matters if you first have a release. You can even publish it directly on your website.
To learn more about distributing your press release, listen to the following episodes or read the blog versions:
- How to Create Press Releases
- How to Create an Author Press Kit
- How to Create an Online Author Press Kit
- How You Can Create Massive PR for Yourself, Even If You’re A Complete Novice
- How to Conduct Your Own Media Tour (without hiring a PR Firm)
- How to Work With a PR Firm to Promote Your Book
Quotable Quote Finder
The Quotable Quote Finder analyzes your manuscript and identifies memorable one-liners.
These quotes can be used for PR, social media, merchandise such as T-shirts or mugs, or other promotional materials. You upload your manuscript, click “Find Quotes,” and it returns your strongest lines.
Influencer Finder
If you have listened to the Novel Marketing podcast, you know I do not recommend authors spend significant time trying to grow their own social media accounts. Most authors are not naturally strong at social media, and even a follower count of 10,000 or 20,000 followers is modest compared to professional influencers.
For a few hundred dollars, you can hire an influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers to talk about your book. The challenge is finding the right influencers.
The Influencer Finder solves that problem. You choose a platform, such as X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Substack, blogs, or podcasts. You enter your Amazon subcategory, your target audience, and a list of comparable books and authors. The tool identifies influencers already discussing similar books and authors.
You can then approach them with a paid offer or an advance reader copy. This approach often saves thousands of hours compared to trying to build your own following from scratch. Your time is usually better spent writing the next book.
Event Finder
The Event Finder is currently grouped under PR tools, though it is more accurately an in-person sales tool.
Like the Influencer Finder, it tailors results to your genre, location, and audience. It helps you identify book fairs, gun shows, homeschool conferences, library events, farmers markets, craft fairs, and seasonal events such as Christmas markets.
Sometimes the best place to sell books is where you are the only author present. The Event Finder not only lists events but aligns them with the type of book you write and the readers you want to reach.
While public speaking events are not the tool’s primary focus, it can also help identify speaking opportunities. To learn more about finding speaking opportunities and in-person selling, listen to the following episodes or read the blog versions:
- Marketing 101: Place
- How to Sell Books From a Table
- How to Sell Your Book In Person
- How to Get Your First Speaking Gigs
Not a Professional Tools
Moving beyond PR tools, I have created a collection of what I call “not a professional” tools. These tools are sprinkled throughout the toolbox and offer professional advice for authors but do not take the place of consulting a real human professional. They do, however, make your time with professionals far more productive and cost-effective.
AI Thomas
AI Thomas is a chatbot is trained on episodes of Novel Marketing and my other podcasts. It is particularly strong at answering marketing questions.
Unlike generic AI tools, it is tuned not to flatter you. Most consumer AI systems default to being agreeable and sycophantic. These tools are calibrated to prioritize truth over affirmation. The goal is to help you succeed, not simply to make you feel good.
Not A Literary Agent
Not A Literary Agent can review book proposals, query letters, full manuscripts, and publishing contracts. It can assess marketability, suggest positioning strategies, identify red flags in contracts, and answer questions about traditional publishing.
You can upload a file or simply type your question. You provide your name and genre, optionally your goal, and then interact with it like a chatbot.
It offers a candid, second opinion without the tendency toward empty encouragement.
Not A Lawyer
Not A Lawyer is not a substitute for a licensed attorney, but it is a fast and useful legal research tool.
It can review contracts, identify potential red flags, answer general legal questions, and help draft a rights reversion request letter. There are two primary ways to regain rights to a traditionally published book: formally requesting reversion under contract terms or negotiating to buy back the rights.
This tool can analyze your contract and help you draft a letter that triggers the appropriate clause. It can also help determine whether you are eligible for reversion.
While it is not a replacement for an attorney, especially when legal fees run $150 per hour or more, it is far better to consult this tool before signing a contract you do not understand. It can also help you optimize your time with a real attorney by giving you a list of questions to ask a human.
Not A CPA
Not A CPA functions similarly but focuses on tax issues for authors.
It is trained on relevant court cases concerning whether the IRS considers you a business or a hobby and whether certain deductions are allowed. While most AI systems are strong at legal and tax matters due to the public nature of statutes and case law, this tool is specifically tuned for authors.
It also suggests intelligent questions to bring to your CPA. If you have limited time in a paid consultation, arriving prepared with vocabulary and background knowledge makes that hour far more productive.
Not A Developmental Editor
Not A Developmental Editor is the most popular and most expensive tool in the Patron Toolbox. It provides in-depth, structured feedback on your manuscript.
You upload your manuscript, specify whether it is a book or short story, identify the genre, and optionally note areas of concern, such as feedback you’ve received from beta readers. Then you click “Evaluate.”
The tool delivers robust developmental feedback. It is intentionally calibrated not to be sycophantic. Considerable effort went into preventing it from simply praising the manuscript.
Editing Tools
Not A Copy Editor
Not A Copy Editor focuses on line-level improvements. It identifies issues related to clarity, grammar, structure, and style while maintaining your voice. Like the other tools, it is tuned to offer honest critique rather than empty affirmation.
Roast Engine
While researching how to reduce sycophantic responses, I created an extreme version called the Roast Engine.
You upload your manuscript, and it generates dozens of distinct “troll” personas. Each persona writes one- and two-star reviews as they might appear if posted on Amazon. The reviews are specific to your book and often hit close to home.
This tool will make you uncomfortable. However, it serves two purposes. First, it stress-tests your manuscript. Second, it prepares you psychologically for negative reviews that you will inevitably receive.
Some of the mock reviewers will complain about features that are central to your genre. For example, someone may criticize an action adventure novel for being too violent or containing too much action. That is realistic. Not every reader is your ideal reader.
In fact, a negative review about excessive action may attract readers who want exactly that. The Roast Engine is the opposite of a sycophant. With the right calibration, AI can be blunt, even harsh, in service of making your book stronger.
Machine learning systems tend to drift toward friendliness because users reward flattery. Thumbs-up feedback trains chatbots to tell people what they want to hear. If you want a tool that tells the truth, you have to tune it deliberately.
If you want to see how far I’ve pushed that, the Roast Engine will show you. You don’t have to share the results with anyone. It will sting a little. While most of the trolls are just mean, some will point out real issues worth fixing.
The Roast Engine is designed to roast everything. It will leave negative reviews no matter what you upload, even To Kill a Mockingbird or The Lord of the Rings. That is the point. There is no “fair mode.” It is always snarky, always critical, and always negative.
Not A Developmental Editor
Not A Developmental Editor provides big-picture feedback on your manuscript. For nonfiction, it evaluates structure and persuasiveness. For fiction, it focuses on character development, dialogue, scene construction, and overall narrative flow.
It addresses the structural foundation of your book rather than line-level edits and is designed to help you strengthen the architecture of your story.
Structure Analyzer
The Structure Analyzer is a more specialized structural tool. You can think of it as a focused companion to Not A Developmental Editor.
It analyzes your manuscript according to established storytelling frameworks, including chiastic structure, Save the Cat, the Hero’s Journey, three-act structure, and the Hollywood formula. It then offers feedback on how your book aligns with those frameworks and suggests adjustments.
If you write “by the seat of your pants” and have not consciously chosen a structure, this tool can be transformative. If you want your book to follow a specific structure more closely, such as the Hollywood formula, it helps you refine the manuscript accordingly.
I strongly recommend listening to my episode on chiastic structure. It is one of the most enduring storytelling patterns in classical literature, and many stories that have resonated for millennia follow it. That episode remains one of my most popular and is linked within the tool.
Not A Copy Editor
Not A Copy Editor focuses on usage, spelling, grammar, and style. You can select your preferred style guide, such as The Chicago Manual of Style or the AP Stylebook. If you are unsure which to use, the default is The Chicago Manual of Style in American English. If you write in another variety of English, such as British English, the tool can adjust accordingly.
This tool cannot process an entire book in a single upload, so for best results, submit individual chapters.
Unlike Grammarly, which constantly interrupts while you write, this tool presents the feedback in a separate document. You choose whether to implement each suggestion, preserving your voice and maintaining control over your style.
You can upload text or a document file. You can also submit a website URL. Selecting “blog post” or “webpage” allows the tool to review an entire site at once. This is especially helpful for Divi websites, where spell check may not function consistently across multiple content boxes. It works well for blog posts, Substack articles, and book chapters.
I did not build tools to write books for you. Writing remains your responsibility. These editing tools emerged from research into reducing sycophantic AI behavior. If you prefer not to use AI for editing, you can skip this section.
Book Splitter
The Book Splitter addresses a common problem, especially for first-time authors. Many debut manuscripts exceed 100,000 words. Some reach 150,000 or even 200,000 words. When using print-on-demand, long books increase production costs, sometimes to $7 or more per copy, which can undermine the economics of publishing, particularly early in a career.
This tool analyzes a long manuscript and suggests logical break points for dividing it into multiple books. You upload your manuscript, specify how many books you want to create, and receive recommendations for where to split the narrative. It also suggests what to add or adjust at the beginnings and endings to shape each section into a cohesive volume.
While not widely needed for most authors, it is invaluable when you do need it.
Compendium Tools
The compendium tools help maintain continuity. Some authors call this a “book bible.” These tools generate internal reference documents to keep your world consistent.
Character Compendium
The Character Compendium reads your manuscript and produces a list of characters, including names, backstories, arcs, and summaries of their relationships with other characters. This is especially useful for series writers. If you need to confirm whether Sarah has blue eyes, you can check the compendium.
It does not identify inconsistencies between chapters. That is the work of a developmental or copy editor. Instead, it provides a centralized reference drawn from your manuscript.
Location Compendium
The Location Compendium lists all significant locations in your book. In epic fantasy, this may include nations or cities. In contemporary fiction, it might include a bedroom or a kitchen.
It helps you zoom in or out as needed and keeps locations consistent across scenes and volumes.
Factions and Races Compendium
For fantasy or science fiction authors, the Factions and Races Compendium organizes kingdoms, political groups, species, and other collective entities. It helps you keep complex worldbuilding details straight.
Creatures and Plants Compendium
The Creatures and Plants Compendium tool catalogs flora and fauna within your story. If you have created distinctive creatures or plants, it compiles them into a structured reference document.
Trope and Genre Finder
The Trope and Genre Finder analyzes your manuscript to identify genre alignment and narrative tropes.
You upload your manuscript, and the tool generates a list of tropes present in your story. It also provides a genre alignment score across multiple genres, typically offering four or five categories ranked by fit.
Poor sales and negative reviews often stem from misaligned genre placement. You may have selected the wrong Amazon subcategory because you misunderstood your book’s true positioning. This tool helps clarify where your manuscript fits best.
It also educates you about tropes. Some authors are fluent in trope language. Others are unfamiliar with the concept. This tool bridges that gap.
Glossary Builder
The Glossary Builder scans your manuscript for distinctive terms, especially words you use in unique ways. It generates definitions based on contextual usage.
You should review and refine the results. All of these tools are time savers, not replacements for human judgment. However, if you are creating a companion guide or worldbuilding appendix, this tool accelerates the process.
World Building Tools
World-building tools help speculative and historical fiction authors manage and review the timelines of their stories or series and help them create visual features such as maps specific to a fictional world.
Map Maker
The Map Maker supports worldbuilding visually. You draw a map by hand, photograph it, and upload the image. The tool converts it into a stylized graphical map, such as a Tolkien-inspired design or a three-dimensional rendering.
It currently works best with simple maps, but it continues to improve as the underlying AI models become more spatially aware.
Timeline Chronicler
The Timeline Chronicler constructs a chronological sequence of events in your story.
Unlike a plot synopsis, which summarizes events in narrative order, the timeline arranges events in the order they occurred. If chapter three contains a flashback to an event before the story begins, the timeline places that event at the beginning.
This helps identify inconsistencies, such as characters appearing in two locations simultaneously or traveling implausible distances in unrealistic timeframes. It is also valuable for maintaining continuity across a series.
Writing Tools
To be clear, the writing tools do not write your book for you, but they can save you time and help you get past some road blocks as you write.
Chapterizer
The Chapterizer tool can take your dictated chapter and clean it up to make it more readable.
If you dictate your manuscript, you often end up with a large, unstructured block of text lacking punctuation and formatting. This tool cleans up dictation. It corrects homophones such as “there,” “their,” and “they’re,” adds punctuation, inserts quotation marks, and formats dialogue with proper line breaks.
It does not edit or improve your prose. It simply converts your rough draft into a readable format. It also preserves parenthetical notes authors might make for themselves, such as reminders to “(research this),” which is a features users requested.
Some authors use this tool daily. They dictate while walking or commuting, paste the raw text into the tool, and receive a usable rough draft to revise.
As Chase Replogle says, “Nobody reads what you write. They read what you edit.” This tool helps you reach the editing stage more efficiently.
Character Namer
The Character Namer researches era-appropriate names.
Inspired by my wife, who tracks name popularity trends, this tool ensures historical and cultural accuracy. It is immersion-breaking when a character born in the 1980s has a name that was popular in the 2010s.
To use the tool, simply enter the genre, the character’s birth year, whether AD or BC, and the geographic origin. Location is essential. The tool adjusts name suggestions based on region and historical context. It can generate Anglo-Saxon names from the fifth century, Roman names from the second century BC, and modern American names informed by Social Security data.
You may also describe the character’s personality or physical traits. The tool integrates era, meaning, region, and genre to generate 20 historically appropriate names.
Some authors enjoy naming characters and will not need this. Others rely on outdated phone books for inspiration. For those seeking historically grounded character research, this tool offers a powerful and precise alternative.
Blog Tools
The Blog Tools are designed to help you publish stronger posts with less manual cleanup.
Podcast Blogifier
The Podcast Blogifier, a tool based on what we do with the Novel Marketing podcast.
We publish a blog version of each episode, and this tool makes that process easy. You paste in your dictation or transcript. It is similar to the Chapterizer but it is tuned specifically for blog posts and interviews. If your transcript includes speaker attributions, it preserves them appropriately while adding headings, bullet points, and other elements that give the post a true “blog” feel.
It can also rewrite your episode into a target length. If you want blog posts between 1,500 and 2,500 words, you select the word count, paste the transcript, choose “blog,” and let it run. It may take four or five minutes, so it is not instant, but it is far faster than fixing every typo yourself. It removes “ums,” “ahs,” and stutters, and it shortens or preserves content based on your settings.
If you choose “don’t abridge,” it keeps the substance while still cleaning the transcript and formatting it as a post. You end up with a nearly ready-to-publish blog article.
What it does not currently do is add hyperlinks or images. You still need to insert those manually, but it handles a large part of the work.
Blog Brainstormer
Next is the Blog Brainstormer. This tool is straightforward. You enter your genre, your book title, and the tropes in your novel, and it generates blog post ideas.
If you are a novelist who wants a blog but does not know what to write about, this removes your excuses. Blogging is optional for fiction authors, but if you choose that strategy, this tool gives you a list of topics to explore.
For nonfiction, the best blog topics come from your readers. They are the questions you hear from the stage, in emails, or in conversations. The strongest content is audience-driven. You can still use this tool for nonfiction, but reader questions should remain your primary source for blog topics.
Blog Optimizer
The Blog Optimizer is a practical SEO tool. You paste in the URL of a blog post, and it generates a meta title, a meta description, and specific recommendations for improving both search optimization and AI optimization.
If you know nothing about SEO, this can be a game changer. It applies search engine expertise directly to your post. Instead of generic advice, it gives specific, actionable changes you can make to help the post rank better on Google.
This tool is trained on the following SEO episodes for authors:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Author Websites
- Introduction to SEO
- How to Rank in Amazon Search Results with Dave Chesson
- AI Optimization for Authors
Business Tools
If you want writing to be your career, and if you intend to make a profit or even a living off of your writing, you’ll need to treat your writing as a business from the start. The Business Tools can help you toward that end.
Business Plan Generator
The Business Plan Generator is the newest tool in the toolbox. I built it after my interview with Joanna Penn where we talked about How to Become a Professional Writer.
You answer a series of questions about your book, your goals, your plans, and your finances, and it produces an initial business plan draft.
Do not generate the plan and forget it. Use it as a starting point. It will need to be tweaked, but it is still a huge time saver, especially if you have never written a business plan before.
Royalty Analyzer
Next is the Royalty Analyzer. This is one of the few metered tools. Most tools can be used without limits, but I had a traditional publisher run book after book through the Royalty Analyzer and rack up significant costs. It is priced for authors. I plan to create a publisher tier in the future.
You upload your royalty statements, such as the Excel file you download from KDP, along with an event log. The event log is where you record your marketing and promotional activities.
The tool compares what you did with what happened and when. It identifies which marketing efforts produced results and which did not. It is especially powerful for indie authors because it does the number crunching automatically.
You go to Kindle Reports at amazon.com/royalties, download the file, upload it, add your marketing log, click “Analyze,” and the tool connects actions to outcomes.
Audiobook Tools
The audiobooks tools can help you help your narrator as they work through recording your book.
Pronunciation Guide Generator
The Pronunciation Guide Generator reads your manuscript and creates a pronunciation guide for unusual words so you can give it to a human narrator. It outputs pronunciations in standard phonetic spelling and, if needed, in IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Narrators who read IPA can use it directly. Even if they do not, IPA can be pasted into tools that will read it aloud for reference.
You should still double-check the output. The tool does its best based on available knowledge. Even if it gets 95% of the words correct and you adjust the rest, it can still save you substantial time and money compared to waiting for mispronunciations from your narrator and having to correct them later.
Character Voice Profiler
The Character Voice Profiler creates voice profiles for each character, similar to the character compendium, but tuned for audiobook production.
It provides personality notes and likely vocal qualities, including accent suggestions, plus details the narrator might not grasp when a character first appears. It gives the narrator a clear, two- to three-page reference about who the characters are and what they should sound like.
You should tweak it. If you know your character Sarah is British, make sure that is reflected. That said, it is often surprisingly good at inferring details you have implied in the text.
This tool helps streamline audiobook production and reduces the risk of inconsistent character voices.
Experimental Tools
These tools have been and are being tweaked. They are evolving over time as we experiment with them.
Based AI (Cosmarch)
The Based AI tool is built on the Cosmarch tool by Alexander Macris. We experimented with making AI less woke, and he succeeded. He gave me permission to use his model here. It remains experimental, and I may change it beyond its current state, but it is a great tool.
Amazon Page Optimizer
The other Experimental Tool is the Amazon Page Optimizer. When it works, it is excellent. It scans your Amazon product page and provides recommendations to improve optimization for ranking and sales. If you are struggling with conversion, this tool can be extremely helpful, especially alongside the following episodes on Amazon page optimization:
- How to Craft Compelling Amazon Pages With Dave Chesson
- How to PROFITABLY Advertise a Solo Book on Amazon
- Amazon Algorithm Secrets That Separate Bestsellers
It is currently experimental because it does not work reliably. Amazon pages are not always scrapable, and we are in a cat-and-mouse game. When it moves out of Experimental and into Business Tools or Indie Author Tools, that will signal that I am confident in its reliability.
AI Knowledge Checkers
Next are the AI Knowledge Checkers (scroll to the bottom of the page for these tools). These tools generate the most negative feedback because people misunderstand how they work.
If you want ChatGPT to recommend your book, it needs to already know your book from its training data. If you ask ChatGPT, “What do you know about my book?” it may appear to know because it can search the web and it has conversational context from you. That does not mean it will recommend your book to other people.
These tools test what the model knows without allowing a web search. Because they run through the API, I can control whether searching is permitted. Search also costs extra tokens. For these tools, I do not pay for that additional search cost, so they cannot search. They only report what exists in the model’s core training data.
You type in your name and book title and click “Check.” The tool reports what it knows. If it does not know your book, that is not a failure of the tool. It is simply the result.
In my episode AI Optimization for Authors: How to get ChatGPT to Recommend Your book, I explain how to teach AI systems about your book and improve the likelihood of recommendation. I routinely get complaints along the lines of, “Grok knows my book,” but Grok is quick to run a search. That still does not tell you what is in Grok’s training data.
These tools are not widely used because many authors do not realize AI optimization is something they can work on. If you want to learn more listen to the following epsiodes:
- AI Optimization for Authors
- Discoverability in the Age of AI (Thomas interviewed by Joanna Penn)
This has become a meaningful area of expertise for me.
AI optimization can create a real edge with a relatively small amount of effort. I have even spoken with at least one person who asked ChatGPT what conference to attend and was directed to the Novel Marketing Conference. People underestimate how influential these systems can be.
The AI Knowledge Checkers help you understand your current baseline if you want to improve.
New Website Tools
SEO GEO Optimizer
A major way AI learns about your book is through your website. The SEO GEO Optimizer helps you optimize a webpage for AI discovery and understanding.
I covered this and several related website tools in my last episode, so I will not go deep here, but the toolbox includes a strong set of website optimization tools.
Book Page Scanner
The Book Page Scanner helps you optimize key book-related pages for AI, including pages designed to teach AI systems what your book is about. I discussed this tool in more detail in the Part 1 episode, along with other website tools.
Education Tools
Lesson Planner
A large portion of the publishing industry’s revenue is not consumer bookstore sales. It is educational sales: school libraries and textbooks. College textbooks can cost $300 per book, which inflates the overall dollar volume. Many authors miss this market because they do nothing to make their books attractive to educators.
Education appeal is not limited to nonfiction. Many novels can be positioned for classroom use.
The Lesson Planner helps you create classroom-ready lesson plans. You upload your manuscript, choose the grade level, enter the genre, and define the goal of the lesson.
If you wrote a Christian book and want a Sunday school lesson, you can set the goal accordingly. If your novel is a mystery with strong science elements, you can set a goal related to how scientific reasoning helps solve the case. That goal dramatically changes the lesson plan output.
The tool generates a full lesson plan, including activities and discussion prompts. You will want to tweak it, but getting something 90 percent complete is especially valuable if you have never built a lesson plan before.
Discussion Guide Builder
The Discussion Guide Builder is useful for classrooms and for book clubs.
You upload your manuscript, set the goal of the discussion, and the tool generates discussion questions tailored to your book. It is consistently strong.
Every book benefits from a discussion guide, but authors struggle to write them for their own work because they know the book too well. As James L. Rubart says, “It’s hard to read the label when you’re standing inside the bottle.” This tool gives you an outside perspective, and you can refine from there.
Classroom Activity Planner
The Classroom Activity Planner creates fun, educational activities that pair with your book. You upload the manuscript, select a grade level, and the tool generates activities automatically.
Many of these tools are intentionally simple to use, and this one is no exception. It helps you create classroom-friendly materials without needing an education background.
Quiz Maker
The Quiz Maker came from a request by an administrator at an elementary or middle school. You upload your manuscript, choose the quiz difficulty, and select the number of questions.
You’ll notice the correct answer appears first. That is intentional, not a bug. Many students take quizzes online now, which means teachers and administrators often have to copy the questions into educational software. In those interfaces, the correct answer typically needs to be entered first, followed by the incorrect options.
If you want a randomized version, generate the quiz and then message the tool, “Randomize the answers.” It will shuffle the answer choices for you.
Birthday Party Planner
I built the Birthday Party Planner after planning a themed birthday party for my oldest daughter, who loves books. For her last birthday, she was especially into The Boxcar Children. We created a full theme around the series, including a cake, foods inspired by the books, and activities tied to the story world. We used AI to help plan parts of it, and it struck me as a powerful marketing idea.
If a child loves your book enough to want a birthday party themed around it, who is most likely to buy that book next? The other parents.
With this tool, you upload your book, enter the book title and your name, and then provide the child’s age, the number of guests, your budget, and the party setting. It generates a full party plan. You essentially build a profile for your target reader and let the tool produce ideas tailored to your story.
Right now, it supports ages up to 17. I may expand it later to include themed adult birthdays as well.
This will not be a fit for every book, but for the right children’s book, it could unlock sales in a surprising way.
Patron Toolbox Ideas
A lot of these tool ideas come directly from listeners. You’ve been the source of many new tools. If there’s something you need help with and I haven’t built it yet, let me know. I’m making new tools all the time, and I have a long list of ideas for future tools.
If you’re a patron, give it a try. If you’re not, you can currently access everything for $10 a month, though that price may increase in the future. My goal is to always keep a $10-per-month option, but as costs rise, I may need to introduce limits on certain tools. I will likely add a $20 tier, possibly higher, that includes access to the most expensive tools and more usage for metered tools.
One of the most expensive tools to run is the Book Cover Designer, which I discussed in the last episode. Generating cover mockups through the API is costly. I originally designed it for reader magnets and temporary covers, but some authors use the output as their actual book cover.
These AI covers are not better than excellent human design, but they can outperform the kind of cover you might get from a $5 Fiverr gig. Some authors run the tool repeatedly and generate $50 worth of covers in a couple of hours. Because of that, I will likely add metering to the Book Cover Designer and other high-cost tools.
My goal is to keep these tools affordable. If you already support the podcast on Patreon at $10 per month or more, you can access them by going to PatronToolbox.com. If you are not yet a patron, you can become a Novel Marketing Patron today.
You’ll get access to 80-plus tools. My goal is to have more than 100 tools by the end of the year, all designed to help you work faster and sell more books.
Featured Patron
J.D. Rempel, author of Write with the Lord: 40 Quick Quiet Times for Authors
Two-minute spiritual power-ups that transform ordinary writing sessions into divine collaborations, reigniting your creative purpose while deepening your relationship with God.
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