Mastering Book Marketing: 7 Genius AI Strategies to Help Authors

by Penny Sansevieri | Oct 10, 2023 | Author Branding

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There’s a lot of buzz out there around ChatGPT, and a lot of it is scary. Like the fact that ChatGPT could take over your job or how it’s changing the publishing industry.

More recently, there has been discussion about users using this AI to write books. With every technology comes new fears of how it will impact us, but there’s also the opportunity to learn how we can benefit from this technology by incorporating it into your book marketing.

Because elevating your book marketing game requires innovation. And exploring the power of ChatGPT can supercharge your efforts, propelling your book to new heights while turbocharging your creativity.

Before we jump into this topic, let me start by saying that the information you get out of ChatGPT is only as good as the information you put into it. Meaning, if you type the following: “Write a blog post about my memoir.” It’ll have nothing to go on and likely will write a blog post about what it takes to write a memoir. It’ll be a fairly generic post which may serve your needs, but likely your readers will benefit from something a bit more enticing. This is why I like to add details and use the “act as if” prompts which I’ll detail below. The act-as-if prompts tell the AI to pretend it’s a person doing a specific job and as such, the detail of whatever the answer is you’re looking for should reflect that expertise.

So let’s delve into seven imaginative ways you can leverage ChatGPT to revolutionize your book marketing strategy.

Engage with Fans Through Author Q&A Sessions

Sometimes coming up with your own interview questions can be rough. Maybe your questions aren’t hard-hitting enough, or maybe they don’t touch on the areas readers really are about.

The idea is to feed into the AI enough information so that it can create a fun, compelling, or unique list of questions that your readers will resonate with. Also, if you’re pitching the media, there’s a good opportunity to create a list of questions they would gravitate to as well.

*Suggested Prompt:*

“Act as if you’re a seasoned chef specializing in plant-based eating and provide a. list of 10 of the most commonly asked questions about plant-based eating.”

For the example above, I used the idea of a cookbook, but you could swap virtually anything into this example.

Create a Fun Quiz

Quizzes are always fun, and readers love them, but they’re often hard to craft. In the example below, I’m suggesting that the AI not only create the list of quiz questions, but offer guidance on the answers. It’s fun to do it that way because this will also prompt your own answers to their right or wrong responses.

*Suggested Prompt:*

You are a quiz master and are going to ask me 10 questions on the subject of [insert idea]. You will ask them one at a time and wait for my response. After each response tell me if I am right or wrong.

Curate Tailored Reading Recommendations

I also love recommending books that are similar to mine, to help readers who really want to dig into the topic get a list of recommended reads and, it’s a fun way to spread some goodwill to your fellow authors.

*Suggested Prompt:*

“Act as if you are an expert at [insert] and craft a set of personalized book recommendations for readers who enjoyed [Book Genre/Theme]. These suggestions should resonate with the spirit of my book: [insert title].”

Unlock Behind-the-Scenes Insights for Blog Posts

If you’ve struggled with what to write on your blog, why not return to the origin story of your book? Open the doors to your writing journey and share behind-the-scenes glimpses into your creative process, research adventures, and inspirational moments.

*Suggested Prompt:*

“Act as if you’re a [insert genre] writer and generate a captivating story about the inception of my book, detailing the research, challenges, and eureka moments that fueled its creation.”

Create Fun and Useful Social Media Posts

Coming up with ideas for your social media posts isn’t always easy, so let the AI do the work for you. You can either have it come up with fun captions or create an action plan for 30 days of social media content. But again, you’ll want to give the AI lots of context. So, for example, if you want captions, be clear on who the captions should resonate with.

*Suggested Prompt:*

Acting as if you’re a social media expert, use my book to create a list of posts for [insert preferred social media site] I will post an expert of my book below, please copy the tone and voice of this excerpt: [you can include an excerpt of any length, but ideally it should be something that really encapsulates the book, you could even use a lengthy synopsis]

Defeat Writer’s Block with AI-Powered Blog Ideas

As I mentioned earlier, it’s not easy to create blog posts – but sometimes all you need is an idea. I’ve used ChatGPT a lot to help me generate blog post ideas. Here’s how it can work for you.

The idea is that you want to either focus on your book topic, or the industry topic if you’ve written non-fiction. For me, I’ll go into the AI and ask it for the top 5 things that most authors struggle with, or I’ll give it some input, maybe a subject matter and ask it for blog post ideas based on that subject matter.

If you’ve written a fiction book, you’ll need to decide what the focus of your blog is. Are you writing exclusively on the topic of your book or are you going to share other book recommendations, like what I mentioned above, or maybe talk about the history of the time period you wrote about (if you’ve written historical fiction) or maybe you wrote a mystery book series and you give your protagonist little mini mysteries to solve on your blog. AI can help with that, too but you’ll want to spend a little bit of time with it in order to get some familiarity of how the system works. For now, let’s focus on using ChatGPT to create a list of blog post ideas based on or around your book’s topic.

*Suggested Prompt:*

Much like before, we’re going to tell the AI what it is – or how to act, so keep in mind that whatever you decide to write about, will need to get written into this prompt, so the whole nature of this command may change.

“Act as if you’re a bestselling mystery author and generate three blog post ideas that might be interesting to someone who reads mysteries.” So what this does, is it tells the AI to dig through Google to see what readers of mystery are looking for. You can do the same with any genre but again, this is a basic prompt. For blog writing you can get super creative with this AI guidance so for the purposes of this blog post, I’m just giving you a place to start!

Use it to Create Amazon Ad Copy or Book Descriptions/Blurbs for Amazon

Writing ad copy can be tricky, especially with Amazon ads. For example, if you’re running Brand Ads the allotment of characters drops way down, making writing enticing ad copy challenging. Ai is great for this as well as book blurbs and ramping up your book description for your Amazon retail page.

*Suggested Prompt:*

“Act as if you’re a seasoned copywriter and use the following book description to generate ad copy of [X] characters that will appeal to the readership for this book. The readers are {describe them briefly with or without age ranges]. Here is the book description: [insert your description].”

You can use this same prompt, worded slightly differently to generate your book description – in that case, I’d recommend that you include the book description and ask for a rewrite to include a headline!

These are just a few ways that AI can help you with your book marketing, generating ideas, and helping you bring you’re A+ game to this effort. So get onto ChatGPT and explore some of these options and see how AI can help you generate more ideas, more content, and more readers!