If you are reading this, you likely have interest in writing and sharing your own books. Or you may be a book publisher, where you print & distribute other people’s books. Or you may just have a passing interest in books. No matter the case, there is one crucial thing you need to know about, as it’s sweeping the book market: AI, also known as artificial intelligence. Used in everything from photographs, to social media, to even advertising, it’s no secret that AI is a booming industry. The majority of people are using AI in their daily lives. A few
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Books, AI & You: Part 8: Social Media Marketing
Of course, book fairs and author signings aren’t the only way to get the word out. Recently, there have been more people using social media every day, and that number is rising. According to Statista, people on average, spend over 2 hours on social media per day. It’s a great, fast way to be updated on current world events and connect with other people. You can post nearly anything that you want, completely for free, on any social media platform as long as it follows their content guidelines. Not to mention that the way social media is designed encourages viewers
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Books, AI & You: Part 7: Traditional Marketing
One of the most important parts of selling a book is how you market it. This will ultimately be what drives most of your sales. This can be intimidating at first due to how difficult it can be to build up momentum and how many ways there are to market, but it is very important and in the long run will do wonders for your book. If you want your book to be a success, you must market it. Constantly. People aren’t going to buy a book, even a well-written one, if it’s a book that they’ve never heard of.
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Books, AI & You: Part 6: The Listing
For many authors, creating an online listing for people to buy your book might be the hardest part of selling a book. Just figuring out what sites to use is hard enough, let alone navigating all the different menu options, figuring out the ISBN, and more. Putting up listings is a long and often convoluted process, one that AI sadly can’t do for you, but can at least help you with. By asking ChatGPT “How do I list my book for sale online?“, it will give you detailed instructions on the different websites that you can list your book on,
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Books, AI & You: Part 5: The Cover
Here is where the fun really begins, and you can really play around with the visual side of AI. For many authors, the cover is the hardest part of making a book. People spend hundreds, even thousands of hours just to get good at designing book covers. And taking a book that you’ve always described with words, and being tasked to put visuals to it, is no small feat. Before AI, you either had to design the cover yourself, which would often turn out poorly given the lack of designing experience or a budget for a professional photo shoot. Or
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Books, AI & You: Part 4: Formatting & Revising
After writing your book, most authors will take the time to read over it and revise it. This involves double checking for typos, making sure everything in the story flows well and makes sense, making sure sentences aren’t worded in a clunky manner, and formatting them in a way that will look pretty for print. It might seem daunting to make all these edits, but don’t worry. Don’t let the last post’s scare put you down, this is another area where AI can shine. Many recent text editors have an AI tool built into the program that will allow you
Read more...Books, AI, & You: Part 3: The Writing
Alright: You are now ready to start your book. You’ve done your research, you’ve looked at the tools you have available to you, and you may have a solid idea of the general structure and plot of your book. Next comes every writer’s favorite step: the writing. All good authors must love the writing process. Even if they get stuck sometimes, even if it gets hard, they need to have a passion for writing. If you do not have a passion for writing, or a passion for the subject that you are writing about, then you shouldn’t be writing a
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Books, AI & You: Part 2: The Research
Say you want to write a cookbook. If you are going to write a cookbook, you would need to prepare yourself for an extensive amount of research. You would need to know what appliances to use and how to use them, what the best ingredients are, what ingredients work well with others, use every bit of prior knowledge that you have with cooking, and maybe even try some of these recipes yourself to see if they work. The same goes for non-fiction books: You would need to compile articles from a variety of different, often hard to find sources, past
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Five Quick Tips on Marketing Your Book
So you’ve finally written your book and put it out there in the world. You’ve planned it out, jumped through the hoops of getting it released, and finally have it ready to be purchased. But there’s a problem: You haven’t heard of anyone buying your books. You keep refreshing the listing, and it never changes. Before you know it, It’s been months, and you haven’t sold a single copy! That would discourage anyone. Why is this the case? It’s all in the marketing. In an age of constant information, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. According
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The Top 5 Myths About Printing
After 30 years of printing, publishing, and copying, we’ve often encountered some common misconceptions among our customers. Here are the 5 most common myths about the printing process that we get at Zip, Print & Copy: Myth #1: Printing is an easy process. Far from it; it’s not as simple as just sending a file over and it will automatically be printed to the correct size and formatting. Printers read files in a very specific way, and can only read certain files. A file that’s formatted to be 8.5″ by 11″ won’t automatically be shrunken to fit a book printed
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