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 to make corrections, chart typos, and rewrite certain passages for you. Microsoft Word, for example, has a “Re-write with CoPilot” option added to the drop-down menu. AIs can detect not only common typos, but also repetitive speech patterns and other formatting changes that need to be made. Though it is a process, you can even train an AI to recognize proper nouns exclusive to your book so that they aren’t flagged as typos.
Admittedly we have not tried this method yet, but some people are even submitting entire transcripts to AI programs and asking them for advice on how to “punch up” their draft and improve it. It’s almost like having a personal reviewer read your draft and give you notes, but it’s nearly instantaneous. I would take this approach with some caution as the AI might gloss through certain details, but otherwise it’s always good to have another perspective that you can use to iron out your story. Instead of prompting with “Can you read my manuscript and give me notes”, you can also be more specific and prompt with “Tell me if there are any plot inconsistencies in this manuscript”, or “Does this manuscript contain any factual errors when it comes to the time period that it is set in?” The more specific your prompts are, the better. Some schools even offer classes on prompting to get better results with AI, though there are also plenty of free tutorials to prompting online.
In terms of formatting, AI can also help save TONS of time: Whether it’s just asking ChatGPT a few questions of how books are supposed to be formatted, (hint: We wrote an article on it!) or wanting an AI to make the formatting changes FOR you. This sort of logic-based approach where there’s a very clear set of rules is what AI excels at. It can take entire books and resize the headers, create a table of contents, add page breaks wherever needed, and more. You may have to do another sweep to make sure everything is correct, but a majority of the work will be done already.
In short: AI + Book Formatting = Good. Next time, we will talk about book covers, arguably the best thing that AI is made for when it comes to the creation of a book. So much of the technology in the visual field of AI has gone so far in just 3 years.
Written by Connor Mayhorn
ChatGPT was used for additional research for this article.