How to Use AI for Your Book Proposal

What to avoid and how to maximize the tech at hand

AI can be a useful tool as you write a nonfiction book proposal, but there are guardrails to keep in mind. The basic principle is to use AI without letting it use you.

What NOT to Do

All of the major publishers now have a policy that they do not publish books that were created using AI. That means you can’t just ask AI to write your book proposal or your book. It must be your original work. Do not ask AI to write sections of your book proposal.

What might not be as obvious is that you should never, under any circumstances, paste your book proposal or any section of it into AI to ask it to improve it, edit it, or summarize it. So, for example, you should not paste your overview into AI and ask it to write an eye-catching query letter based on it.

Anything you feed into AI it will use and incorporate into what it outputs for other people. So, if you give it access to your overview or your sample chapter, it then has that information and your exact words, and it can use them to create material for other users. You are giving it permission to use your work and present it to other users. Do not give AI your work!!

A Few Quick AI Tips

Before I get into how it can help you, let’s take a second to understand how to get the best information out of it.

When you ask AI to do something, it’s called prompting. How you write your prompt directly affects what you get back. There are free classes on prompting you can find online through Google or Coursera, but in general, it’s important to be very clear, very specific, and write in short sentences. It can help to give it a numbered list of what you’re asking it to do.

AI works best when you give it some context, so ask it to act like a book expert, book agent, book publisher, or book proposal expert. Tell it the tone you want, so maybe you want wording that is exciting, compelling, inspiring, thought-provoking, or shocking. Be clear on what the task is that you are asking it to do, such as writing a one-paragraph pitch or researching statistics.

Sometimes, you have to go back and forth a few times to get exactly what you need so you can ask it to revise its findings or output in specific ways, such as by focusing on words that are important for marketing or by expanding the type of statistic or data you’re asking it to find. Adjusting your prompt in small ways can change the output you get so keep at it until you get back what you’re looking for.

Remember to use AI as a tool, not as a substitute for your own work. Think of AI as an elevated Google search, a tool everyone uses all the time. Using AI is not cheating if you don’t ask it to write your proposal for you. It is a useful way to access information, gather ideas, and brainstorm.

Ways AI Can Help With Your Book Proposal

Now that we’re clear that you don’t ever want to give AI your original work, there are many ways you can use AI to help you write or improve your book proposal.

I’m going to go through the sections of a book proposal and give you some ideas for how AI can help you with each section.

Query Letter

You can tell AI to write a compelling pitch for a book on your topic. Do not copy and paste what it gives you into your own query letter (it wouldn’t be your own work then). Instead, look at the words and phrases it uses. Many of them might be useful to you. They might ignite a spark in your brain that leads you to other words. You can also take some of the words it gives you and plug it into Thesaurus.com to see where that leads you.

If you are looking for an agent, you can tell AI to go to the Association of American Literary Agents and create a spreadsheet of the agents in your genre that are open to submissions and what their submission requirements are. This will save you tons of time. Creating that list of where you’re going to send your proposal and what each agent wants is a huge PIA, frankly. This creates it for you in a few seconds.

Overview

If you’re struggling to explain what your book is about, tell AI a sentence or two about the topic and ask it to write a paragraph explaining what makes the book new, exciting, or interesting. Use the output as inspiration to punch up your overview.

As with the query letter, AI can help you come up with the words to make a compelling and noticeable pitch. Try not to use the exact same wording as you did in the query letter.

AI can also be helpful in defining what the problem or interest area is that your book speaks to. Tell it what the book is about and ask it to explain why this kind of book is needed or to determine who it would appeal to. Defining the problem or specific interest niche is key in showing that your book fills an empty niche.

Bio

If you’re having a hard time hyping yourself, tell AI some key facts about yourself and ask it to write a bio that highlights your expertise and positions you as an author about your topic. Use this as inspiration to write your bio, mimicking the tone and structure, but making it your own work. This can help you get past that sticking point where you feel like you’re not an expert and have no authority to write this book.

Audience

AI can help you figure out who your audience actually is. Ask it to determine what kind of people would want to read a book about your topic and ask for identifiers such as age, gender, sex, location, career, etc. You can also ask it to name some key characteristics these readers might share, such as having anxiety, being interested in travel, having children, coping with grief, interest in politics, etc. This can help you get a handle on who your audience actually is and help you think about secondary audiences.

Then you can get AI to find statistics and numbers about your audience size. For example, you can ask it to find studies and stats that show how many people have spouses who are narcissists, own a home built before 1970, hike regularly, have public speaking fears, wake up tired every day, etc. I have clients who have had great success finding data they needed this way, which Google just didn’t find.

Always verify this data by asking it to provide links to sources and then clicking through to make sure it’s real. AI can “hallucinate” and make up things that aren’t true or don’t make sense, so always confirm what it tells you.

Promotion

Tell AI the topic of your book and the audience and ask it to think like a marketing specialist and create a list of specific places and outlets where you could promote the book. Ask it to include podcasts, websites, associations, organizations, newspapers, television shows, social media, and more. You can also ask it to generate a list of ideas for email campaigns, YouTube videos, giveaways, book signings, and more.

You can drill down if needed and ask it to be even more specific. For example, you could ask it to create a list of 10 podcasts that cover topics relevant to your book and which have guests. Or you could ask it to create a list of professional organizations related to your topic or audience that have conferences, webinars, or continuing education and which use speakers or keynoters.

You could ask it to identify places where you could write opeds on topics related to your book, TikTokers who might be interested in the book, or ask it to brainstorm some unique publicity approaches for your book.

This is a great way to get ideas, to spark new ideas of your own, and to just get a handle on some promotion approaches. It can help you to think outside of the box and come up with new approaches and options.

Competition

AI can locate competitors to your book, but be sure to give it some parameters, such as books that are not self-published, books published within the past three years, or books that have a specific approach. You can also ask it to summarize those books so that you can get a better idea of what they are about, which allows you to write a better comparison to your own book.

Be sure to take a look at the books it names on Amazon to ensure AI is not hallucinating.

Table of Contents and Chapter Summaries

When you are first starting to work on your book, you can tell AI a little bit about the book topic and who it is for and ask it to generate a list of topics that should be in the book. This can help you flesh out your table of contents and may give you ideas about things you haven’t thought of yet. AI can also help you rework chapter titles to be more compelling, use alliteration, or be shorter.

Do not feed a chapter into AI and ask it to summarize it for you! For the summaries, you could feed in some facts about what is in the chapter and ask it to write a paragraph that summarizes it and arranges the information in an appealing way. Don’t copy that, but use it as a jumping off point to write your own summary.

Sample Chapter

Again, don’t give AI your sample chapter. You can use AI to help you organize topics in a chapter, give you some compelling or interesting wording that might be useful, or suggest other information that might go in a chapter about that topic.

It can also help you come up with exercises or tools for your reader. If you’re providing case studies in your book, AI can help you come up with ideas for fictional case studies to use.

It’s also very helpful for creating tables, lists, checklists, diagrams, and graphics to add into your chapter.

Final Thoughts

AI is a tool that can help you work through your book proposal or improve it. Look at it as an assistant that can give you ideas, find data, organize your thoughts, suggest things, or help you find the right wording and tone for your proposal.

Fun Stuff

In My World

I’m deep into editing a book about narcissism for a client. I’m watching the forsythia and daffodils bloom and waiting patiently for the tulip bulbs I brought home from Amsterdam last year to bloom. I also can’t stop thinking about the carrot cake I’m going to make for Easter!

If you need help writing a nonfiction book proposal, nonfiction book, or fiction book or need an editor for any type of book, please reach out to me at brette@brettesember.com.

Obsessed With…

I’m reading Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, and it’s so good. Who’s your ghost, Brooke? She’s very open about the aging process and all the feels involved and gets very personal and raw. Each chapter contains her personal experiences, but then her ghost does amazing work by including research and statistics about the topic. It’s a really great read.

Good Goods

When we were traveling in New Zealand, I took this photo of a sign at the airport:

It’s a quote from The Hobbit. I’m not a big word art person, but this spoke to me, and I wished I’d taken a better photo because I really wanted to frame it and hang it on my office wall. I have been Googling for a year and a half since then and found only one sign online with this that I liked, but it seems that whoever owns that site is not accepting orders. So I finally made my own, printed it and framed it, and it now hangs in my office: