How to use AI to write your book description

• In the first part of the series, we looked at how you can leverage generative AI chats like ChatGPT, Google Bard, or Bing Chat to help you with your ad copy.
• But what if we took this one step further, and used AI to write our whole book description for us? That’s what we’ll try today (spoiler alert: it’s not that easy).
• But what if we took this one step further, and used AI to write our whole book description for us? That’s what we’ll try today (spoiler alert: it’s not that easy).

The importance of context

• Generative AI isn’t magic. Nor is it a miracle solution to your copywriting problems. You can’t just ask an AI to write a blurb for your book out of thin air – first, you need to give the AI context about your book.
• If you’ve read a bit about generative AI, you’ll know that context is at the center of everything. The reason why current AI models aren’t good with long-form content is because they struggle to maintain context over longer pieces of text.
• But what kind of context are we talking about? Put shortly, it’s the information you feed to the AI in the form of a prompt. The more detailed that information, the more context the AI will have to work with – and the more relevant the results.

“So can I just feed my whole book to the AI, and ask it to write a blurb for it?”

• Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. First, you may remember from the last newsletter that whatever you “feed” to an AI will be used for future training purposes. You may or may not be okay with that – I just want you to be aware of it.
• More importantly, current public generative AI models just aren’t able (or willing?) to ingest long-form content like that:
• So what’s the solution? Only one, I’m afraid: you first need to write some sort of a description yourself.

From synopsis to book description

• The difficulty in writing an effective book description is that you need to condense the essence of your book into just a few sentences. As if that’s not hard enough, you have to grab the attention of the reader from the very first one! Your description should also reveal some of the main plot – or the main points of the book in the case of non-fiction – but naturally not everything. The point is to make the reader curious enough to want to start reading, without knowing everything about what’s going to happen.
• This is a delicate balance to strike, all the more when you come to it from an author perspective. Since we know everything that happens in our book, we tend to want to pack all that information into the blurb. Yet effective copywriting is most often achieved by leaving the right stuff out, rather than working more stuff in.
• As such, it’s usually much easier for us to write a synopsis, rather than a description. Unlike the book description, a synopsis reveals everything that happens in the book. You don’t need to pick and choose the right elements, or distill the essence of your work: you can just go chapter by chapter, making notes of what happens in each chapter and then putting the whole thing together.
• Of course, if you want to end up with a good synopsis, you’ll need to edit those notes for consistency, style, and flow (you can learn more about writing a strong synopsis
• But for our purposes for writing a book description here, just having a rough skeleton of the story on your hands will do.
• And now you probably guessed it: you feed that skeleton into your favorite generative AI model, and ask it to write a description. If you want some tips on how long that skeleton should be, and what crucial information it should contain, you can just ask your AI buddy.

Don’t expect perfection

• I’m genuinely amazed by what current generative AI models are able to come up with when it comes to copywriting. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, or usable as-is. If you follow this method, you’ll end up with a rough first draft of a book description.
• Because you’re limited in the context you feed the AI, it may make up stuff in the description that’s not even in the novel. More importantly, since it doesn’t know your style, the description won’t be written in your voice (nor that of your characters). And finally, though this may just be a ChatGPT thing, I’ve found that AI models have a tendency to resort to flowery (or downright purple) prose:

Nice use of the Thesaurus there, GPT-4!

• All that to say: you’ll need to rewrite a lot of it. But at least you’re not starting from a blank page, and there may be some salvageable, or even really good, passages.

In my example above, for example, there’s not a ton I’d keep, but the bit about “a secret, ancient power, a magic he had only heard of in whispered tales and old folk songs” I find is really good!

• Even better, you can always ask the chatbot to rewrite some of those passages for you, or provide several alternatives. You’ll still have a lot of work left to put the whole thing together, but it might feel more of a collaborative effort than just sitting down to write the description by yourself.
• All in all, AI chats can be a really useful tool when it comes to copywriting, but so far they’re just that: a tool. If you want a proper marketing professional, one with experience in your genre, to actually do the hard work for you.

But if you want to give it a try yourself – even for an older book that’s not selling too well – do give those AI chats a try, and let me know how it goes!