Experiments in Book Marketing with AI

Can my characters market my book for me? It’s worth a try to find out!

We Start Out Delusional

I would venture to say that almost all new authors publish their first book with the same delusion of grandeur: if I write a good enough book, people will buy it, love it, and tell their friends.

We believe, in our heart of hearts, that selling books is a meritocracy and that the best books will rise to the top, like cream. No one tells us the truth—and if they do, we don’t really believe them—that book marketing hard. Like, really hard. And that the books that sell best are the ones with the most convincing marketing, not the ones written the best.

Of course, both things can be true at once. A beautifully written book can have great marketing and sell like proverbial hotcakes. And the reverse can be true, a mediocre book can find the right audience with very little marketing and explode.

But for the majority of authors, selling books will be an uphill battle because the skills it takes to sell books are not the same as the skill it takes to write them. And if we can agree that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to master a skill, authors are often starting way behind the curve in terms of simply understanding marketing, not to mention navigating the labyrinthine halls of the book industry.

So We Have to Learn Fast and Get Creative

What does all of this mean for bright and shiny authors who want to send their books out into the world? It means we will try anything, and I mean almost anything (I do have some standards, thank you) to get our books in front of potential readers.

And what is one thing almost all marketing arsenals need? Images. Lots and lots of images. Images of our books, of our characters, of people reading our books, of scenarios in which our books could look cool, and so on.

I’m lucky that, as an artist, I can provide myself with hand-crafted art. But there is only so much time in a day, and so much money in my pockets, which means I have to choose my battles carefully. I can’t always afford to spend 6 hours creating a digital painting, or searching through stock photos, or compositing something cool.

I’m still a desperate author, willing to try anything to give my books a home. That means I need marketing images that will be sticky—both interesting and compelling enough to catch people’s attention and get them engaged over time—which means experimenting with technology.

Technology to the Rescue?

As I was gearing up to do some marketing this morning, I happened across an article about Creative Reality Studio, a software that uses artificial intelligence to animate still images of people speaking prerecorded text, or text-to-speech.

After chosing or uploading an image and typing or uploading a pre-recorded mp3, the AI does it’s magic and voila! You have a video of a person who doesn’t exist giving a speech they didn’t write. Naturally, my artist+author brain went, “Could I create a video of one of my characters saying lines from the books? Maybe reading the blurb, or having conversations!?”

I want to make one decision clear: I could have licensed a photo of a person, or painted something from scratch. But my time and money are both limited. And I chose an illustration because it’s easier to suspend disbelief when something is uncanny if it is a piece of art, rather than a real person. And I’d rather not have any real people intimately tied to my characters.

Unless a studio out there is looking for movie options, in which case, COME AT ME.

In any case, this was an experiment, and one I didn’t want to invest too much in, just in case it doesn’t work.

So, you guessed it, I jumped on those ideas immediately. The first thing I needed to test my idea was a forward-facing image of my main character. Rather than spending multiple hours painting, I used another AI program, MidJourney, to create a rough representation of my Allie Chapter. This is what the AI gave me.

It’s a good start but, as you can see, there are several issues. Her eyes are wonky, her neck is too long, I don’t know what is happening with her hair, and her nose and lips aren’t properly aligned. But that’s where I come in.

After some retouching and digital painting, I have a pretty dang good representation of Allie.

Here’s a quick before and after, so you can see what was done.

Once I had a character to use, I needed something for her to say. Using Garage Band on my Mac, I recorded myself reading the blurb of The Laws of Founding as if Allie was saying it to someone.

Once all the pieces were in the system, I just had to hit the “Generate Video” button, and wait a few minutes.

And there, to my amazement, was my character; moving, speaking, and looking very…uncanny, but cool! It was just plain cool.

But the question remains…will it make good marketing? Will it be sticky? Will it sell books? I don’t know.

What I do know is that I feel inspired to try things, even crazy things, because who knows what’s possible? And book marketing is hard, so even if something has never been done before, if it’s weird or uncanny, or whatever—if it might sell books, I’m going to try it.

Because, to make a living, I have to sell dozens, if not hundreds, of books daily.

And seeing my characters come to life is really freakin’ cool.

I would love to hear what you think! Is it worth playing around with this more to see what I can come up with? Is this something you’d like to see more of, or should it be thrown in a trashcan and set on fire? Let me know!

And if you want to pick up The Laws of Founding, you can find it HERE.

Addendum

My feelings about AI art are complicated, and this isn’t the time to get into the nitty gritty of things like Copyright, etc. but please know that as an artist I am invested in the outcome, and learn as much about the process as I can.

AI generated art doesn’t create an amalgamation of other artist’s work; meaning, it doesn’t take bits and pieces from other artists and infringe on their intellectual property. And while Ai generated images cannot be copy-written as of right now, the future remains uncertain.

Here is a link to the best video description I’ve seen so far on how AI generates art. Give it a watch if you’re interested. And—whenever you can—HIRE ARTISTS!