Can You Write A Book With AI And Get Traditionally Published?

I am a big fan of newsletters becoming the foundation of books. I think it's an incredibly efficient way of writing about a topic or a category for a long period of time. So I love that. I encourage it. Absolutely do that. On the traditional side, there's all sorts of stuff here. First of all, um, you have to remember that At the end of the day, it's— it almost doesn't even matter what you do because the manuscript is going to go through 7 layers of quality control inside of a publishing house. So let's just say it in the most extreme way possible. Let's say that you wrote an entire book with AI, 100%, and you didn't even read it. You just took all 300 pages and you gave it to the publisher, they're still going to have the agent go through it, the editor go through it, the senior editor oversee the editor going through it. They're still going to have all of those things. And so if the book goes through all of those layers of quality control and gets published, like, who's fault? Who is at fault if later they're like, AI wrote this? Right? It's like, at least they are at least 50%, you know what I mean? And so you— I think, A, like, don't overcomplicate it. You have to remember that publishers are still going to have quality control and their hands in it. You don't necessarily need to like 100% think you own the responsibility of that because that's not true.

Yeah.

The second point is I think it's really important. This is a great just nugget for everyone here. When you hear people say, doesn't matter what industry, when you hear people say, I don't want you using AI, or I don't want it to be AI written, what they are referring to is someone who uses a very poor prompt and then gets a very poor output. And then deploys zero effort in improving that final output. So it's not that AI is the problem. When people say, "I don't want you using AI," the problem they're pointing at is, "I don't want you to defer 100% of the thinking." So for you, if you're going through and you're working on newsletters with clients, and yeah, you're using AI, but you're also reading through it and you're fact-checking and you're adding sources as needed. You know, if AI gives you some stat and you're like, oh, I want to double-check and make sure that that's real, and you go and actually find the source to the thing. If you're reading through paragraphs and you're like cleaning up some of the language, like it is impossible for anyone to know, well, how much of that was AI and how much of that was you? Because you're still— you are still a very important participant in the creation of the thing.

Okay, yeah, I think the question for me— and maybe, like you said, I'm just too in the weeds— is kind of overthinking the process itself. Where when I started, however many years ago, it's you're ideating, you're brainstorming, you're mind mapping, you're drafting, and then you bring in other people— your editor, your agent, whoever it is. And that's when their input comes in, but the foundation is the author. So then for the foundation to be AI, I think that's what's kind of tripping me up. And this is a very like— I— this isn't a problem I've run into before. I'm not sure I'll run into it a bunch just because of I don't want to be ghostwriting books, but just for kind of moving ahead Yeah, just curious about some kind of the prompt would be mine, but the original draft would be AI.

I think you might be overcomplicating it because when you say the prompting is mine, but the final draft is AI, you're separating— The first draft. The first draft is AI, right? You're separating these two as if they are in individual containers. It's like you write the prompt and then whatever AI writes, you have no say in it. That's just not true. What's going to happen is you're going to write the prompt and then AI is going to spit something out and then you're going to read what AI wrote and you're going to make your own subjective decisions about, I really like that intro. I don't like what you did here in the middle. I really like what you did at the end. Let's move some of these pieces around. The thing to remember is that with AI, every single person in every single role basically goes from being an individual contributor to a department head. If you were working in a publishing house using AI, you go from being the editor or the entry-level writer who takes the first pass to AI does the first pass and now you are the senior editor. But the senior editor wouldn't have a job if they were just like, oh, the intern wrote it. I don't need to check that out.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, that's helpful. Do you recommend people mention, hey, when I'm ghostwriting for you, I use AI as a tool? Or is that so long past that people just assume everyone's using it and it's fine?

Yeah, I don't— it's like you have to remember what's the thing that the person really cares about. Like ultimately the person only cares about a high-quality end product. They don't really care how you get there, you know? And so if I were you, I would just talk more about the process and the way that you think. You're the senior editor, you know? How do you make decisions? How do you think about coming up with high-quality ideas? And whether you then go execute on that using AI or talking to a friend that is in the journalism industry or talking to a mentor, it doesn't matter, right? All that matters is like, how do you piece together this end product that the person really enjoys and really cares about? The way that I handle it is just talking more about the process. And then if someone says, do you use AI? I said, yeah, absolutely. I use it to be efficient. I don't use it to do all the work for me and I don't use my brain, but I use it to research really quickly, to help generate ideas really quickly, to review my drafts, to get feedback on the writing before I send it to you, just to make sure that I'm giving you the highest quality end product. You just frame it as a tool that's helping you rather than something that's replacing you.

Yeah. Rather than the writer itself.

Exactly.

That's helpful.

That makes sense. Any, any follow-ups?

Yeah, I think the main question that sparked it is for if authors are querying publishers, they now have like a check. Did, did you use AI at all to contribute anything to your writing? And I think that's kind of the question mark for me.

Yeah, but like, so a couple things. One, I don't know if you or anyone here has seen people do this on X all the time where it's like they take something that absolutely AI didn't write and then the AI generator check thing is like, oh, someone put in the Declaration of Independence and the AI checker was like, this is 100% AI. It's like these things, this is such new technology that the reality is no one really knows what the answer is. And second, at the end of the day, like, there are tons of— I know a handful of them personally. There are a ton of creators that use AI constantly that are writing books and having them published and everything. The issue again is not, did you use AI or no? The thing the publisher really wants to know is, how much of the thinking did you defer to this technology, and how much effort did you put forth in making sure that all of it is actually correct? Yeah, you know, that's the thing they care about, right?

Okay, so then if you're using newsletters to test the ideas, to re-edit, to make it best for your audience, then you're, you know, using AI a bit, but it's really your effort, your work.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, good question.

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