Instead Of Using AI To Write That Book Here Is What To Do Instead

Just a few days ago, I witnessed a social media debate regarding using AI to create books that brought out the gloves for both pro and con positions. 2026 has been a year where I have watched the reality of AI become a polarizing discussion. You have some, like me, who see it as a tool that allows business owners to work smarter, not harder. While on the other side, you have those who point to data centers, AI slop, and doomsday-type scenarios. This discussion raised the ideas I want to share in this article. Though I may be pro-AI, I am not pro-AI to the point where I have no guardrails regarding this tool. There are many things I will use AI for, but writing articles, such as this, blog posts, or books is not one of them.

I have published books (both physical and digital) the old-school way, and I thus believe that it is not only possible, but it gives a great sense of accomplishment to behold a book you labored so hard to develop come to fruition. I wrote my first book as an ebook all the way back in the summer of 2000 (long before AI was available on the consumer level). You may have heard my story that I got into internet marketing back in 1999. One of the things I was learning back during this time was repurposing content to produce a small ebook. Repurposing content is the tactic of taking previously released content and making it new through repackaging.

During the summer of 2000, I didn’t believe that I had what it took to write a full book from scratch, so I started to look around at written assets I had already produced. One thing I was doing during this period was documenting my journey and sharing my knowledge on AOL message boards. Remember AOL… You got mail! Yeah, I have been around since that long. I began to gather the message board posts I had created and discovered that I had a lot of content to put into a book. So, with that, I began to organize my words into chapters in a new ebook. Some writings had to be expanded to make them fit in a book. Once completed, I produced a digital book titled: “The Keys To Unlock The Doors To Financial Freedom On The Internet”.

Over the years, I have written books from scratch and using this repurposing method; therefore, in the age of being able to generate written material from a prompt, I am an old-school purist who believes in creating your work from your own voice, your own research, and your own struggle. Because I have taken a position of being pro-AI, some may assume that I would also consider using this tool for my writings as well. Technically, you could develop a prompt, give background, context, and audience to create a book with ChatGPT or similar tools. However, I believe that book belongs to AI’s voice and not your own. I further believe the book would be soulless, because though your name is on it, you are the missing ingredient in the book. With the advancements of generative AI, I’m sure eventually a well-written book could be produced, but as an author, where is the fun in that?

I don’t subscribe to the anti-AI view, so I’m not saying that AI is useless in the process of writing a book. There are many ways AI can help you in the writing process without actually writing your book for you.

How AI Can Help You Write Your Book Without Writing Your Book?

1. Ideation. You could have an idea for your next book, but it gets stuck at just that, an idea. You can run the story or non-fiction idea through AI for feedback.
   
2. Mock book cover. There is debate whether you should use AI to generate your book cover, and I will not advise you either way in this writing. However, you can run your ideas for a book cover through AI and ask it to generate a book cover, spine, and back mockup. If you don’t want to use AI for the final design, you can take this mockup to a professional graphic designer.
   
3. Editing. Grammarly is now infused with AI tools, so you can use it for spell check, grammar, and general writing feedback. You can use AI (ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) as an extra set of eyes to review your book without changing the content. If you write your book in Google Docs then you have access to Gemini for spelling and grammar checks.
   
4. Outline / table of contents. Sometimes seeing an orderly table of contents can help you get started by organizing your points. You can use AI to come up with this table of contents by sharing your ideas for the book, themes, and topics you want to address. Then, you can tweak it either with AI suggestions or your own efforts.
   
5. Research. What if you needed a few quotes or longer written passages to support your ideas in writing? Of course, you could just go to the library, use Google, or other resources, but AI can speed up this process by giving it the task to look up a few quotes or passages.
   

Other ways to write a book while working smarter, not harder, without letting AI do it

Instead of letting AI write assets for you, here are a few tactics you can use to produce quality writings in your own voice and with your own efforts. These are all based on strategies I have used to produce books, articles, and small guides.

1. One page a day for 90 days. The idea of writing a book from scratch, which could comprise hundreds of pages, can be intimidating when you are staring at page one with a long way to go. A book doesn’t have to be an encyclopedia; it can be a focused 100 pages. To complete this, you can commit to writing one page a day (4 paragraphs) for about 90 days, which will give you about 100 pages of book material.
   
2. Repurpose existing articles/blog posts. Another strategy to use would be looking through your existing writings and finding enough related content that could be compiled into a book. The base of a few of my books have been repurposed blog posts/articles that I expanded into chapters. The repurposed writings may or may not be enough material to complete a full book, but if you knock out 25–50 pages, you are further ahead than starting from scratch.
   
3. Social media content. Related to the last strategy is taking a few longer-form social media posts to become content in your new book. You could do an audit of your social media content to find ideas, fragments that could be included or posts that could become chapter starters.
   
4. Speak it! The last strategy I will offer is the ultimate move to work smarter, not harder. If you produce regular YouTube videos and/or podcast episodes in your business lane, you are sitting on a gold mine of content that can be repurposed into articles, blog posts, or chapters in a book. I have personally used this to produce written content. To get this done, you would want to use a tool like Otter to convert your audio/video into text that can be shaped into articles, blog posts, or chapters in your book. If you have a lot of video/audio content, you could use this as an easy strategy to create written works regularly.

You can do one or all of these strategies to produce your newest book. While AI could write your book, I think there is a great satisfaction from holding something you know you put blood, sweat, and tears into.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate you investing your time here.

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