3 Ways You Can Use ChatGPT as an Author to Streamline Your Writing Process
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It's no secret that ChatGPT and AI models are taking the world by storm, and that includes the world of writing and publishing books. Whether you see it as a useful tool or are concerned about its possible long-term impact, it’s helpful to know about the potential use cases for ChatGPT as an author. While obviously this conversation is going to evolve as its capabilities expand, today I want to talk about three use cases I've found that are really helpful for authors who are working on a book.
What I do like about ChatGPT is its ability to streamline processes and free up your time for what actually matters, which is the writing component. So, spoiler alert: one of these use cases is not having ChatGPT write your entire book, which I do not recommend.
So, how can you successfully and efficiently use ChatGPT as an author?
1. Title Brainstorming
I know how challenging titles can be to come up with. You want it to strike that perfect, evocative tone that reflects the genre and intrigues readers. Believe me, even when I was in the publishing industry, titles changed so many times because it is so hard to get it right. This is a place where I think brainstorming with ChatGPT could be kind of fun and interesting.
I will say that when you are at the manuscript phase, coming up with the title is ultimately not that important, so you can feel fine keeping the manuscrip untitled for as long as you want. But I know many authors want a title, whether that is just to give your project more focus or to make it feel more real, or you're ready to query and you want to query with a working title. So, rather than spending hours and hours toiling over titles yourself, maybe you could try prompting ChatGPT and see what happens.
I gave ChatGPT a little bit of information about my plot and my story and then had it come up with some example titles. Here is the prompt I entered:
“Come up with a title for a contemporary thriller set in Iceland that follows two college students on a road trip during their summer break when one of them suddenly goes missing. Please provide 10 title ideas.”
Let's see what it came up with. We have:
Frozen Secrets
Vanished in Iceland
The Disappearance at Jökulsárlón
Icelandic Nightmare
The Lost Road
Summer Solstice Suspense
In Search of Aurora
Cold Traces
Midnight Sun Mystery
Dark Icelandic Roads
Some of them just make no sense whatsoever, like Cold Traces doesn't really mean much to me. It just feels like two words thrown together. Same with Summer Solstice Suspense — I get they're going for the alliteration, but that sounds so cheesy, and I don't want “suspense” in the title of my suspense novel. But I do kind of like In Search of Aurora because I said there was a character missing. That character could be named Aurora, and this also reflects the Aurora Borealis, so that one could be cool to play around with a little bit.
Even if you don’t want to move forward with any of these titles, it can at least get the gears turning on aspects you want to reflect in the title or words that you want to use. I will say that with ChatGPT, you want to make sure that it's not giving you titles that already exist and are already being used for a book, so before going forward with any title, I would definitely do a Google search.
2. Finding Comparable Titles
I hope some of you just breathed a huge sigh of relief because I know how challenging comparable titles can be to come up with.
To me, this is one of the most exciting ways to useChatGPT as an author in its current form because as an author, you can't read every single book that has been published in your genre in the past few years. But ChatGPT has been trained on a huge amount of data and it might know a lot more about recently published books than we do and can help sift through them for us. There's really no easy way to Google comparable titles as it is, so ChatGPT fills that void.
For this one, I do want to give it very specific parameters for coming up with the comparable titles because it is a bit of a dance in that you want to find something that's recently published, something that's published by a traditional publishing house, and something that sold well but isn't necessarily a mega bestseller.
I used the same random plot idea that I came up with and asked ChatGPT to come up with some comps. Here was my exact input:
“Provide a list of 10 thrillers that involve one or more of the following aspects: Iceland, college students, someone disappearing, road trip, dual first person POVs. The thrillers should have been published in the past five years and should have sold well but were not huge bestsellers. They should all have been published by traditional publishing houses, excluding self-published books.”
This was interesting because ChatGPT misunderstood me. It said:
“Unfortunately, I cannot provide a list of thrillers that meet all the specific criteria you've outlined.”
I said I wanted books that involved one or more of the listed aspects, so I don't know why it was confused there. It went on to say:
“While there are certainly thrillers that involve Iceland, college students, someone disappearing, road trips, and dual first person POVs, it is unlikely that all of these elements would be present in a single book. Additionally, it's difficult to verify which books have sold well without access to specific sales data.”
That is fair. I actually like that it raised this point that they can't find a comp that includes all of those aspects because that's something I talk about a lot with writers who I am working with on query materials. They say, “Well, there's no comp for my book because there's nothing that combines all of these aspects of my plot, my characters, and my setting.” A comp should not be a perfect match to your book. That's impossible, because you've written something entirely unique. A good comp ultimately should just reflect certain aspects of your book. That's why I really like the structure of saying your book is X meets Y. Maybe one comp involves the setting and another comp involves something about the characters or the tone.
So, let's go through what ChatGPT actually provided me. It went on to say:
“However, I can provide a list of five contemporary thrillers that involve some combination of these elements and have been well received by critics and readers.”
And then it gives me a few titles. I noticed that they were all published no later than 2021. That is because its data set is actually limited, so that is something very important to consider when and if you are using ChatGPT for comps; the data set it has now (at least version 3) stops at 2021, so as we go into future years, it is either going to need to be updated with more recent information, or you're going to end up using old comps.
After receiving an answer, I would Google each of the books, read an excerpt if you can on Amazon or another website, and read the description. Maybe read the whole book, ideally, if you have time and you feel compelled to — that's always the best way to know if it's a good comp.
My last word of caution here is that ChatGPT can spit out totally incorrect information, so you also want to make sure that these books actually exist. Do not just copy and paste this into your query letter without doing further research and looking into the books —just use it as a starting point.
3. Background Research
Let's talk about the final use case for ChatGPT as an author, which is using it for background research. Almost every book involves some amount of research. Whether you have a character who's trying to open a bakery in Asheville and you don't really know what all of that process entails, or you are writing a historical novel about the Roman army and you don't know what those characters would have worn during a certain battle, you're likely going to find yourself Googling obsessively over certain details that you want to portray accurately in your book.
This is where ChatGPT can be a really helpful research tool. You can, of course, find this information via a Google search, but the nature of the AI model is that it gives you a very succinct answer and grabs information from multiple sources and compiles it into a nice, clean answer for you (versus you having to read 10 articles).
Let's try it out for this thriller set in Iceland. Maybe I want to research what a 10-day road trip would look like around the entire country of Iceland and what different stops the characters would make. I could prompt ChatGPT with something like:
“Please provide an itinerary for a five-day road trip across the country of Iceland, stopping at all of the major tourist attractions. All of the stops should be accessible by car and should be open to visitors in the winter months.”
In response, ChatGPT gave me a full itinerary. It told me all these different attractions to visit and gave me the overview of which cities we would be traveling to on each day, all the way back to Reykjavik. That's pretty interesting; if I needed to structure my novel, maybe I could structure it around day one, day two, day three, etc. as the thriller is unraveling. I could potentially dive into some of these different sites and attractions that it is suggesting and see if I want my characters to go there.
You can see how there are different options for prompting it and receiving information that you can maybe incorporate in your novel without having to do hours and hours and hours of background research.
As with all the other use cases, don't take anything it says at face value; you will always want to do thorough research, but it can get the wheels turning.
I hope this gave you some inspiration for how you can use ChatGPT as an author to empower you and free up your time for the stuff that you actually want to be doing, and maybe it can even help you get unstuck.
Thanks so much for reading and happy writing!