The Question Underneath "Which AI Tool Should I Use?"

I get asked this a few times a week. By authors. By small publishers. By people I meet at industry events who have heard I work on AI licensing and assume I have a tool recommendation in my back pocket.

I do not.

I was on Kathleen Kaiser and Adanna Moriarty’s podcast last month and one of them - I think it was Adanna - asked me what tools I recommend to authors. I said the question is upstream of the tool. Which is a slightly annoying answer, so let me explain it.

When an author asks which AI tool to use, what she is usually asking is: how do I keep up. The pace of new releases is overwhelming. The marketing around each one is loud. Everyone has a friend who swears by something different. The instinct is to pick one and start, before the next one comes out and the choice gets harder.

The instinct is wrong. Picking a tool before you have picked a problem is how you end up with three monthly subscriptions and a folder of half-finished experiments.

What I tell authors instead: pick the smallest, most concrete piece of work you wish was easier. Not “marketing.” Not “platform.” Something specific. Drafting the cold outreach to fifteen podcasts whose audiences match your book. Pulling together a comp title analysis you can use in a query letter. Writing a launch email to your existing list that sounds like you.

Now you have a problem with edges. Now you can pick a tool, or two, that actually fits the shape of that problem. And if a better tool drops in six months, you will know within an hour whether it does this specific thing better than what you have.

The other piece, and this is the one I cannot stop talking about, is that your work is becoming worth something to AI companies in a new way. The same content they used to scrape for free is going to be licensed. Some of it already is. If you have a backlist, or even one book that has been out for a while, you have an asset that is starting to earn in a way it could not earn before.

This is what I am building toward in my work with Amlet. A registry that lets authors say: yes, AI can use my work, here is what it costs, here is how I get paid. The infrastructure is being built right now. The authors who set themselves up early are the ones who will see income from it first.

Strategy before tools. Then tools. Then the part where your work earns money every time AI uses it.

That order matters.

Full episode: Talking Book Publishing, S6 E3.

Cheers, Julie