By: Dar Dowling
Artificial intelligence is changing publishing at an extraordinary pace, and it is clearly freaking people out. But feelings aren’t facts, even though they do have a lot of power. So, what is really up with AI and publishing?
Authors and publishing professionals can now use AI to brainstorm ideas, organize research, develop marketing campaigns, create promotional copy, analyze audiences, generate metadata, and accomplish in minutes work that once took hours. For independent authors and smaller publishing teams in particular, that can be incredibly valuable.
But faster does not automatically mean better, and more does not necessarily mean more interesting. One of the biggest changes AI may bring to publishing is an enormous increase in content that is perfectly competent, professionally written, and completely boring, and who wants that?
When almost anyone can generate a polished book description, social media campaign, newsletter, article, or advertisement, simply producing good content is no longer enough to stand out. As polished language becomes easier to create, originality, personality, experience, and judgment become more valuable. In reality, it’s the human voice and the human vision that bring excitement to the words, the images, the vibe.
AI Can Generate Possibilities. People Still Have to Choose.
This truth sometimes gets lost in the conversation: the role of publishing professionals is more important than ever, not less. Working with authors, you quickly learn that the challenge is rarely a lack of ideas. The challenge is recognizing the right idea for a particular book, author, and audience, and going with it.
A good editor does more than correct grammar. They understand the story and help weave it together. A publicist understands what might make someone outside the publishing world fall in love with a story, want to know more about an author, and care about the author’s work and personal story. A publishing strategist has to recognize which opportunities fit an author’s work and which ones are simply distractions. Cutting through the noise in an already loud world is imperative. Experience teaches you what to pursue and, just as importantly, what to throw away.
AI is very good at generating options, sometimes too good, and it can feel overwhelming, right? But when used well, it can suggest headlines, publicity angles, potential audiences, marketing concepts, interview questions, and promotional ideas. Some will help, but some will be completely wrong. The real value comes from knowing the difference.
That requires taste, instinct, perspective, and judgment. In other words, it requires something profoundly human.
Discoverability Is About to Get Harder
Publishing already has a discoverability problem. Millions of books compete for attention across online retailers, search engines, social media, podcasts, newsletters, influencers, traditional media, and increasingly AI-powered recommendation systems. AI will add even more material to an already crowded environment.
Creating content may no longer be the biggest challenge. What is?
Simple: getting anyone to actually care about it.
That makes everything surrounding a book increasingly important: positioning, author identity, media coverage, interviews, reviews, digital presence, visual branding, and the relationship an author builds with readers. I see authors spend enormous amounts of energy getting a book written and published, only to discover that publishing the book was the beginning of the work, not the end.
Publishing a book is a long game. AI can make some of that work easier. It cannot make an author interesting, a story compelling, or a book worthy of a movie deal. It cannot build the relationship between an author and their readers. That, too, requires the human touch.
The One Thing AI Doesn’t Have
Writers sometimes worry that AI will learn to write like them. It will probably become increasingly good at imitating style, but imitation is not the same as having a life.
My AI knows my voice pretty damn well. We’ve been working together for a long while, but it still forgets sometimes, makes mistakes, and suggests things that won’t work. How do I know? That’s easy. I’ve been in publishing a very long time.
The truth is that AI didn’t grow up in your family, fall in love with the wrong person, lose someone it couldn’t imagine living without, make a really bad decision and pay the price for it, or experience the thousands of seemingly insignificant moments that eventually become part of how a person sees the world. Those experiences create perspective, which in turn helps create a storyteller’s voice and vision.
AI can’t see through your eyes. It doesn’t know your soul. And isn’t that where writers write from?
Two writers can witness the same event and tell completely different stories because each brings a lifetime of memories, relationships, fears, humor, disappointments, and observations to the page. That is also part of being a storyteller.
Readers don’t remember books because every sentence was technically perfect. They may remember a well-placed typo that somehow got by, but that’s another story.
What do they remember? They remember a story because something special, some may even say magical, happened while they were reading. They were propelled into a new world, whether scrolling through an ebook or turning the pages of an actual book on the beach. They laughed, got angry, recognized themselves, understood someone differently, escaped their own life for a few hours, fell in love, or simply felt less alone.
Technology can help shape, market, and distribute those stories. It cannot manufacture the life behind them, or the feelings, vision, or vibe that come with that life.
Authenticity Will Become More Valuable
There is an irony in all of this. The more sophisticated AI becomes, the more valuable genuinely human work will likely feel.
When audiences are surrounded by so much oh-so-polished material, the unusual sentence stands out. So does the vibe that defies explanation, the unexpected observation, the strange yet luscious sense of humor that makes you giggle, the disturbing yet intriguing opinion, or the story that could only have come from one particular person.
That doesn’t mean writers or publishing professionals should reject AI. I certainly don’t think they should. Used thoughtfully, it can be an extraordinary tool for research, brainstorming, marketing, organization, and the repetitive work that can consume hours of a creative person’s day.
It can even become a way to bounce ideas around in the middle of the night, when there is no one else to talk to about your work.
That’s a good thing.
The mistake isn’t using the tool. The mistake is allowing the tool to become the voice.
The Future of Publishing Is Still Human
The conversation around AI is often framed as a competition between humans and machines, but publishing’s future is more likely to involve collaboration between the two.
A writer can use AI to organize months of research and still write the story herself. A publicist can explore multiple campaign ideas and use experience to decide which ones are worth pursuing. An independent author can use technology to accomplish work that previously required a much larger marketing budget. Used well, AI can create more time for the work that actually requires our blood, sweat, and, yes, sometimes tears.
AI should make the creative process more efficient. It should not become the creative process.
Publishing has survived every technological disruption thrown at it because technology was never really the point. Stories were. Stories still are. People still are.
People pick up a book and fall in love with the written word because they want to escape, learn, laugh, imagine, question, understand, or recognize something of themselves in another person’s experience.
AI will undoubtedly change how those stories are written, marketed, discovered, and distributed. It may become extraordinarily good at helping us produce words.
That doesn’t mean it knows which words matter. It doesn’t mean it knows what feelings those words will evoke in a reader. AI can’t catch the wave for you. It can get the surfboard ready, but you’re still the one who has to take it out, find the wave, muster your courage, ride it, and feel the excitement of the ride.
That’s why the future of publishing still belongs to people, with a little help from a friend.
Dar Dowling is a filmmaker, author, and creative strategist specializing in publishing, storytelling, and brand development. She founded DarMa Creative Media and serves as Executive Vice President of Atlas Elite Publishing Partners. You can find her on Instagram.
