How to Use AI to Write a Book (Guide)

About 45% of authors now use some form of generative AI in their writing process, according to a 2025 Author Media survey. But here's the split that matters: most use AI for brainstorming and editing, not to generate entire manuscripts. The authors who know how to use AI to write a book treat it as a writing partner, not a ghostwriter.

Whether you're writing a novel, a business book, or a memoir, AI can cut months off your timeline if you use it at the right stages. This guide walks through the full workflow from blank page to finished manuscript.

Why AI Works Better as a Book Co-Writer Than a Ghostwriter

If you paste "write me a 60,000-word novel about a detective in 1920s Chicago" into ChatGPT, you'll get something flat, repetitive, and obviously machine-generated. AI models produce text token by token, which means they lose coherence over long passages. Character arcs wander. Themes get dropped. Subplots appear and vanish.

The better approach is to break book writing into the stages that AI actually handles well: brainstorming, structuring, drafting short sections, and editing. You keep creative control. AI handles the grunt work.

Stage 1: Brainstorming and Research

This is where AI earns its keep immediately. Instead of staring at a blank page, you can generate dozens of ideas in minutes.

ChatGPT and Claude are both strong here. Claude tends to give longer, more nuanced responses. ChatGPT is faster at generating volume. Use whichever fits your style.

For research-heavy non-fiction, Perplexity AI is particularly useful because it cites sources, saving you hours of fact-checking later.

If you want to develop stronger prompting skills for creative and research tasks like these, the AI Academy covers the fundamentals in a hands-on format.

Stage 2: Building Your Outline

A detailed outline is the single most important factor in writing a book with AI. Without one, AI-generated chapters will meander and contradict each other. With a strong outline, each chapter prompt has clear guardrails.

Spend real time refining this outline. Move sections around. Cut what doesn't fit. The better your outline, the less rewriting you'll do later.

Stage 3: Using AI to Write a Book Chapter by Chapter

Here's where the workflow splits between fiction and non-fiction.

Non-Fiction Drafting

Non-fiction is more straightforward. Each chapter has a clear argument and supporting points. Feed AI your outline one chapter at a time.

The style reference is critical. Without it, AI defaults to a generic blog voice. Paste 200-300 words of your own writing so the model matches your rhythm. For more techniques on getting natural-sounding output, our guide on making AI write like a human covers 10 methods that work especially well for book-length projects.

Fiction Drafting

Fiction requires more human involvement. AI struggles with consistent voice, subtext, and emotional beats across long passages. The most effective approach is scene-by-scene drafting.

For fiction specifically, specialized tools outperform general-purpose chatbots. Sudowrite's Muse 1.5 model was fine-tuned on published novels and short stories, which gives it stronger prose instincts than ChatGPT or Claude. NovelCrafter is another option that lets you maintain character bibles and world-building documents that the AI references while drafting, solving the consistency problem.

Maintaining Consistency

Regardless of genre, keep a running "bible" document that you paste into each prompt:

• Character details: names, ages, backstory, speech patterns, relationships
• World rules: setting details, timeline, established facts
• Style guide: tone, POV, tense, vocabulary preferences
• Previously established plot points: what's happened so far

This prevents the AI from contradicting earlier chapters or changing a character's eye color mid-book.

Managing long-form AI projects like this requires a specific set of skills. Our AI Academy teaches these workflows systematically, from prompt design to output refinement.

Stage 4: Editing and Revision

AI is arguably more valuable for editing than for drafting. It catches things you miss after your tenth read-through.

For a detailed look at making AI-edited text sound natural rather than robotic, read our guide on how to use ChatGPT to write an essay. Many of the revision techniques apply to book-length work too. If you need AI help with a specific speech or presentation related to your book launch, our guide on using AI to write a speech covers keynotes, talks, and promotional appearances.

Best AI Tools to Write a Book

After testing the major options, here's what works best at each stage:

Budget-wise: ChatGPT Plus at $20/month and Claude Pro at $20/month cover most needs. Sudowrite runs $22-59/month depending on your plan, and is worth it for fiction writers doing heavy drafting.

Fiction vs. Non-Fiction: Key Differences

Non-fiction is where AI shines brightest. The content is structured, research-based, and doesn't require the emotional nuance that AI struggles with. Many non-fiction authors report cutting their writing time by 40-60% using AI for drafts, then spending their time on editing and adding personal experience.

Fiction requires more human steering. AI can draft scenes, suggest plot directions, and write dialogue, but the creative vision has to come from you. Think of AI as a writing room collaborator: it throws ideas at the wall, and you decide what sticks.

Publishing Your AI-Assisted Book

Once your manuscript is complete, publishing options are the same whether you used AI or not:

Self-publishing: Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, and Draft2Digital remain the main platforms. KDP doesn't prohibit AI-assisted books, but does require you to disclose AI-generated content during the upload process.

Traditional publishing: Most agents and editors care about quality, not process. That said, be prepared to discuss your writing process if asked. Transparency matters more than ever in the current publishing climate.

Hybrid publishing: Services like Reedsy connect you with professional editors, cover designers, and formatters, which is worth considering since AI-drafted manuscripts especially benefit from professional editing.

Ethical Considerations Worth Thinking About

The publishing world is still working out the norms here. A few principles that most people agree on:

1. Be transparent. If AI wrote significant portions of your book, say so. Readers and publishers increasingly expect this.
2. Edit substantially. A first draft from AI is just raw material. Your job is to add expertise, personal experience, and voice.
3. Don't plagiarize. AI can accidentally reproduce phrases from its training data. Run your manuscript through a plagiarism checker before publishing.
4. Add what AI can't. Personal stories, original research, lived experience, genuine emotional insight: these are what make a book worth reading.

For a broader look at using AI for content projects, our guide on generative AI for content creation covers the principles that apply across formats.

Writers looking to build a repeatable AI-assisted process will find the AI Academy especially useful -- it covers content creation workflows with practical assignments you can apply to your own book project.

A Realistic Timeline

Here's what a realistic AI-assisted book timeline looks like for a 50,000-word non-fiction book:

• Week 1-2: Brainstorming, research, outline (AI-assisted)
• Week 3-6: First draft, chapter by chapter (AI-assisted, heavy human editing)
• Week 7-8: Revision pass with AI editing tools
• Week 9-10: Professional editing (human editor recommended)
• Week 11-12: Final polish, formatting, cover design

Compare that to the 6-12 months most non-fiction books take without AI. The time savings are real, but they come from faster drafting, not from skipping steps.

Start Writing

The best approach is to start small. Pick one chapter of your book and run through the full workflow: outline it, draft it with AI, edit it, then compare the result to what you'd write manually. You'll quickly find the balance between AI assistance and your own creative input.

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