Join us for an engaging discussion that will take you from the first spark of an idea to a published book. Whether you’re just starting out or getting ready for your next release, this panel will provide you with practical knowledge and inspiration to elevate your writing.
We’ll explore:
- Crafting Your Narrative
- The Revision Process
- Understanding Your Audience
- Navigating the Publishing Process
- Transform Your Literary Spark into a Bestseller Blaze: Let’s Get Writing
So get ready for a deep dive into the world of book publishing. Let our expert panel—Ally Berthiaume, Kristy Johnson, and Jessica Andersen—guide you!
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Plot Twists And Coffee: A Sassy Guide To Book Development
I’m super excited about this panel, and hopefully, you all are too. Before we get started on everything, I want to introduce everybody and we have Kristy Boyd Johnson. She is an award-winning children’s author and has ghostwritten over 30 books for entrepreneurs over the years. She’s a sought-after developmental editor and transformational book coach, and she launched Starseed Journey Retreats because she can’t imagine anything better than being in a beautiful location with beautiful people who want to reconnect with their deepest selves through writing. That sounds amazing. We went to Costa Rica. How’s that?
We have Jessica Andersen, and she’s an editor turned book coach from the USA who moved to France one day in 2010 and never looked back. Since starting her business a few years ago, she’s worked with authors all over the world on dozens of books and is the Founder of Brand Book Bootcamp. She serves entrepreneurs who want to replace their content marketing with a brand book, which will position them as the go-to voice and attract ideal clients.
To her right is Ally Berthiaume. She’s usually known as Ally B but published under AY and is the founder of Write Place, Right Time, a virtual boutique of book coaching and ghostwriting services. She serves leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries across North America and Europe in writing their books that will light up their world and ours. She is also an award-winning author of Dear Universe, I Get It Now: Letters on the Art and Journey of Being Brave and Being Me and the co-author of Do Not Write a Book…Until You Read This One, which is a fabulous book, you guys. I did one of the endorsements on it, and the ladies did a fantastic job.
You guys, welcome. Let’s start with audience building. One of the big things that happens is we get into people saying, “I want to write a book,” but they don’t get into understanding their audience. Who wants to start with this? Maybe talk about what you do to get people invested and identify that audience clearly.
Announce Your Book On Social Media To Build Audience Interest
The first thing that I tell my author clients to do is to announce it on social media, and that is scary for some people. It’s where most people give me pushback from the get-go, but I do it on purpose because it’s going to challenge them. If they are digging in and not wanting to do that, I say, instead of saying, like, I’m going to write this book, say, I’m thinking about writing this book. It offers them a little bit of leeway, but the point of all this is to start a discussion with any audience that they have already established to start putting feelers out there about what people think about this person writing a book.
10 out of 10, people are going to be supportive because they want to see you succeed. They are already following you because they already like you on some level, and they are going to be interested in your journey as you go along in writing the book. The more little steps you take to pull back the curtain on your book writing journey, the more engagement comes along from your audience, and it starts to snowball from there and gets easier for you as well to start sharing bits and pieces of what you are writing. That’s always the first thing that I tell people when we are starting the market research phase in trying to discover what their audience wants to read about from you in the first place.
You are starting them on their author platform-building journey as well. See who’s looking, see what you can build. That’s awesome. Who wants to go next?
First of all, I love Jessica’s strategy here. You almost start that market analysis and engagement interaction right out of the gate and then prime that muscle to be doing that as you go. For me, I like to understand where the impetus for wanting to write a book stems from to begin with. In those initial conversations with prospects or authors that have finally signed and we are moving forward, I want to understand, well, where did you get the idea that you wanted to write a book? What was the motivation originally? If it’s like, “I knew that I had all of this data from X number of years in my business serving clients in this way. Now we are already talking about the audience because essentially they are writing a book for other people like their client.”
Who is their client? What does that profile or avatar demographic look like? Then we narrow it down from there because if you’ve been in an industry or a field for twenty-plus years, it doesn’t necessarily mean that every iota of information that you’ve learned in twenty-plus years goes into that book, but at least we have a starting point to understand how they are seeing the book and the business connect through the ideal client or audience that they are already serving. I like to start there because often there’s some connector between what they are doing for business and what they intend for the book, and usually, somewhere in that middle ground, that connector has something to do with people.
I love that because a lot of times when I get books as a publisher, I will go back with a brand new cover that they brought me and say, “Why doesn’t this connect to your brand? Why are we not using the same colors? Why is this not identifiable?” For people using that brand book to get more business, that’s important. I love that a lot. Kris, how about you? You are going to say yes, do a vomit draft because we don’t want everything you learned in the last several years in your book.
Identifying Your Target Audience Before Writing
If we go back a little further than the vomit draft where they are starting with me, typically, I have to get them focused on Who are you talking to? I can’t believe how many people try to combine talking to other professionals in their field in their book and also talking to customers or laypeople in their book, and it does not work. You have to think in terms of two separate books. I will say, “Who do you want to talk to? What excites you about teaching? Do you want to teach to other professionals, or do you want to teach to people who would be your clients, who you are teaching them something you know?” That determines the language in the book because you can use jargon with other professionals that you cannot use with laypeople.
Think about doctors. Doctors can talk about jargon all day, but most of us don’t understand all those medical terms, so it wouldn’t work. We get them focused on who we are talking to, number one, and then, what we are teaching them. We are not teaching them everything you’ve learned over the last several years because that will be a giant tome that nobody will read, and it is too difficult. What I found is when I get them through that process, they start to relax. They go, “This isn’t as hard as I thought. Maybe I can do this.” They start shifting into This is more like a manageable thing. Then we can start moving forward into the vomit draft.
Diane made the point. We always want to impress our colleagues, and Kris and I started working on a self-published book a while ago where the psychiatrist who was the author did that combination. We were trying to get her to separate into the person who’s having mental problems or a family member and that professional, putting them in two different books. She made that exact mistake. It’s fantastic that all this gets done.
One of the things that I find as a publisher when I get a book is that none of my authors have their end game. They think they are going to make a whole bunch of money from books, which is very rare. You have to write the book, put out the money, and figure that that’s a loss leader. Now, what am I going to sell that’s bigger? How do you guys get your authors invested in what’s next and get them going on that too? Anybody who wants to take that?
Understanding Your Book’s ROI: Don’t Expect To Get Rich Quick!
I’m going to jump in here for this one. What’s important first is education. Part of the reason that a lot of people who are working on books think that they will write it, and they will come, meaning readers and then dollars, is because they don’t understand the return on investment to begin with. They don’t understand how you turn a profit from your book or what the royalty payments break down and look like. They don’t get the economics of it, the costs that are associated, and how you make that money back. The difference between direct selling and having a distributor sell and push, and all the different nuances and complexities. There’s this idea that there’s something magical that happens when the book lands in the wide internet space or bookstore space or whatever, and then poof, copies are being bought and money’s coming in.
Until they have a better understanding of how this works and breaks down mathematically, economically, and financially, they can’t focus on the end game. They have to have an understanding of all those things first in order to then go, “If that’s how it works, then now let’s talk strategy, let’s talk steps, let’s talk how you get a return.” It’s not that you can’t get a return, it’s a matter of understanding how that return works.
I also think it’s a matter of understanding what exactly are your goals and motivators. Is it money-driven, or is it something else? Not all of our end games have to do with the dollars and cents that we are bringing back into our pockets. The people who are more successful are the ones who say, “I’m investing because I want this book to do X,” and have it not have anything to do with book sales and sales reports and money generated from a 1-to-1 ratio perspective.

That is so true, and that’s one of the things we are very transparent about when we talk to those people. The first thing I ask is, “What are your goals with this book?” I want to hear if I have someone say, “I want to make a lot of money,” you are not my client. Jessica, you want to answer that?
Yes, a few ideas come to mind. The first one is probably when I work with people now, I tend to attract entrepreneurs because of how I market myself. What I’m looking for is someone who already has a four-figure offer in place that is validated, that they have sold before, and I’m usually trying to connect their brand book to that offer by looking at the offer first and reverse engineering the book from that so that it’s all seamless, it’s all aligned, it’s the same messaging basically, and we are talking to the same person. Ultimately, their target client for that offer is also their target reader. It doesn’t always work out that perfectly, but usually, we can do something there.
Sometimes, like you started to allude to this, Ally, in your answer, when someone comes to me and they want to write a book, it’s almost like a self-fulfilling thing like an aspirational goal that they have. Once they start looking into it, like you said, they start to discover all the different investments that you have to make. Again, you can either spend your time doing it yourself, or you can spend your money to have good people like us help you through the process.
Then, when I start to drill down and say, “If we connect it to a high-ticket offer that you already have,” things start to make sense because usually when people go through the trouble of creating and validating a high-ticket offer, they take it seriously. I start to say, “You’ve got to treat your book the same way. It can funnel into that high-ticket offer, and then you can see a rapid return on investment from that.”
When you start to talk about conversion rates in your high-ticket offer and translate that like you superimpose that on the book then people are like, “I see why I’m not going to make money selling copies. It’s like so many readers buy the book, then they read it, and a certain percentage of those people are then going to go on to work with me in that specific capacity or whatever other offer I have set up.”
One thing that’s a little bit separate from what I said, though, is that I also seem to attract a lot of people in my audience who want to use the book as a platform for paid speaking gigs. They can do that very well too. I know someone else who helps people attract these gigs, and I remember she said that even as a beginner speaker, you can sometimes get paid around $3,000. When people start to see something like that, they can more easily do the math and see an ROI.
That’s a great point, especially when people have that bigger offer, and you can say, “Your ROI is that you are going to pay for this package with 3 or 4 of those packages.” It becomes more relevant, but getting that business above and beyond that is great too. I love that you do that, Jessica, because most of the people who come to us for publishing do not have courses, and we end up developing courses from the book as well. Kris, how about you?
On the same page with both Allie and Jessica. Also, what I have found is that, in addition to speaking, a lot of my clients want to have workshops or live events. They want to do something themselves on a smaller scale than being on a stage. Many times, we try to find a way to make the book either have a companion workbook with it that they can use at a workshop, or some books lend themselves to, “Chapter one, this is this information. Now do these things.”
The book melds it depends on the topic that they are teaching. Juliet, we did a couple of books like that where it was right in the book. Other times, I say, “Let’s do a companion workbook.” When you bring a workshop together, you are like, “You are going to get this book and workbook when you come, and you build that into the price of your workshop.” Then you give it to them, and the perceived value of the gift receiving the book and the workbook and then going through the workshop process is huge because they get loyalty.
“They love them. You helped me. I made a transformation, and I got this book to help me remember so I can revisit it and go through it again.” That’s what I found. All those things you’ve got to think of ways to expand beyond the book, and it has to be I would say also it has to be a way that juices you. If you don’t want to speak on a stage, don’t try to force yourself to do that. Do what makes you feel good because that’s where you are going to bring your life and your joy. Otherwise, you are going to be up there going, “I’m here but I don’t want to be,” and they feel it.
They do. The workbook part or at least putting questions in your book is especially important for personal development. Nobody ever had a transformation happen without digging in, answering questions, and looking at their situation. It is important for that. For those of you who are out speaking, my friend Shannon Procise has the best strategy. When she goes to a speaking event, she puts a book on every single chair. Then she has you open up, and you are invested in that book. You can buy it afterward, and she rarely walks away with extra books after an event with that strategy because now people see the value. They are opening the book, working, and answering questions about it.
I’m going to ask you guys a tough question, and I have to word this right because when I threw this at them before, they all looked at me like, “What the hell are you trying to say, girl?” How do you get your writer to fulfill the big juicy promise that they made their readers at the beginning of the book? How’d I do?
Creating A Book Outline: Your Roadmap To A Successful Manuscript
This is where I’m going to pull in an outline. We are going there probably next, but this is important. When you outline where you are heading before you sit down to write, it’s like creating a map. You understand that all the chapters and sections of the book are pointing to your north star. Your north star is that promise you are making at the outset. Now you want to make sure that each of the chapters that follow is going to speak to the promise you made. If we think about the essay that we learned to write in elementary school or middle school, we would start with our introductory paragraph to lay our argument forward. Then we would have body paragraphs to support the original thesis that was in the introduction of the setup that we created. Then we would round it all out with a nice pretty bow in the conclusion at the other side to prove, “We did it. We made our argument clear.”
A book is basically that format but in a much bigger way, with some digressions here and there perhaps, and some creative ways to approach that, but essentially, we are doing the same thing. We are setting up an argument or telling what the promise is at the beginning, and then we have to support what we have already promised.
I find it’s easier to do that when we have outlined where you intend to take your concept, theory, or framework whatever it is, and making sure each paragraph or chapter is speaking towards that north star. When you’ve got that outline created, you’ve already done the work to know these ideas all connect. They support the thing that you said you were going to do. Then, when you sit down to write, you are not fumbling around wondering, does this support that argument? Is this detail necessary?
Not that your outline is necessarily the end-all, be-all. It’s a working and breathing document, and as you get into the application of drafting, it’s going to change because the outline is still abstract until you are digging in. The outline still can act as one way to get to that final destination. Like a GPS. I say the outline is like a GPS you are putting in where you are trying to get to. The outline gives you one way to get there, and then, as you are writing, maybe you end up taking a detour or finding a different way. The outline at least gives you a place to start to ensure that you are thinking strategically and intentionally about aligning what you are saying with what you are promising.

I’m going to ask a silly question here. I think Kris does this, but I know I do. Before I start writing I’m a kinesthetic learner. I use cards and walk over them, shift them around like, “This well belongs here.” Do you guys do that before you sit down and write the actual outline or do you do it all on paper? Ally?
I have done it in different ways depending on the project and, honestly, the energy of the project or how complex it is. Sometimes, if it’s super complex, I might need index cards and tangible items to move around and see the various ways it can go. Other times, I’m like, I can see a clear path and map it out on a digital concept board, and we are ready to rock. There are different tactics and ways to get to the same point, and it’s about finding what works for you as the author, learner, brainstormer, or visualizer of how you digest and organize material. There are lots of different tools that you can use.
When I say outline, I mean that eventually, you want it written out for yourself in a way that you can understand, but how to get to that organized outline that’s a document where the sky’s the limit. You could go and write stuff on a pair of underwear and string them up on a clothesline. I don’t care if that’s how you are going to get there. Sweet, have fun with it. These are the exploratory stages of writing. It should be fun, exciting, and creative. You want to get those juices flowing so that you’ve got that initial momentum of it being fun rather than it being a slog.
Ally is going to be starting her OnlyFans book outlining a course on OnlyFans.
There you go. Who wants to go next?
I would like to. Outline is a general, broad term, and you can do that outline any way that works for you. I like the color-coded cards because I can be more hands-on with my authors. I give them assignments. I will say, “We are going to color code the stories that you want to include that illustrate your points in blue. On blue cards, I want you to make a note like, ‘That story about Bill that day,’ or a note so you know the story. You don’t have to write the whole story on the card.” When you lay out the cards, you can say, “That story about Bill would be better in chapter 2 than chapter 1,” and you can lay them out.
I give them assignments like, “I want you to start telling me stories. Tell me about your topic, tell me some stories of your clients, your family, anything that gets me,” and then we keep a note of which stories would fit in and what could make it flow because a story will always break up the momentum of the teaching and make it more engaging.
I have them do calls to action. I have them do stats if that’s applicable to what they are writing. I have them do all kinds of different things if there are links to something that they need to link to so they are thinking almost sectionally. They are not overwhelming themselves. They always overwhelm themselves with, “I have to write a book, and it’s a big giant thing.”
It’s like, “Right now, what I’d love you to do is write down your journey. That’s all you have to do. Don’t think about the book. Tell me how you got here. Tell me your story, write it down, send it to me, and we go from there.” It’s like chunking like I used to do when I was teaching kids. We would chunk something down into a piece, and that’s all you have to do right now and then they relax, and it stops being so overwhelming because overwhelm equals writer’s block. That’s me, but it’s like Ally does it she said the same thing in different words. I outlined one person. I love mind mapping. I’m not a fan, but it worked for him.
Why You Need A Book Developer To Save Time And Money
I mapped everything to death and never executed. Before we get to Jessica quickly because you and I have this discussion all the time. Storytelling is vulnerable versus TMI. For me, that’s the whole reason you need a book developer to come in and say, “Stop already. We don’t need to know that in particular.” Can you address that a little bit?
TMI, I don’t censor them on the first draft. I’m like, “Write me your story, and then send it to me, and then I will go through it.” Inevitably, there’ll be something that is TMI and goes on and on and then there’s another section where it’s like they jump over, and that’s usually where the pain is. That’s the pain that reaches the audience.
We go through a little process of bringing it out in a safe way. Then they realize that all this stuff at the end probably could go away or be funneled down into 1 or 2 sentences. That is a big deal, and honestly, if you are going to write a book, it doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or nonfiction, be ready to bear your soul. There is going to be a bearing, and if you don’t, it reads dry, and your audience will drop it and move to the next one.
If you're going to write a book, be ready to bare your soul. Share on XMany years ago I worked on a book where we all knew a piece of the woman’s story, and she left it out. As her friends, we made her put it back in. When you look at her reviews, that is the most talked-about piece of her book. She didn’t want to include it because it was vulnerable, scary, and embarrassing, but that was the piece that people grasped onto. Jessica, how about you?
How do we get the writers to give the readers the transformation they are after? Kristy, you started to steal my answer there, but you went a little bit of a different direction. It’s all good. I was going to say storytelling because, since we have the teaching and classroom analogy here, without the storytelling, if you are regurgitating your twenty-year career, it’s going to come off like a professor giving a lecture to a class, with no engagement. When you are writing a book, you don’t have live engagement with your readers as they are reading, but we can fake it with storytelling.
As you also touched on, Juliet, some people start to freeze up because, as you said, it starts to get in their feelings a little bit. Feeling vulnerable is an uncomfortable experience. Sometimes it’s one thing to write it, and then it’s another thing to publish it. You go through the ups and downs of feelings feeling safe about writing it and including it in the book. As the book becomes more real, suddenly you’re putting on the brakes because you’re scared that this is going to come out and people are going to know this stuff about you. As you rightly said, Juliet, vulnerability is important to connect with your readers.
To sum up, it’s also very important to know which stories are going to resonate. Your editor or book developer can help you pick, choose, and cut the ones that are TMI, don’t make sense, or won’t connect. I will also add that some of us feel like we can’t share what we went through, depending on who our book is speaking to. In that case, I would say, if you are a service provider, entrepreneur, or someone with client success stories, share those stories in your book. Your readers want to know if can you help them with their issues. Have you helped other people like them achieve the same transformation they are after? Not all of us have done that for ourselves, but we are still experts because we have helped other people do it. Am I making sense?
Yeah. Here’s something you guys don’t know. I worked with someone several years ago who was a book editor and ghostwriter. She told me she wrote a book about domestic violence she had experienced with her husband in the past. She didn’t want to publish the book then because she didn’t want her son to know about it. He’s grown now, and she still hasn’t published that book. Sometimes people get so invested in that story that they will never share it, which is sad.
I want to move to something else here. A lot of people ask me why I need a book developer. I find that when I get a book as a publisher, and you haven’t had a book developer, now you need a comprehensive, what you guys call a deep line edit, which you probably would have avoided had you used the book developer. Can you guys speak to that because all of you do editing? I think Jessica more than the rest of you but do you want to speak to that? I feel like people waste so much money because they write it first without that guidance.
You answered it. Honestly, the only answer is to save time and money to conserve those two resources. Many people come to me because they have written what they think is a polished first draft. They think it needs a copy edit and proofread, and I ask, “Did you think about your target reader? Did you think about the stories? Did you think about what this is funneling into?” Then they realize revisions are needed.
Not all editors are super loved by our clients. We do make you work a little bit, but it’s because we are invested in the success of your book. That’s what I would say are two big reasons. I want to conserve time and money as much as my clients do. I don’t want to make you go through lots of revisions. Please, choose to work with me when you get the idea in your head to write a book so that we can start it off, structure it correctly, and then, like Ally mentioned with the outline, you can follow it. Then maybe you’ll only need a copy edit and proofread.
Kris, you constantly complain about getting books where they write it and then don’t do a rewrite. You can tell.
You can tell. That’s the infamous vomit draft. The first draft is a vomit draft. Get over yourself. It’s not a polished, publishable manuscript, and your friend who reads it is not an editor. They might catch some typos, but that’s not the same thing. However, I always send a book to a proofer after I’m done because developers get the same issue authors do. Our brains fill in the gaps. We know what’s going on and miss typos after reading the manuscript 3, 4, or 5 times. A proofer at the end, who has never seen it, is a very good idea but it’s been fully developed. You know that they are just fixing the small things like a missing period or a double word or something like that. The big stuff, though, is all in place. That’s what sells your book and resonates with your reader. The first draft is not a finished draft.
I’m going to recommend, too, when you take your book to a developer and then when you get into publishing, I don’t think people have any idea how sick of their book they will be by the time it’s published. I highly recommend that when you engage your editor or your book developer, whichever way you are most comfortable with, ask them how much they will charge to look at the formatted book.
When I give you your first formatted copy, you are going to look through it, and your eye is going to insert what you think is there, whether it’s there or not. Get that second set of eyes on the formatted copy. That way, you are going to avoid mistakes once it’s published as well because people don’t realize you are going to only get so many revisions in formatting, and when you start to go above and beyond, you are going to get charged for those because there are different points in the publishing journey.
To give an example, if I have submitted and it’s approved to Lightning Source, Ingram, whoever we are sending it to, if I have to send it up again, you are going to get charged because I’m going to get charged because you okayed it. I recommend that you go back and ask that person, how much will you charge me to go through this again? One editor we worked with went through it nine times. That book was perfect because in every format he picked up a little something extra that they didn’t get before it. Ally, how about you?
I echo everything that everyone has said. One thing is recognizing that a developer or a developmental editor is a person to help you with the big stuff, and as somebody who might be a first-time author or it’s been a long time since you’ve written a long piece of writing or maybe you’ve never written a long piece of writing. It’s a very different thing from writing a LinkedIn post to writing a 45,000 or above book. Just because you might be an okay writer or you might be skilled in dropping some sweet beats into your LinkedIn posts, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the skill, stamina, or strength to withstand a cohesive, well-organized, well-developed manuscript on the other side. That is something that we who are here as experts have developed or studied right over time. It is a specific skill set that not most people have.

Developmental Editing Is The Most Expensive Part Of Writing A Book
The other thing to understand is that one of the most expensive pieces of doing a book is editing. Imagine now going back to Jessica’s point, you’ve written the whole manuscript, and you put it in front of a book developer or developmental editor, and they say, “This is garbage. Sorry, you need to redo a lot of this.” You are talking about a higher rate because developmental editing is the more expensive type of editing, and you want to make sure you are working with a good one. If you’ve now spent, you are like, “I thought it was ready, so I brought it to a line editor already,” or, “I thought it was ready, so I went and started a contract with a publisher, and I already put all this money down.”
Now you are realizing that it needs a bunch of redevelopment and restructuring. That’s going to take a lot longer, and it ruins the contract with the publisher, and now you’ve got to extend that, or it means that the money you already paid for the line editor is going to be completely undone because you’ve got so much rewriting to have happened. You are now sinking twice as many costs than if you didn’t try to go the journey alone.
I also would love for there to be a study. I would love for there to be a study that is like the people who have been working on their book for longer than two years. Is it because they have not been working with anyone? I feel like the clients who come to me who have already been working on their manuscripts for a long period of time, come to me because they have been pushing themselves and slogging through getting that first draft done on their own.
By the time they are done, they realize that they are not even sure if it’s good anymore because they can’t see it any longer. They have got all kinds of blind spots. They intuitively feel like something is off, and then what ends up happening is I see it and I go, “Did you think about your audience? Did you think about what you wanted to do with it? Did you write an outline?” Inevitably, all of those questions go as no.
What I’m seeing usually is a mishmash of personal storytelling, and some thought leadership. We are mixing genres and not doing it well. There are hybrid books, there are hybrid genres, but most people are not coming out of the gate working on a hybrid genre. You need to pick a lane, but the people who have done it on their own get all wishy-washy, aren’t very clear, and then their manuscripts need all kinds of work.
Now instead of it taking them 2 or 3 years, it’s now going to take them an additional however many months to years because they made such a mess, unfortunately, of the manuscript to begin with. That’s not to say that it’s all useless or the work isn’t informative of the next version or whatever. It’s not that it’s all said and done and lost, but like talk about the time and energy investment and having tried to walk that path all on your own only to come up with something that a professional’s going to say, “This ain’t going to cut it, sorry,” which are words that I hate to ever have left my mouth, but I will continue to say them for the benefit of the author. In the long run, having a much better book that they will be far more proud of and that readers won’t blast all over the internet because they took the time to fix it.
I love Diane’s comment here. She’s read books that are literally like two years of blogs thrown together, and I do remember Tracy Hazzard and I were going to do a book with an anthology on real estate and these people had blogs, but we were like, “No. We are going to have them rewritten into something publishable there.”
Don’t Use AI To Write Your Book: It Lacks Personality And Originality
The other thing about that two-year, Ally, that’s why that vomit draft is so important. I run into people all the time who are like, “I’m writing a book,” and I’m like, “Where are you at on it?” “I’m still on chapter one,” and then you ask them how long they have been rewriting chapter one for the last five years and it’s like, “You have to get the whole draft out. You can’t micromanage that one chapter or it never gets done.” Last question here before we open it up for questions. Many people are looking at AI right now and saying, “I’m going to write within an AI book.” I have yet to see an AI book that isn’t crap. What are your thoughts on that?
You have to get the whole draft out. You can't micromanage that one chapter or it never gets done. Share on XThat’s a funny story. I was writing something that applied to something I was doing and the AI came back floating stuff that I had out there myself.
Seriously. You were the citations on your work. That’s hilarious. That’s what I do love about perplexity it does give you the citations versus ChatGPT which gives you sassy stuff, and Geminiwhicht lies and says that Mount Rushmore’s full of African American presidents.
I was talking with someone about this because it was a sales call, full disclosure, and I said, “I need to talk to you about AI,” and I’m sure you are all sick of hearing it because everyone’s sick of talking about it, but I want to make sure that my values are stated upfront so that if yours differ then we know we are not like a good fit to work together.
I said listen, “I’m all for automation. There are human touchpoints. I’m all for making things easier, but I am ideologically opposed to generative AI and certainly in regards to writing books with it because as a consumer of books, I’m a reader myself, and I love books. When I walk into a bookstore or heaven forbid, I’m shopping on Amazon for books, I have an expectation that they are written by humans. I don’t want my selection of books like in the search results or whatever in the actual bookstore to be written with generative AI. I might be an odd bird, but that’s me. Ally, what do you think?
If an author is going to use AI to author a book, then it’s not regenerative AI, it’s regurgitating.
Pointing it along with my outlines and briefs side business for outlining as Jessica pointed out like AI can be super useful in streamlining things, automating things, brainstorming, perhaps helping maybe with that outline so it’s a little more efficient, not so much of a slog, but with a very specific and accurate prompt that is taking into consideration a number of key factors that are you focused in order to make those outlines, brainstorms, whatever as specific to you and your content and thought leadership as possible. However, none of those things are writing the book. If you are prompting an AI source, then you are prompting it, not authoring it, and that it calls into question who is the author of the piece if you are putting your book’s prompt into an AI-generated piece.

Are you authoring it? No. If AI is pulling from all of the sources of data that are out there to pull it in, then it’s regurgitating somebody else’s stuff, which you now can’t cite because you don’t have that information, and then it calls into question your credibility, your thought leadership, your experience, which in AI can’t generate for you. Only you have lived your life, only you have experienced the things that you’ve experienced. If you are using your book to generate leads for your business and people give a crap about what you are able to do for them and AI can’t speak to that and AI doesn’t have the case studies that are in your brain, the client success stories that you have. No, thank you folks.
You need to author a book that requires action, which means you have to do something and it’s not like, typing some things in and hitting the button and then letting the thing, pull 80,000 words together that you then have to go through and make sure that you are comfortable putting your name on the thing that got generated from all of the other things out there that aren’t yours.
I think that there are still a lot of issues with ethics and integrity right now in this space. I would say figure out how to use it as personally as you can for all of the outsourcing of other things. Maybe helping you generate some ideas but like making it yours. Stick with having the ownership and authorship of your written word, and hold up, let’s not get all shiny object syndrome because AI is here to save the day because what we know about tools and technology because we saw it with the wave of the internet, is that they are only as helpful and good as the people who are running them. The internet is as much a powerful, wonderful, healthy tool as it is destructive, chaotic, and awful, and it all is about the human on the other side who is pushing the buttons. AI is not any different.
What AI is good for is running your manuscript through the keywords that you think are your keywords Is that coming out of the other side? We do that a lot. The categories you can use AI for the categories when you publish. We had somebody change. We ran his book through it, and it gave us a lot of Christian, and he’s like, “Why is there not psychology?” If the AI is picking up that you belong in one area, you have to think about the distributors who are using AI to categorize. Amazon runs a lot on AI. If you’ve ever run an ad, it’ll give you suggestions, and you look at it and you are like, “That’s not what I intended.” It is good for verifying that things are there that you think should be there and that you’ve used them consistently, but the writing, I don’t, and it has their personality.
When you put in somebody’s manuscript to do that, I like the idea there, and I have seen somebody do an AI-generated report based on their manuscript that provided all kinds of wonderful, like here are key points you can talk about in marketing. Here’s what it sounds like your audience demographic is. It was impressive. It was pretty neat. I will give it credit for that, but when you put your manuscript into one of these AI generative programs, is it then keeping that manuscript content in its sources?
No, it does not. We verified it, and here’s the other thing too. AIs are different, ChatGPT, you can use it for marketing, but you can’t use it for factual things. Gemini proved a couple of months ago, that you cannot use Gemini for factual things. What I love, and I mentioned it with Kris when Kris was talking, is perplexity. First of all, it will not take a copyrighted manuscript if you’ve got a copyright page on there. You’ve got to do the pre-copyright because it will not, it will not look at copyrighted material, which is ethically a good thing.
The second thing is it will give you citations, so you can go look and verify that the information you are using is correct and has been verified. It depends on which AI you are using and what you are doing with it too, but you should never use it to write a book. The two books that people sent me were about the worst things ever, and they had no personality. You have to remember, that AI doesn’t have a personality, Jessica.
I don’t want to derail the conversation. Have any of you edited a book that was AI-generated, like written by AI? I would imagine that if you do it that way and bring it to an editor, it would still cost you more time and more money to get that edited to a place where now it’s okay to publish. Had you written it yourself, you probably would have saved time and money there again.
It’s the same argument. If you go it alone, you don’t know what you are doing and it’s not focused, it’s not specific. You end up in a major reconstruction. Now if AI has generated it and it doesn’t have your voice, it doesn’t have your experiences, it’s not organized according to your framework like whatever it is, you are still doing the same major reconstruction. I did have a client who got frustrated with a chapter. She could not figure out how to word certain arguments within this chapter, and so she was frustrated. She had rewritten this one chapter a thousand times. It always seems like with my clients, there’s at least one chapter that gives them hell, and they start to burn out on trying to figure out how to get that chapter where it needs to be.
What I didn’t know is that she took a couple of paragraphs and ran them through AI to write them for her because she got so burnt out. She didn’t share that with me because she knew my feelings on the use of AI and authoring a manuscript, but what happened when I went to read that chapter again after she told me that there was another rewrite, I noticed it immediately. It slipped right out of her voice and into the automaton world, and I was like, “Send her an audio message. By any chance, did you use AI at all in paragraphs or on page whatever?” She sent me a message back and she was giggling and she was like, “You got me.” I was like, “This is why I have the opinion that I do because it’s obvious that this isn’t you. This isn’t at all how you’ve written up until this point. The tone is different, the expressions are different, and the formality of the writing is different. I can’t imagine reading a 75,000-word manuscript all generated from AI.
Kris, I have a question for you real quick. You edit my articles sometimes and you can tell the difference between my smart tone and what AI generates. Can you talk about that a little bit? That’s a tiny article. That’s not 75,000 words.
I will say the AI-generated ones require more heavy editing because I have found misspellings besides the technical errors I have found, and also malapropism because it’s drawing from things that are wrong. It’s like making the word the right word, and a computer doesn’t know it’s the wrong word if it’s been programmed that way.
I can tell the difference between when you AI it and when you and I will try to beef it up a little and make it more, humanize it a little bit. I will say, that have used AI to trust writer’s block. Like I have got this idea for this chapter, I have got, and I will put it in and give it some parameters, and then it busts the writer’s block. Like, “I like the approach there but then you don’t copy-paste it into your manuscript.”
You have to use your human discernment and go, “First of all, you don’t even know if it’s plagiarized, like Ally was saying. That’s a serious thing.” Second of all, you have to bring it into your voice so it can help you break writer’s block, get an idea for a chapter, help you get a perspective that maybe didn’t think of or you are struggling with, especially if you are bogged down, that feeling of you are bogged down and you can’t get it, but after that, you have to do heavy editing yourself and make it your own. For an article, I don’t think that’s as big of a deal for a 50 to 100-word article as it is for a 50,000-word book.
We are running out of time here. Do you guys have any questions for these guys before we close out? Diane, I appreciate all your comments along the way here. They have been very helpful.
I don’t have any specific questions, but it has been amazing to hear from people who are doing this every single day. I do websites, so things tend to be a lot smaller. Your website’s 20, and 30 pages. Yes, there are still audiences, strategy, marketing, and all those things, but I don’t have the volume of content, and it’s amazing to hear about 70,000 words and keep a tone through many chapters because I’m sure that people who are writing, they are different from the time when they do vomit draft. Their emotional state must change fundamentally. They have worked through maybe their issues, and their own stories, and it must be amazing to see that journey that they go through, which will probably be the journey that their reader will go through.
The Healing Journey Of Writing A Book: Embrace Vulnerability And Heal Through Storytelling
Every book is a healing journey. It’s almost as if God or the universe, whoever you believe in as your higher power, says, “You’ve got this, you can do it,” and then you get into it and it’s like, “What? You’re going to have to heal before we finish.” That’s been my experience with the book. There’s all that thoughtfulness. It’s like journaling. You get into some deep emotion. It’s always very healing to write a book.
Juliet and I had a client we worked with who wrote and it was a freaking awesome book and it was about, she was sex trafficked as a child. When she handed me the book, she said, “If anything needs fixing, fix it yourself. Ask me questions, but I’m never reading this book again.” She couldn’t even read her manuscript again, but it was so beautifully written that the editing we went through was very minor. It was a huge healing journey for her.
Before we close out, can each of you tell people where to find you if they would like to embark on this journey in 2025? Jessica, you are unmuted. Do you want to go first?
You can find me on LinkedIn. That’s where I hang out. On my LinkedIn, you have the link under my name there that will get you on my email list so that you can keep updated with everything that I have going on. I usually send an email out every single week. Lots of exciting things in the pipeline, including how to get an amazing ROI on your brand book and also a free mini service coming up in January. I would love it if you would take me up on that offer.
Ally, do you want to go ahead since you dropped it in the chat but nobody can see it?
We didn’t realize that. You can come visit me at The Write Place Right Time. You can sign up for the email list, and all of my social links are also right on the homepage, but the main place that I’m hanging out online is LinkedIn as well. I would love to connect and chat. I give a free 30-minute story stroll, which is a 1-to-1 connection call via Zoom or phone, where we talk about the book that you want to write, the barriers to the blank page, and try to get you moving again.
I’m in the process of changing over. I don’t have a website right at this moment. The best way to find me is on social media LinkedIn, Kristy Boyd Johnson, or Facebook. That’s the easiest way to find me or you can email me. Send me an email and tell me you heard me on Juliet’s show.
I want to remind you, to go over and get Breakthrough Author Magazine. All of these guys write articles. They have great tips and great perspectives on what’s going on, and if you think you know what’s going on in the publishing world, you are probably not correct because it’s not as simple as you think it is. It would be like me pretending to be an engineer and building a bridge. I could probably do it, but you wouldn’t want to drive across it. Subscribe and find out more about this industry so you have all of the information you need to make this a great journey. Thank you, guys, and thank you for the you that showed up too.
Important Links
- Kristy Boyd Johnson
- Brand Book Bootcamp
- Ally Berthiaume
- Dear Universe, I Get It Now: Letters on the Art and Journey of Being Brave and Being Me
- Do Not Write a Book…Until You Read This One
- Outlines And Briefs
- Jessica Andersen on LinkedIn
- Kristy Boyd Johnson on Facebook
- Kristy Boyd Johnson’s Email Address
- Breakthrough Author Magazine
About Ally Berthiaume
Alyssa Berthiaume (usually known as Ally, but published under A.Y.) is the founder of The Write Place, Right Time, her virtual boutique of book coaching and ghostwriting services. Berthiaume serves leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries across North America and Europe in writing the books that will light up their world and ours. Berthiaume is also the award-winning author of Dear Universe, I Get it Now: Letters on the Art and Journey of Being Brave and Being Me and the co-author of Do Not Write a Book…Until You Read This one.
About Kristy Boyd Johnson
Kristy Boyd Johnson is an award-winning children’s author, and has ghostwritten over 30 books for entrepreneurs over the years. She is a sought-after developmental editor and transformational book coach. She recently launched Starseed Journey Retreats because she can’t imagine anything better than being a beautiful location with beautiful people who want to reconnect with their deepest selves through writing.
About Jessica Andersen
Jessica is an editor-turned-book-coach from the USA who moved to France one day in 2010 and never looked back.
Since starting her business four years ago, she has worked with authors all over the world on dozens of books.
As the founder of Brand Book Bootcamp, she serves entrepreneurs who want to replace their content marketing with a “Brand Book” which will position them as a go-to voice and attract ideal clients on autopilot.