Transforming Your Book in the Age of AI: 23 Innovative Ideas

• In the age of AI, books are no longer just books; they are assets.
• Discover 23 different ways to transform a single book into more valuable content.
• Leverage AI technologies to reach new audiences and create diverse adaptations.
• Enhance creativity and expansion opportunities beyond traditional writing.
• Learn how to utilize AI tools effectively for various formats.

In the age of AI, we can no longer afford to think of a book as just a single book. It is now an asset, something that can be used as intellectual property in a variety of different situations. AI can actually help you transform the single book, the single asset, into something much bigger and greater.

In this video, I will give you 23 different ways to do that, although it's certainly not limited to these 23.

Number one is a young reader edition of your book. This is something that I've started to do right now. I'm in the process of getting the images right now for one of them, where I basically took my book and I used AI to condense it down into a, more young reader version of the book so that I could read it to my daughter, who is 3 years old, almost four at this point. She would be able to comprehend it a little bit better.

I don't know if that's necessarily going to make a lot of money, but I'm doing it because I really love my daughter and I really love my stories. I would love to find a way to bring them together in a way that is meaningful. That's number one.

As an aside, the prompt that I use for that young reader edition is available in my prompt library, which you can get for free by signing up for my email list. Go ahead down below; you can see where you can sign up to get that prompt library for free.

I don't have prompts for every single one of these 23 items that I'm going to present to you today, but I do have prompts for several of them.

All right, the second way to transform your book into more assets is to leverage translations. Now translations are at that point where the AI is pretty good. DeepL is the tool that I currently recommend to get those translations done. It has the best cost for quality output that I found.

The downside to translations is that there are a lot of little nuances in the language, so it's still necessary to get somebody who is a native speaker of that language to at least go through the translation and proofread it. Make sure that it makes sense from their perspective. You'll have to have a person like that with each language that you try to do, but that is still significantly less money than what it would have taken before to get a full translation.

So, the barriers to entry are significantly less, and you can potentially turn your book into dozens of different translations just with this one strategy.

My third item, and this is kind of related to the first two, is to create different reader versions. Now, like the young reader version, this is creating essentially an entirely different audience that wouldn't have existed before. You could have your PG version, your PG-13 version, or your R-rated version if you so desire.

For me, I write mostly clean fiction, and I know that a lot of clean fiction readers would not like an explicit version. So this isn't for them. This is creating an entirely new audience of people that really go for the spicy stuff or, if you write spicy stuff already, you can open up a new audience with the people that really like clean stuff.

With AI, it actually becomes pretty easy to quickly and easily filter out the swear words or the spicy scenes and things like that, or to add them in if you so desire. If you're using an AI model that can do that.

Admittedly, this doesn't work for everything. If you write explicit erotica or something like that, it just doesn't translate to clean; you can't have a clean version of that because that's sort of the point of the genre.

But if you have a book where the spicy level, as well as the violence and gore and everything, are not really what the book is about, they're just sort of in there, then you can absolutely create a clean version of that book.

That would be more or less the same story but just a little bit cleaner, and that's an entirely different audience that you can now reach.

I'm actually surprised that people in Hollywood, for example, have not been doing this. There have been a couple of companies that have sprung up now and again trying to take what Hollywood movie and edit it to be a little bit more digestible for the people who don't like all the explicit stuff.

That's a huge audience that they're missing out on, and those companies tried to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, a lot of those companies did not get very far because Hollywood sued the crap out of them.

I really think Hollywood should think about doing this themselves; it's a totally untapped market where they could easily make additional money just by cleaning up the films and presenting them to that audience that would prefer it that way.

All right, the fourth way you can repurpose a book is to create audiobooks. Now this one existed already, and you can absolutely continue to do that the way it's always been done by hiring a narrator. But there are AI audio narrators available now if you can't afford to do the proper human narrator.

For me personally, I'm lucky enough to be able to afford the occasional audiobook for my books, so I do hire a human narrator where I can. But I also produce a lot of extra material. For instance, the young reader book or if I'm doing my own version of a public domain book, sometimes I'll create a modern prose edition. I'll get to that one in a second.

I would like to have the modern prose edition narrated, but I can't really afford to do that process with a human narrator for all of the titles that I produce. Therefore, in that case, I might want to use an AI audio narrator because it's a lot quicker and easier.

Unfortunately, you can't really use AI audio for most platforms. Audible does allow it as long as you're using their version of the audiobook narrator, which isn't that great compared to others like 11 Labs.

But if you're selling the stuff yourself directly, there is that option, or you can put it on YouTube and that sort of thing.

Speaking of putting your audiobooks on YouTube, there is the fifth item that I want to bring up, and that is creating what I call dramatic slideshows of your book. This is where you can take your audiobook, whether it's human or AI narrated, and create a slideshow of images that illustrate the scene.

You can generate these images with AI, and I do have a prompt in my prompt library that will take a chapter of your book and split it up into a bunch of different image prompts, which you can then run through MidJourney or any of the other AI art generators out there.

Then you can take all of those images and string them together into a slideshow. In my case, I'm experimenting with this right now; I'm using a tool called Imersity to create a sort of subtle motion and depth map with every image to create this more dramatic effect.

We already know that putting your audiobooks on YouTube has been very successful for some authors, and I think if you can animate those audiobooks in this way with the dramatic slideshow, that could make it even better and more appealing to audiences.

If you want to take this even further, we go to my sixth way that you can repurpose your content, and that is to create an audio drama. Now, at a very basic level, you can use AI to create different voices for each of the characters in your audiobook and just repurpose the audiobook this way.

But if you really want to take it to the next level, you can use AI to create an audio drama script based on your book. Then, from that, you can narrate all of the different parts using AI, creating this dramatic audiobook experience.

This one admittedly is going to take a bit more work to get it done right, but when done well, audio dramas can be extremely impactful for a lot of people. I know I used to listen to them a ton when I was a kid growing up. The Star Wars audio dramas are still probably the thing that I listen to the most in my childhood.

Number seven: comic books. Now, this one seems pretty obvious, but you can absolutely use AI to create images for your books and then add the text in and all of that. Use AI to adapt your book to a comic book script, do whatever you need to do to make it look good.

From there, you can make comic books with your work. If you've already gone through the process of creating that dramatic illustrated version of an audiobook, like I talked about before, you will already have a whole bunch of images. Maybe you can repurpose those images to create a comic book in addition to what you've already done.

Number eight: you can create coloring books with AI. AI is pretty good at coloring books, especially if you can upscale them properly so that they look clean. Once again, I do have a prompt in my prompt library that will allow you to put a chapter of your book into the AI, and it will spit out a bunch of image prompts. Those image prompts could be coloring book prompts if you design them that way.

Number nine is a Choose Your Own Adventure edition. Now, admittedly, this is an interesting one that would probably require a fair amount of work even with AI. But you could absolutely take your book and have AI analyze it and come up with interesting Choose Your Own Adventure options.

Then AI is really good at mapping out the different adventure pathways that you could do, and so it wouldn't be that difficult to actually take a story and create a Choose Your Own Adventure book from it, especially if it's a relatively short type of adventure that ties into your book rather than takes the whole place of the book.

So you can perhaps focus on a side character or something a little adventure that they have that allows your reader to immerse themselves in the experience a little bit more because of the Choose Your Own Adventure mentality.

Just remember: don't use the phrase "Choose Your Own Adventure" when you're publishing the book because unfortunately, that is trademarked.

Number ten is annotated editions. Now, admittedly, I use this mostly for public domain books that I work on, but you can do this for your own books as well, where you basically take the whole book and run it through a prompt that creates interesting annotations for the book.

You could even adjust the prompt so that you could have, say, a character within the book actually making commentary on the book as you’re moving through. I've seen books like that where it seems like there are almost in-universe scribblings from different characters inside of the book. You could potentially create something like that with the right prompt.

Number eleven is modern prose editions. This is another one that I use pretty much exclusively for public domain books. There are a lot of public domain books out there where the language is kind of difficult to understand for a modern reader. So, to make that barrier to entry a little bit better, I like to create modern prose editions so that the text is really easy to digest.

I do have a prompt for this one; you can find in my prompt library down below if you sign up. This is another thing that AI is actually really good at understanding the language and being able to translate that language essentially into a modern prose version.

All right, number twelve is to create a screenplay or stage play script for film or theater, respectively. This one's pretty obvious, but if you are interested in adapting your book to film or the stage, this would be your first step.

Number thirteen is to create card games from your book. Now, you can use AI to come up with interesting rule books and things around different card games that you might want to do. Or, you might just want to create established card games using artwork from your book and your characters, and you can of course use AI to create that artwork and then incorporate it into your cards and go from there.

Number fourteen is to create a story bible or lore encyclopedia. A lot of authors are already using AI to create their story bibles from their books. It's a really useful way to kind of catalog all of your information. But if you want to take that to the next level, format it in such a way, take your story bible, and use the AI to write basically Wikipedia-like entries that you can then use and piece together into a lore encyclopedia that you can then sell.

You can even get AI to do your images for this encyclopedia to make it a little bit more engaging and exciting, and with that, you have a potentially really interesting book that readers can use.

Number fifteen: I thought this one was interesting. This one was actually suggested to me by AI, and I thought it was a great idea. That is poetry books. Let's say you want to actually take your story and maybe characters in your story and make some kind of poetry out of that.

Maybe the character is a poet themselves, and you can create poetry that they would write. Perhaps it's poetry that is based on the story. Maybe there's a particularly tragic or touching moment inside the book that you could take that scene and have AI create some kind of poem from it. I think whatever the case is, there's some really good opportunities there that you could really play with.

Number sixteen: I've dabbled with this one already, but it's in-universe books. I really like in-universe books; I like books that really immerse me in the story. That's one of the reasons I like Skyrim and the other Elder Scrolls games, as they have a lot of these books inside of the game that you can read.

Now, they're not particularly in-depth or anything like that, but it does increase the immersion a little bit to see these things written from the perspective of characters in the story. You could absolutely use AI to capture the voice of a character to write the way that character does and then create different pieces of content that exist inside of the story itself.

I think that's a really cool thing that if you were to bring out three or four of those for every series that you create, I think readers would eat that up.

Number seventeen is social media stories. I'm not just talking about creating social media content from your books. I'm talking about making it almost in-universe social media content.

What I mean by this would work a little bit better for contemporary stories—anything set in the modern day. You could actually set up social media accounts for different characters and have them interact. Say on X/Twitter, you could have different characters interact and set up ahead of time all of the tweets that they're going to put out and then from there create this really immersive social media experience.

I've seen this done in the past, but AI would make it super easy to do, just creating those series of tweets from the character's perspective.

Number eighteen is interactive text games. This is something you could set up so that readers could use the AI themselves. For instance, you could create a GPT that does this, that basically acts like a dungeon master.

Then you give it the rules of your story and your book, and it can then take those rules and act as a dungeon master for that particular world that you've created. Readers could come and interact with that GPT you've set up as a way of kind of interacting with the game directly, and I think that's a strong potential that AI has available.

Number nineteen is recipe books. You can use AI to scan through your book and look for potential opportunities for recipes, and then you can work with the AI to actually come up with what those recipes are.

Now in order to make a proper recipe book, I recommend actually making some of these recipes and tweaking them, figuring them out, maybe getting into food photography a little bit or hiring someone to do food photography so you can get an actual picture of the recipe.

There are lots of cool opportunities that AI could help you with with this recipe book idea. I have a fantasy series I plan on writing in the distant future that is very focused on food as part of their culture, and so that would be a very appropriate opportunity to create a recipe book for that series.

Number twenty is educational workbooks. This one is pretty obvious; you create a workbook that is educational for kids, adults, or teens, whatever the grade level may be. This one might be more appropriate for some genres than others and for non-fiction rather than fiction.

But for instance, in my case, I have mythology-based stories, and so having a mythology-based workbook might be a really cool idea for kids. You can even expand it so that there are things like coloring pages, mazes, and other fun little activities that the kids can work with.

Number twenty-one is music albums. Now, I haven't gotten into AI-generated music too much on this channel, but there are a couple of really good ones out there. Sunno and Audio seem to be the big AI music producers out there. I would experiment with those and see if you can create an actual album based on the themes of your story. Perhaps you could create a soundtrack for your book.

I personally think that is really exciting; it's something I plan on dipping my toes into in the future, but that's just another way that you can repurpose your book.

Number twenty-two is themed merchandise. This one's also pretty obvious. You can use a tool like Ideogram to create stickers and t-shirt designs and things like that all around your book and your book ideas and then you can put those designs on your merchandise and use them.

Number twenty-three and this is the last one that I have for you, is AI animated television or film. Now, admittedly, this one is still kind of in its infancy. AI video is getting really good; it's not quite at the level where we could produce a full-on animated film or something like that.

Let me rephrase that. It is good enough to do the animation, but it's going to require quite a bit of work, even with the tools that we have available with AI. Granted, it is something that is possible with today's technology for anybody to be able to go out and create a low-fidelity animated film using these tools.

I think in a couple of years it will be even better, and there will be tools that make the process simpler and easier to do.

We'll start with animation because I think that's just easier to get away with using the AI tools out there. There's too much of an uncanny valley with the live-action type of AI, but we're going to get there eventually.

It won't be long before anybody with a good idea who is a good writer will be able to produce amazing film and television productions, either by themselves or with a small team. I believe this is going to completely decentralize and disrupt the Hollywood industry, opening up many more opportunities for, let's just say, niche down film and television that we haven't been able to do before.

Now already in my publishing house, I have basically a rule that every book that I release needs to have at least one alternate version. I'm not just talking about an audiobook or something like that; I'm talking about a completely new version.

So for my fiction, that is right now at least, that is mostly just talking about the young reader editions that I'm producing. Although, for some of my books, I'm actually taking the audiobook and creating that dramatic slideshow that I talked about.

For the public domain books that I create, I usually create two versions there as well. I have an annotated version that creates the original text with a lot of annotations, and then I create a modern prose edition, which basically rewrites the entire text to be in a more modern-friendly text.

For my non-fiction, I don't use AI for this one as much, but for every non-fiction book that I produce for authors, I usually produce a companion course that goes with it.

All of that goes inside my membership. And by the way, if you're interested in learning more about how to not just write with AI but to write well and to how to publish your books and everything that goes into that process, you can go check out my membership down below.

I have a link to it; it will take you from nothing, if you've published nothing at all, to the entire process of not just writing your first book but publishing it and setting up your email and having all of the foundational tools that you need to succeed in publishing and marketing your book.

Now if you like this video, I go much more in-depth on this idea of writing a book in a day, creating some of these versions very quickly in a video that I'll link to right here. Depending on when you see this, you might see the old version of the video, but I will also be doing an updated version of this video very soon, so look forward to that.

Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.