How to Build a Book Marketing Stack Without Hiring Consultants (or Losing Your Mind)

A practical guide to book marketing in the age of AI

Hi,

I met with Florin a few weeks ago to talk about a tool he’s building, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

If you know me, you know I get excited about tools—especially when they simplify the parts of the author business that most people avoid. And book marketing? That’s usually at the top of the hate list for indie authors.

Most of us just want to write. We didn’t sign up for keyword research, social media calendars, or figuring out what makes a good comp title. We do it because we have to, but almost nobody enjoys it.

Which is why this caught my attention.

What Florin’s building is one of the first tools I’ve seen that actually makes book marketing feel manageable. Not by throwing more dashboards at you, but by turning all those overwhelming, confusing tasks into something that looks…doable.

And if you’ve ever stared at a blank ad headline or tried to write your tenth version of a blurb, you know how big that is.

So let’s talk about how AI—and the right kind of automation—can actually help you build a book marketing stack that works without burning you out. Because this stuff doesn’t have to suck.

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Once upon a time, indie authors dreamed of hiring a magical consultant who would handle everything—blurbs, keywords, comps, press, social media—so they could just write.

The reality? That consultant often comes with a five-figure price tag and a stack of generic templates that don’t actually reflect your book.

According to Palmetto Publishing, the cost to market a book can range from $249 to over $8,000, depending on services. PaperTrue puts the upper end for “comprehensive marketing services” at $12,000+. And those prices don’t include ongoing platform growth or content creation.

But here’s the good news: you can now replicate most of those services yourself using the right mix of AI tools. For the first time ever, authors can build their own book marketing stack powered by modern tech, without the burnout or budget blowout.

Let’s break down exactly how to do that.

Your New Assistant Has 100 Billion Neurons

Meet your new marketing team: large language models, or LLMs.

If you’ve used ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you’ve already interacted with this new wave of generative AI. What’s wild is that these aren’t just tools. They’re the sum total of a massive corpus of human knowledge, creativity, and yes, marketing strategy.

Most of today’s top-performing LLMs—ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and others—have been trained on hundreds of billions of tokens of publicly available data. This includes books, scripts, websites, articles, and in many cases…books that were not technically meant to be in the training data.

That’s controversial, and the legality of training on copyrighted material is still being challenged in court, but while that battle plays out, these models are live, and they’ve read everything from Stephen King to Colleen Hoover to Brandon Sanderson.

That means they’re surprisingly good at:

• Identifying what kinds of blurbs hook readers in specific genres

• Understanding what tone resonates with different audiences

• Matching your story to comparable titles that have real market traction

• Suggesting keywords and hashtags that are actually trending

• Adapting your content for specific reader segments, from romantasy to cozy mystery to hard sci-fi

In short: they’ve already “seen” millions of books that sold well and can reverse-engineer what makes them work. That’s something even most consultants can’t offer without access to expensive industry databases.

⚠️ But there’s the catch…

Yes, AI can do a lot, but you have to know how to prompt it. Think of AI not like a vending machine, but like a new assistant who’s brilliant, if a little weird. It can write a great book blurb in under 10 seconds, but only if you ask the right question.

LLMs don’t magically generate perfect content. They respond to your prompt. The better your input, the better your output.

Here’s an example:

Basic prompt:

“Write a blurb for my book.”

Better prompt:

“I need you to write 5 150-word back cover blurbs for my cozy mystery. Below I’ll give you the summary of the book and the target audience. In this blurb, highlight themes of redemption and community.

Here’s the book summary: [insert summary obtained in an earlier, separate step]

Here’s the target audience: [insert target audience obtained in an earlier, separate step]”

The second version gives the AI just enough constraints to deliver something usable and on-brand. You’ll notice that it will take more than one iteration to get a good blurb so you’ll first have to get a summary and based on it, the target audience.

Learning to prompt is the skill that separates good AI results from generic filler. It’s like learning to give feedback to a junior assistant. You’ll get more from them when you give more to them.

🧠 TL;DR: These AI tools are powerful because they’ve been trained on the best—and worst—of book marketing. They know what sells, but they only perform well when you ask the right questions. Learn to prompt, stay aware of the copyright landscape, and use the tools available while they’re here.

What AI Can (and Should) Do for Your Marketing

Done right, AI can completely replace many core tasks traditionally handled by consultants or agencies. In addition to the example above, here are a few more things it can handle, along with prompt examples to get you started.

Comparable Titles (Comps)

Why comps matter: They help readers, retailers, and algorithms understand where your book fits.

You can get comps using a variation of the following prompt:

“Based on the synopsis of this novel, list 5 recent books that share similar tone, themes, and audience appeal. Prioritize recent books with strong Amazon visibility.
Here’s the synopsis: [insert synopsis]”

Cross-check with Kindle categories or Goodreads Listopia for market relevance

Keywords and Metadata

This is the “boring” stuff that drives real discoverability.

Prompt:

“Based on this book synopsis, generate 10 high-volume Amazon keywords, 3 BISAC categories, and a list of niche hashtags for BookTok and Instagram. Here’s the synopsis: [insert synopsis]”

Bonus: Tools like Publisher Rocket and KDP’s own backend can help you validate these.

Want More? AI Can Help You Build…

• A press release that sounds professional and tailored to your genre

• A book club discussion guide with 10+ thought-provoking questions

• A set of email sequences introducing readers to your world, your character, and your future releases

• A personalized ad copy pack with multiple variations for Facebook, Amazon, and Google Ads

• Reader personas and audience segments for better targeting

Marketing isn’t just about the launch day anymore. It’s about building a sustainable content loop that keeps your book alive in the minds (and feeds) of readers.

AI and automation make it possible to do this without spending hours each week manually posting, repackaging, or brainstorming new content.

Create Targeted Reader Personas

Knowing who your book is for is the starting point of any solid marketing strategy. With AI, you can go beyond vague “target audiences” and generate detailed, specific reader personas based on your actual story.

Prompt:

“Based on this book’s synopsis, who is the ideal reader? What other authors might they follow? What hashtags do they browse, and where do they spend time online? Here’s the synopsis: [insert synopsis]”

The result? You don’t just know your reader is “into fantasy”—you know she’s 32, loves Tessa Dare and cozy villain redemption arcs, scrolls #Romantasy on TikTok, and subscribes to fantasy map-making subreddits.

Once you know this, everything else becomes easier: your tone, your platform, your ads, even your newsletter giveaways.

Blog Posts That Go Deeper

Blogs may feel old school, but they’re still powerful for SEO and email engagement—especially when the content resonates with readers beyond just “buy my book.”

Here’s a smart workflow: Use a high-context model like Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Prompt:

“I want to create blog content from this novel. Suggest 5 blog post ideas based on its characters, worldbuilding, and themes. For each blog post provide the title and a high level structure with all the section titles and descriptions”

• Then, adjust what you don’t like and generate each blog post separately using consistent instructions. You can even go more granular and generate each blog section separately.

• Make sure to include in the prompt the exact style and tone of the blog post. You can also provide chunks from your book and ask the LLM to replicate the style.

• Once you’ve got all sections, stitch them together and tweak as needed.

This step-by-step approach keeps the quality high—far better than asking for a full blog post in one go, which often results in generic fluff.

Memorable Quotes for Social Media & Ads

AI is also great at surfacing quotable moments from your novel that you might have overlooked.

Feed in your book chapter by chapter. A synopsis of the whole book might also help the LLM understand the context better.

Prompt:

“Extract 5 emotional, thought-provoking, or funny quotes from this chapter that would resonate with readers on Instagram or Twitter. Avoid spoilers.”

Want something more specific? Ask for:

• Quotes that reflect the main theme

• Quotes about love, fear, power, or freedom

• Quotes spoken by a certain character

Pair these with book covers or AI-generated visuals (more on that next), and you’ve got evergreen content for your socials, newsletter, or ads.

Social Media Posts (With Custom AI Images)

Not everything has to be a quote. You can also ask AI to generate posts inspired by:

• A character’s internal struggle

• A pivotal scene (no spoilers!)

• A specific trope (grumpy x sunshine, chosen one, etc.)

• A piece of worldbuilding (your magic system, your alien planet, your café menu)

Then take it one step further:

• Ask the AI to create a catchy, visual description for each extracted post.

• Feed that description into an image generation model. The best ones right now are ChatGPT, Gemini, Flux 1.1 Pro Ultra, or Midjourney v7. Know that most of these models require separate payment or subscriptions.

A few tips:

• Be specific with image prompts: setting, lighting, mood, pose, colors, time of day

• Don’t ask for text in images (AI struggles a lot with that)

• Careful when adding people in the images, AI will also struggle with fingers and faces.

• Iteration is your friend—good image prompts are part art, part science

Sample images generated from Russell Nohelty’s Magic:

Automate Your Content Schedule

This step is optional but if you build a bank of content—quotes, blog excerpts, character posts, image prompts—you can automate the machine.

Here’s how to keep your content flowing consistently, without manually logging in every day:

• Use scheduling tools like Buffer, Later, or Hypefury to plan posts weeks in advance

• Recycle your best posts by rewriting them in different tones or formats:

  • Tweet ➝ carousel ➝ IG story ➝ quote image

The 3 Pitfalls of AI Marketing (and How to Avoid Them)

AI is amazing. It can write blurbs, brainstorm blog posts, pull quotes from your novel, and tell you which hashtags are hot on BookTok. But like any assistant, it needs supervision.

Here are three common mistakes authors make when using AI for marketing—and how to stay on the safe side.

1. Don’t Blindly Trust the Bots

LLMs are great storytellers… which means they’re also great at making things up. Even the best models occasionally hallucinate plot points, character names, or create weird cause-and-effect leaps that don’t actually exist in your book.

The fix: Always double-check outputs. If you’re generating comps, blurbs, or quotes—give them a once-over for accuracy. Especially before hitting publish.

2. Beware the Beige Voice

Most AI outputs start with the same generic tone: kind of corporate, kind of bland, kind of not you. If your book is funny, heartfelt, gritty, or poetic, you’ll want your marketing content to reflect that.

The fix: Be specific in your prompts about the tone you want. Even better—feed the model a writing sample and ask it to match your style. Don’t settle for “AI voice” when you’ve got a book full of your voice.

3. Respect Your Work and Read the Fine Print (if you care about these things)

You wrote a whole book. That’s a big deal. Don’t just throw it into every free AI tool out there without checking where your data might end up.

Some platforms store and use your input to train future models (unless you’re on a paid, privacy-respecting plan). Others don’t let you delete your uploads at all.

Want All of This Done for You?

Meet ManuscriptReport.com

If you love the idea of AI-powered marketing but don’t want to prompt engineer for hours and create multiple subscriptions, that’s exactly why I built ManuscriptReport.com.

We create 4 powerful types of reports from your books. Some reports are delivered in minutes and they all respect privacy (no AI training, all traces of the book are deleted in 30 days). Moreover, you can get $5 off with the discount code RUSSELL5.

Below is more information on the reports we create as well as a demo for each on Russell's book, Magic: Book 1 of The Godsverse Chronicles.

1. Full Marketing Report ($35)

Includes 15 marketing sections that are already optimized for discoverability: blurbs, comps, audience profile, market positioning, keywords, back-of-the-book summary, synopsis, themes, tropes, and more.

Marketing Report Demo

2. Blog Series ($35)

Get up to 10 professionally crafted blog posts highlighting your book's key themes, ideas, and narratives.

Blog Series Demo Report

3. Social Media Content ($45)

Generates 30 ready-to-publish social media posts with images. You’ll get posts with memorable quotes, sales pitches and scene spotlights (for fiction) or facts & stats (for non-fiction).

Social Media Content Demo (this will download an excel file 3 sheets/categories of posts and images)

4. Book Bible ($49)

Generate a detailed bible for your fiction or non-fiction book, tracking characters, descriptions, locations, relationships, plot, concepts, evidence, objects, and more.

Book Bible Demo Report


Still not convinced? Check out our case studies to learn how authors and publishers are using the reports.

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LSS: Book marketing doesn’t have to be this massive, painful, soul-draining thing we all dread. If you’ve ever paid thousands for “comprehensive marketing help” and ended up with a generic blurb and a few hashtags, you know what I mean.

The truth is, much of what those high-paid consultants do can now be replicated if you know how to use the right tools and give them the right input. That’s what changes the game. Not just the tools themselves, but learning how to drive them.

We’re not stuck choosing between doing everything ourselves or shelling out thousands for someone else to do it. With the right tools and a little bit of prompting skill, you can take back control of your book marketing on your terms.

This isn’t about making your work generic or turning you into a robot. It’s about getting the annoying, repetitive stuff out of the way so you can focus on what you do best: telling stories that matter.

Start with what’s in front of you. Prompt better. Test more. Build as you go. The future of book marketing isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing it smarter.

You don’t need to be a tech expert. You just need to be curious.

What about you?

1. What’s been your biggest struggle with book marketing so far—and have you found anything that actually helped?

2. Have you tried using AI tools for your author business yet? If so, what’s worked for you (or totally flopped)?

3. If you could take one marketing task off your plate forever, what would it be—and why?

Let us know in the comments.

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Photo by Emilipothèse on Unsplash