The tsunami of offerings in the AI, writing and self publishing world continues apace in 2025. I am often asked ‘What are the best AI tools are for business book writing and self publishing’, so here’s my Top 7, including some tools that I don’t use but have been recommended by our clients.
They key ways I use AI tools is for research, chapter structure, chapter summaries, repurposing for blog posts (especially linking in with current news items), book titles and subtitles, market segmentation and presentations. There’s SOOOOO many options depending on what your purpose/outcome is.This means you need to understand how each tool operates/searches and where it pulls its information from. While this might take you a bit of time to research it’s well worth the effort as the results/outcomes that are generated (as well as your skill in prompting) will be significantly better.
And, it’s important to understand that there’s a world of difference between the free and paid versions of all these Ai tools. For around $20 a month I’d highly recommend that you go straight to the paid versions of whatever Ai tools you use as they deliver much more useful outputs.
For research, content structure and target audiences
1. ChatGPT – the most well-known Ai tool is super useful for a whole range of tasks but I don’t use it to write my books. The main ways I use ChatGPT are as follows:
Book comparisons – think competitor research about what other books on the topic you are writing about that are in the marketplace. This helps to work out what’s been done already, why your book is going to be different and which topics resonate/sell the most
Title and sub title options
Chapter outlines
Topic listings and order within chapters
Compelling story summaries (think the 1-2 paragraphs that describe your book and are usually on the back cover
Market segmentation – what are your target audiences, who are they following, what are their core challenges, what platforms are they using
I don’t use it much for research as it doesn’t generate accurate references, it hallucinates about 20% of the time and, according to several studies, between 30-45% of the content in incorrect.
I am also careful what I share with it as my ‘input’ can be served up as the ‘output’ for someone else (without any referencing of me).
2. Perplexity
I use Perplexity for research as it provides source information and links
3. Google
It may seem old school now but it’s still a great research tool if you delve past the first page of listings.
I don’t find the summaries that useful and it is annoying that sponsored ads take up a lot of the first listings. AI generated summaries are also pretty ordinary at the moment too, although they are improving, and that’s really what the Ai tools do…constantly improve.
4. Claude
From what many users say, Claude generates content that sounds more authentic and specific. The responses read better and flow naturally. Others say its more personable, friendly and warm..more human-like I guess. It can also process more words than ChatGPT, although that will probably change by the time you read this post.
Interview Transcription
4. Firefires.ai, read.ai and rev.com
There are oodles of Ai tools for transcription that you can embed into Zoom and other platforms or use independently. Microsoft also has its own embedded transcription services. Given I cover a wide range of industries and interview a lot of people I find that transcriptions are good but not great. They often don’t pick up specific industry terms, people’s names, company names etc, so you need to review your transcripts BEFORE you use them or send them to others.
And remember, to check the style settings in terms of the dictionary you want to use (US English, British/Australian English etc), and remove filler words like um, ahh, erm…
Even when the transcriptions are done, I have someone review them for me while listening to the audio to fix up the names of people, places, specific industry terminology etc as all Ai tools get this critical information wrong.
Grammar and editing
5. Jasper.ai, Hemingway, Grammarly.com All these are pretty good tools for editing and checking your writing – removing spelling mistakes, correcting grammar and punctuation and the like.
Marketing and sales
6. Semrush.com, Buffer.com, HubSpot.com (Breeze), Amazon.com (KDP)
You might want to look at Publisher Rocket which is a great tool for maximising your presence on Amazon.
For the money side of things I use
Xero.com, Stripe.com, WooCommerce
Self publishing
7. Prowritingaid.com I have not used this personally but it comes highly recommended for those who want to DIY it.
Also useful for the DIY person is IngramSpark.com, Amazon.com (KDP)
To summarise
As you can see from this brief list, there are lots of AI tools out there for different parts of the writing and self publishing process. And by writing I mean writing books, not marketing content…there’s even more tools available to help with this (to be covered in an upcoming article).
Which AI tool you pick, or combination of tools, is really a matter of your personal preference and goals and whether you want to pay for the better version or use the free ones. The good people at Zapier have compiled a useful overview as well that you can read here.
No matter what tool you choose you need to learn how to get the best out of it by taking some training – either free or paid.
I recently overhead someone ranting about the fact that ChatGPT wasn’t providing it with the information they wanted and that he’d used his 40 daily prompts wanting to know WHY it couldn’t.
I gently explained to him that he needed to
a) provide some context, which he had not done
b) stop arguing with it, it’s not a person, and
c) understand it’s limitations.
Finally, take responsibility for what you ask any tool with your prompts and understand that these questions and your engagement with it could well become the ‘output’ for someone else. Ai is learning from you as well as assisting you. If protecting your IP is a concern READ THE FINE PRINT of what happens to your engagement.
Happy writing 🙂
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