Novel Uses of Ai Literally
eBookFairs has been using modern technologies since we began in 2021 to help authors in as many ways possible. Originally it was being one of the first to embrace Microsoft's Blazor technologies with our .NET 7 platform. More recently it has been by releasing a series of Ai based product features. We believe that while there are scary and unethical uses for Ai there are also many positive uses and that is what we choose to focus on. We want to find ways to leverage technology to make better books and to help more authors market their books. Accordingly we wanted to discuss our book cover checker, our name generation Ai, and our newest release of a book blurb generator. The first two are completely free to use, but the last one does require a paid subscription.
Our first entry into Ai was a book cover checker and we created that primarily because our CEO, Kenney Myers had an experience with his first book that opened his eyes. He was attempting to use a newsletter service when to his surprise they rejected his book cover. Why? Great question! It was because the color contrast wasn't adequate. You see, the book cover was not going to be visible on grayscale or black and white devices (ereaders). This was something that had never even crossed his mind. So in researching alternatives he found that nothing really existed that could help authors assess their covers before paying so much money to various services. Not only had he paid money for services that were likely not going to work but he also had to update his book cover everywhere well after the release of the book. So to solve that problem he went to work looking at Azure Cognitive Services and other technologies by Amazon (Amazon Rekognition) and Google with Google Vision. Before long he had created a system for grading book covers using computer vision so that authors could know upfront whether their book cover was adequate BEFORE releasing it to the world.
The second entry into the Ai space was triggered by Myers playing around with ChatGPT4 and realizing how advanced it had become. After messing around with several ChatGPT prompts he found something interesting. At the same time he was doing that he was working on the third book in his Jon Bragg series and needed to name some tertiary characters. He broke down multiple factors that could go into that the naming questions/prompts to feed to OpenAi. He settled on the following: gender, character type, dominant personality trait, country of origin, social status, and the year of birth. With these characteristics it was easy enough to build the prompt necessary to generate three appropriate names for his characters. It's extremely effective at generating period names (names that were popular in any given year) and country based names (names that are common in various countries around the world). We recommend that users play around with this free tool and send any suggestions for improvements to info@ebookfairs.com.
The final entry into the Ai space was a generative Ai task for creating a proper book blurb for a book. There are many different reasons why an author might need one or more book blurbs and they can be difficult to write and certainly difficult to distinguish between different variations. So after mor experimentation with ChatGPT4 prompts, Myers was able to create a series of prompts that could help create industry standard and genre specific book blurbs. The only inputs required are the genre, title of the book, author names, and a short description of the book to be used as a basis for the longer blurb. Once that information is input then it is sent to OpenAi and a new book blurb is quickly returned.
We believe in the power of positive thinking and we believe in utilizing technology for the greater good. We know that many uses of Ai are scary for authors but we know that ALL use cases are not scary. Many of the features we are working on are just going to help authors be more efficient and to get more of the story right the first time. We are not feeding their manuscripts into Ai or doing anything scary with them. We do believe that the time will come when that problem will increase in frequency but we want to make it known that our intentions for Ai are good and they are pure. We simply want to make this industry and this world a better place for us authors to exist and thrive.
