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I joined Colleen Mitchell on The Novel Writing Podcast to talk about using AI for book marketing. Colleen asked sharp questions about agentic AI and how authors keep control of an assistant that acts on their behalf.

We also got into why posting on social media doesn't sell books. Then I explained how one real reader, your Timothy, shapes the book you write and the ads you buy.

Want to go deeper? Join my Grok Bot for Authors webinar on October 22, 2026.

Key takeaways

• Agentic AI like Grok Bot can update your website, draft your newsletter, run your ads, and keep your books while you write.
• Posting on social media doesn't drive book sales. It creates social proximity with readers, and Amazon can delete their reviews for it.
• Book marketing starts with one real reader. Find your Timothy and write the book that thrills that person.
• Grammarly can strip your voice faster than most AI writing tools.
• A wrong genre or a mismatched cover sinks more books than bad writing. The Book Cover Analyzer and Trope and Genre Finder catch both.
• The Copyright Office's process for flagging AI-written work is shaky and likely exceeds its statutory authority.

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What Is Agentic AI and Why Does It Matter for Authors

Colleen Mitchell: You are listening to the Novel Writing Podcast, episode 237. I'm your host, Colleen Mitchell. Grab a cup, cozy up, and let's get to writing. Today I've got Thomas Umstattd Jr. back on the show. He is the host of the Novel Marketing Podcast and the Christian Publishing Show. He also co-hosts the YouTube Author Update Show, and today we are talking about AI and book marketing in today's day and age with AI. So Thomas, welcome back.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Colleen Mitchell: Go ahead and just remind listeners who you are, what you do, and why you're an expert in book marketing.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I've been helping authors with websites and marketing since 2007, which has been some time now. I'm starting to feel old. I've helped authors at every level, from New York Times bestsellers to beginning authors, building websites, and now building tools to help do their marketing. The Novel Marketing Podcast is the longest-running book marketing podcast in the world.

Colleen Mitchell: AI is the gigantic hot-button topic of the day. Why are you an AI proponent in the writing world, and how do you think it should be used?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: There are a lot of ways you can use AI. I think the least controversial is for doing marketing for you, and that's the new hot thing that AI can do.

Historically, AI was a tool that told you what to do. You chatted with it, and it would answer your questions, help you do research, or point out problems in your book that you needed to fix. Now, just in the last few months, agentic AI has gotten to the point where normal people can use it without too much difficulty.

Grok Bot is the easiest to use. Now, for instance, instead of updating your website yourself, you can just say, "Grok Bot, I want you to add information about my new book to my website," and it can edit your website and add the new information for you. That's this massive tectonic shift in AI, where it no longer is telling you what to do or helping you do it. It's doing the work that you tell it to do.

Colleen Mitchell: I don't think I've heard that word before. Can you describe what "agentic" means for people who don't know?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: It's from the word agent. An AI agent is an AI with authority to act on your behalf. You're still responsible as the human for everything it does. You tell it what to do, it does it. So an agentic AI can go in and, with your permission, edit your website.

I did a video on my Novel Marketing channel about a month ago about how to use Grok Bot to update your website as a demo of what it was capable of, and I've just been flooded with feedback from authors who said, "I had no idea. I had this big long list of things I've always wanted to fix about my website, but it was always too much work, always too much hassle, and I was able to just tell Grok Bot to do it, and it did it, and it was a total game changer."

That's just one area. You can have Grok Bot do your bookkeeping. You can have it help you with the publishing process, with typesetting. Almost anything that is done on a laptop can now be delegated to an agent, which allows you to focus on the part of the job that you most enjoy, which for most authors is the writing.

The controversial part is authors using AI for the writing itself. But if you're using AI correctly, you can have more time for the parts of the job that you enjoy. So don't give the part you enjoy to the machine. Give the bookkeeping and the website updating and the planning of your next promotion to the machine, and you focus on what only you can do, which is tell your story.

How to Work With an AI Agent Without Losing Control

Colleen Mitchell: My brain is immediately going to: how do you keep it from accessing things that you don't want it to access, and how do you ensure that it does what you want it to do?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: It's just like working with a human. The people who are getting the most out of Grok Bot the fastest are the people who are used to delegating tasks to humans. If you're used to being a boss and delegating tasks to an employee, Grok Bot is just an employee with a really good attitude all the time.

If you've never delegated a task to a human, it can be a bigger challenge, because Grok Bot will make the same kinds of mistakes a human will make if you don't give clear instructions. It's not all-knowing, and if you don't give clear instructions, it might make a mistake, or more likely, it'll constantly come back to you asking for information, guidance, or permission.

It's an interactive process. When you first say, "Go update my website," it says, "Okay, I need you to log in." So you go and log in. One thing that's nice about Grok Bot, as opposed to Claude and ChatGPT's Codex, is that it's very secure. There's a secure way to pass passwords and login information through Grok Bot where Grok Bot never sees it, whereas with Claude, it's almost impossible to give it a password securely. It is an act of Congress. Most people just insecurely post the password in the chat, which means you never know where that's going to go, because nothing you post in a chat to Claude is ever private.

Colleen Mitchell: When most people think of marketing, even if they've listened to your podcast, the first thing that pops to mind is how to get a book in front of a buyer. Social media, in-person marketing, creating flyers, interacting with people. But you're talking about using an agentic AI like Grok Bot to do things like update a website. How do we shift our mindset to include things like that under this broad term called marketing?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: The first step is to have a plan of what needs to happen and when. I've got a book coming out in six months. What do I need to do now? What do I need to do in three months? What needs to happen before it comes out? What do I need to do during launch week and launch month?

Once you have your list of tasks, the what and the when, then you figure out the who. This I need to do. This my bookkeeper needs to do. This my PR person needs to do. This my webmaster needs to do. For a lot of authors, they are all of those things. An agentic AI like Grok Bot just becomes a member of the team.

You have the task preexisting, and then you say, "Grok Bot, is this something you can help me with?" In many cases, it's surprisingly capable, and you just assign the task to it. It kind of rewords what you said and says it back to you to make sure there's no miscommunication, and then it goes and does it and reports back. With a website, it'll often give you a screenshot of what the page is going to look like and ask your permission: "Should I publish this, or do you want to make changes?" The experience of working with a Grok Bot webmaster is very similar to working with a human webmaster.

Colleen Mitchell: So as authors, we have the business hat, and there are all of these things under the business hat that we have to keep track of. If we already keep track of those things, Grok Bot or another agentic AI just becomes a personal assistant.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Right.

The Quills: Pre-Programmed Grok Bots Built for Authors

Colleen Mitchell: I did not know it could do that.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I've built a bunch of quills. I have this whole system of pre-programmed Grok Bots that are already trained on my expertise. I do these webinars from time to time on Grok Bot, and one of them is what I call the continuity quill. Its whole purpose is to deal with continuity issues, like helping you keep your characters straight, keep your locations straight, catch things like John having blue eyes in chapter one and hazel eyes in chapter seven. You need to decide what color eyes he has, or explain why his eyes changed.

I have another quill called the newsletter quill, and all it does is manage your email newsletter. It can draft email newsletters for you. You say, "I want you to put together a newsletter. I want it to say X, Y, and Z. I want you to feature my book that just came out and hint at my next book coming out," and it pulls all of that together. It can connect with Kit just fine. It can also look at your analytics and give you reports. You can write a blog post, hand it to your webmaster quill to publish, and then hand it to the newsletter quill to put together into a newsletter. All of this can be handled in an automated way.

This is the vision that we wanted AI to do. And we're finally there.

Colleen Mitchell: Are there other unique or uncommon ways that you've been seeing this used in the author world?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I've got quills for running Amazon ads, for running Facebook ads where it runs your ads for you based on your feedback, one for running X ads, and one that can give you editorial feedback.

One interesting way I saw somebody using Grok Bot recently was she had been podcasting for a long time. She had text versions of her podcasts, all of her writings, all of her books, and she was able to have a Grok Bot that knows everything she's published and can answer listener questions based on her big compendium of knowledge. Similar to my AI Thomas program, but she was able to do it at a tiny fraction of the cost. Me doing AI Thomas the way I did early on cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now people can build an equivalent for a few hundred.

Colleen Mitchell: Well, that just means you're blazing the trail.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Yeah, I'm the first guy off the landing craft on D-Day, taking all the bullets.

Why Social Media Marketing Doesn't Work for Authors

Colleen Mitchell: What about people who want to use AI with social media marketing? A lot of people would have questions about that. But the problem I'm seeing is that if there's any hint of AI in your social media posts, some readers might equate that to the author using AI in everything, including their writing.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: There are several things there. I should probably start here: social media marketing doesn't work. Posting content to Facebook and Instagram is not only ineffective, it's actually negatively effective. The more you create social proximity with your readers by interacting with them on a meta platform like Instagram or Facebook, the more likely those readers' reviews are to be deleted from Amazon for being a friend of yours. You don't want to be interacting with your readers on Facebook. It's very bad for marketing.

This is one of those myths that has somehow persisted. Facebook has been bad for marketing for a decade. No one has ever been able to show numbers in any repeatable way that it drives sales, other than advertising. The one area where it can still work, and where you don't get the social proximity penalty, is advertising.

Even then, that's not the first place I would start. If you're going to dip your toe in the water on advertising, advertise on Amazon first, then maybe on BookBub second, then meta platforms third. Whether meta will work for you depends a little on your genre. Some genres are easier to target than others. Facebook and Instagram have very strong discrimination against Christian authors. You can target sweet romance, but you can't target Christian romance. If you're a Christian romance author, it's almost impossible to target your readers.

My first answer is just get off social media and write your book. Social media is bad for your productivity, it's bad for your mental health, it doesn't drive sales, and you will be a happier, healthier, more productive person if you just get off altogether.

Now, I know no one's going to listen to me on this. They're going to do social media anyway, because for a lot of people, they don't really care about making money. They care about validation, and social media gives them the feeling of validation. You get these likes and comments, and that's the real reason. Social media gives you a kind of facsimile of that.

Whether or not your audience is discriminating on AI has a lot to do with how old they are. In my experience, the less somebody interacts with AI themselves, the poorer they are at spotting AI. Ninety percent of the content on Facebook is AI now. Most of what people watch on Reels is either AI text, AI video, or both. Even when it's a real person reading, the script they're reading is often generated by AI.

When people say "I don't like AI," what they're really saying is "I don't like it when I notice it." They don't mind CG in movies when they don't realize it's CG. They just don't want it looking fake and lame. Almost everything they're consuming on social media is AI already. The social network itself is an AI algorithm.

The kind of person who goes on Facebook and says "AI is evil" is a special kind of hypocrite, because Facebook is AI. It's an AI company. The algorithm is AI. The platform is AI. The code is AI. Everything about Facebook is AI and has been for decades. You can't draw a line that says the big corporate AI algorithm is good but your personal machine learning tool for marketing or editing is bad. Who says? If anything, it's the opposite.

AI-Assisted Writing and the Readers Who Just Want the Right Book

Colleen Mitchell: I like the campy CG from the Once Upon a Time TV show, and I also like the incredible CG of Pirates of the Caribbean where they put Davy Jones together. I like both of those. So I don't care whether I can notice it or not.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I know boomers who will consume tons of AI content and AI videos, and they get really irritated when their millennial kids say, "Mom, don't you know that's AI?" And she says, "I just want to enjoy what I want to enjoy. Don't tell me what I can and cannot watch on YouTube."

A bigger and bigger chunk of the books people are reading are being written in part by authors who are augmenting or writing alongside a large language model. LLM-assisted authors are gaining market share every month, partly because they're able to write more books that are more specifically tailored to the specific proclivities and desires of the readership.

There's always going to be a demand for James Patterson writing a book with Mr. Beast or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but there's also demand for the very specific book that scratches the very specific itch that a very specific reader has. Maybe there are only a few thousand of those readers in the world, but an author writing with the aid of AI can write the book that appeals to those few thousand readers. Because the cost in hours to write that book is so much lower, the book is able to exist when it wasn't able to exist before.

Telling those few thousand readers they shouldn't enjoy a book made specifically for them because the author used AI, they don't want to hear that. They're saying, "Finally, somebody wrote a book specifically for me. I've been ignored my entire life, and I now finally have a book that's specifically for what I've been wanting this whole time. I'm going to read this, and I'm going to enjoy it, and I don't care how it was made."

People don't watch the special features to see how the movie was made. There was a big drama over The Hobbit movies being filmed at 48 frames per second rather than 24, and there was a big hullabaloo in Hollywood about this.

Colleen Mitchell: Us.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Moviegoers. We watched it.

Colleen Mitchell: I didn't even know that. I just liked it. It's a great movie.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Exactly. They just want a good story, and good according to that person.

Grammarly Is a Bigger Threat to Your Voice Than Most AI Tools

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: None of my tools write the book for you. Almost all of them are marketing tools. The only ones that even get close to writing are a couple that give editorial feedback, but they don't edit your book. They just give you a list of things to change, and you decide per item whether to include it or not.

I include a whole video on when to ignore your editor, because I'm really against tools like Grammarly. They put all of these suggestions into the language of incorrect spelling. That little red squiggly used to mean you did it wrong, and now it's just a preference. If you listen to Grammarly, you'll lose your voice and you'll be the most generic writer. Grammarly is a far bigger threat to you than almost any other AI tool out there.

You could write something with AI doing the actual typing that's truer to your voice than what you would get just typing it yourself and then accepting all of Grammarly's changes. Those tools are really toxic, especially now that they group suggestions together. You right-click and accept the whole change, and suddenly it's not even your words anymore. Very bad for your voice.

I have a tool called the Chapterizer, and all it does is take your dictation and fix the homophones, put in the punctuation and the paragraph breaks. So instead of a big overwhelming wall of text, it's still your words, it's still your terrible first draft, but it's your terrible first draft with the paragraphs in the right spots, the quotation marks in the right spots, and the transcription mistakes fixed. It's still your rough draft, and it's actually one of my most popular tools because people like to dictate.

Dictating stories is an ancient form of storytelling. It was actually the go-to way to do it two thousand years ago. What I really wanted to call the Chapterizer was the amanuensis, which is the Latin term for a special kind of scribe who would take dictation in shorthand and then rewrite it in longhand, but I knew exactly five people would get that reference.

Colleen Mitchell: Exactly five.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: So I put my marketing hat on and used the word Chapterizer instead. If it had been made just for me, I'd have called it an amanuensis.

Finding Your Timothy: The Foundation of Smarter Book Marketing

Colleen Mitchell: Authors who can use LLMs to meet the specific need of a few thousand readers, how would they do that, and then how do they find those readers so it makes the effort worth it?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I'm not going to explain how to write the book with AI, because I'm not really an expert on that piece of it, but I can talk about finding readers.

It starts with finding one real human person. Authors often make the mistake of writing for themselves. We have a lot of books written for nerdy introverts because authors tend to be nerdy introverts. If you're writing for yourself, you're in this really crowded arena where everyone's writing for the kind of nerdy introvert that they are. If your goal is to make money, you have to expand your horizons and start writing for a specific reader.

It's a technique I call writing for your Timothy, and it's an ancient technique. The dedication of a book used to be for the person the book was specifically written to. The Hobbit was written for Christopher Tolkien, and by thrilling Christopher Tolkien, it's thrilled millions of readers. The Book of First Timothy was written to a guy named Timothy, but many other people have read it and benefited.

You find that person in real life, which requires interacting with people and listening. These are two skills that almost no author is willing to practice. Going out and finding strangers and listening deeply to their hopes, their dreams, their frustrations, what they like and don't like about the world, about politics, about the movies they're watching and the books they're reading.

A good Timothy is already a reader. A mistake is saying, "I'm going to write a book for people who don't read books." Now you have to sell them twice. You have to convert them into the kind of person who reads. Maybe they'll buy your audiobook, but then you have to convert them into the kind of person who has an audiobook app on their phone. And then you have to sell them on your specific book. Converting non-readers to readers is a James Patterson job. You have to be at his tier to play in that game.

Our house flooded, so we're getting all this work done as it's being rebuilt. This plumber I've gotten to know listens to audiobooks while he's fixing toilets. He had been listening to He Who Fights with Monsters and was getting increasingly frustrated with it because that book is very much from a therapeutic worldview. This is a manly man who doesn't buy into that. I was like, "There's a better book I think you'll enjoy, Son of the Black Sword by Larry Correia." He texts me a few days later: "Oh my gosh, this book is amazing." He came back a few weeks later to do the next round of work and said, "I'm already on book four, and I've gotten all my friends reading it."

It's a very manly book, a very violent book, very much a Conan swords and sorcery style book. Very different from He Who Fights with Monsters. Superficially they seem like the same kind of book. There are monsters, there are heroes who fight them, but very different worldviews. This manly man wanted a book written for him, and it just so happened that Larry Correia is that same sort of blue-collar rough man writing for other rough men. Finally, a book for me.

Colleen Mitchell: So assume you find that one person. Is it then relying on organic marketing, or what information do you gather from that person to craft an Amazon ad, a Facebook ad, to talk to people at markets?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: The first step is to write the kind of book that thrills that person. You'll get more than one sale, because if they're truly thrilled, like this plumber, he didn't just buy the book. He's got his wife reading it, he's got all his friends reading it. If you can really thrill someone, it will spread.

Then you build from that person a stereotype, a customer avatar, that you target. None of us are nearly as unique as we like to think we are. There's a joke my wife and I have: there are no unique experiences. My baby was up throwing up all night last night. That feels like a unique experience, but at that same night there were thousands of other dads up with a baby throwing up. Any given night there are some babies that are throwing up and their parents are up with them.

This is where your advantage is. You're basing it off of a real human person, and because they're human you can ask: what websites do you hang out on? Where do you find out about books? Oh, I follow such and such influencer. You don't try to become an influencer yourself. You don't become a book talker and dance with the book. That's never going to work. For a hundred or three hundred dollars, you can just pay the one influencer who has influence with your Timothy to feature your book, and you'll reach ten thousand or a hundred thousand people, however popular that influencer is.

This is a far more effective strategy, and it's far more likely to succeed because you already have a product that's popular with the Timothy. What most people do is have a book that's not popular with anyone in specific. They're shooting in between a bunch of targets, which is the same as missing the target altogether.

I always know if somebody really understands my concept of Timothy when they say, "My Timothy's actually named Samantha." If your Timothy's named Timothy, you haven't found your Timothy yet. You're still thinking of a fictitious representative person. It's got to be a specific person. If you're writing for Samantha, who reads a romance book every night and reads three hundred romance books a year in the cozy mystery romance space, suddenly you've got a really specific idea of her, and you want to find out where she discovers new books. Oh, she's really big on Goodreads. Okay, I need to be big on Goodreads. Where you invest your marketing is all dependent on where your Timothy hangs out and what would influence her.

Colleen Mitchell: Am I misremembering that one of your tools in the patron toolbox is something like finding your Timothy?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I do. I have a Timothy Finder, and I also have a trope and genre finder. The Timothy Finder helps give you an idea of where to find Timothy. It doesn't give you Timothy, because remember, Timothy has to be a real person.

The trope and genre finder was just reworked, but it evaluates your book and gives you a list of the tropes in it, and then gives you a genre alignment score based on those tropes. A common cause of failure is an author having their book in the wrong genre. They've written for one genre but think they've written in another, and that lack of alignment leads to low reviews or no reviews because readers aren't finishing it or aren't enjoying it.

Having a hard time getting reviews is a sign that the book isn't very good, and one of the most common reasons a book isn't performing well is that it's just presented wrong. It was presented as a thriller but it's really more of a mystery. The thriller readers get bored and the mystery readers didn't buy it because they thought it was a thriller. Is it really a bad book? No. It's just bad wrapping. The thriller readers got bored because you weren't dropping a new body every chapter. The whole book was about solving the body that dropped on page one, which is what a mystery reader wants, but not what a thriller reader wants.

A Tour of the Author Toolbox

Colleen Mitchell: What are some of the other tools that are the most widely used and most helpful for authors?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: The most popular one is AI Thomas, which is basically picking my brain. It's actually free right now. Because I'm in a newborn mode and got way behind with email, I made it free as a palliative for my audience. I don't know if it'll always be free.

The Book Cover Analyzer is kind of like the Trope and Genre Finder, but just for the cover. It's actually even more important that your cover is appropriate to your genre. You don't get to tell the tool what genre your book is in. The tool looks at your cover and tells you what genre it thinks your book is in. If it tells you the wrong genre, that's not necessarily a problem with the tool. It may be a problem with your cover. It will give you a score on how your cover will perform.

I have a tool called the Book Cover Designer, which will actually design a book cover for you. I created it for the purpose of creating reader magnets inexpensively, but I found, much to my chagrin, that many people are using it for their actual book covers, and in some cases they're outperforming their previous book covers.

I have a tool called Not a Copy Editor, which gives you copy edits. I have a tool called Not a Developmental Editor, which gives you big-picture edits on your story, narrative, and characters.

I have the Review Linker, which creates a link to your book on Amazon with the leave-a-review screen already pulled up, and even creates a QR code. We take this for granted as authors who leave reviews all the time, but your typical reader doesn't actually know how to leave a review on Amazon. It's not obvious, particularly on a phone. If you can give somebody a QR code to scan or a link to tap on their iPad or Kindle, it makes it a lot more likely they'll leave a review. That one's free as well.

Another popular one is Book2Blurb, which writes a blurb, a one-sentence hook, a one-paragraph summary, and full back cover copy of your book. You just upload your book and it does it all for you. I have other blurb tools that I actually like better because they ask you questions about your protagonist, antagonist, and setting, with different approaches. But nobody likes those because they're work. They just want to upload their book and push a button and get the blurb back.

Colleen Mitchell: I tested the one that asks you questions, and what it came back with wasn't quite right because it didn't match what's in the book. So if I was going to do it, I would just upload the book.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Yeah, there you go.

The Editing and Continuity Tools

Colleen Mitchell: I had a question about Not a Developmental Editor. I've used ProWritingAid's manuscript critique before, and a problem I had with it was it was flagging continuity issues or not explaining things enough when those things would have been explained in the first two books in my series. Does Not a Developmental Editor take that into account?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I actually have tools specifically to help with continuity issues. I have a whole collection of tools for compendiums. One for creating a character compendium, one for creating a timeline of what happens in your book, and a bunch of compendiums specifically for fantasy and sci-fi. A factions and races compendium, a creatures and plants compendium, a locations compendium.

I also have a tool called Compendium Consolidator, where it pulls all of those compendiums together. You generate compendiums for each book individually, and then you run all the compendiums through the consolidator and get a book bible that you can use as your source of truth for checking future books. That can be really helpful.

Colleen Mitchell: I'm more curious about the kind of feedback Not a Developmental Editor gives. What does it actually tell you?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: It gives you an initial report of the manuscript and ways you can improve it, but then you can talk with it. You can send more information. "Oh, this is book two. Here's my compendium, my book bible of all the stuff," and then it will revise its report accordingly. You can also guide it when you're uploading your manuscript. "Look for such and such" or "I want you to focus on such and such."

It's kind of hard for me to answer this question because I have the privacy settings set so high on the toolbox that I can't actually see the edits people get. I just get their feedback, and for Not a Developmental Editor, it's mostly vague positive feedback. People say, "I loved it so much," but they don't list the specific problems it pointed out. They always leave that out of their reviews. I don't have good visibility into the sorts of things it finds. But I know that every single month it's the most popular tool. It's also one of the most expensive, because it comes right out of my wallet.

Colleen Mitchell: I think you answered it with the ability to have a conversation with it, because that was my primary beef with the ProWritingAid report. I couldn't go back and forth to make it understand what it was telling me was wrong, and the report ended up being kind of useless.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: It was a take-it-or-leave-it style report.

Colleen Mitchell: Pretty much.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I have a couple of other editing tools that are a little more specific. One is called the Structure Analyzer, and it helps you figure out which story structure your book is in. If you know which story structure you're aiming for, like a three-act structure or a chiastic structure, it gives you feedback on how to fit it closer to that structure. I find this is particularly popular with discovery writers who are asking, "What kind of story did I write?" They upload it to the Structure Analyzer and get very specific structural feedback in terms of story structure.

Then I have another editing tool called Book Splitter, which helps you figure out where to split a novel that's too long. Which is what saved Lord of the Rings, I think, because Tolkien initially wanted it to be one massive tome. If you thought The Fellowship of the Ring was long, imagine if Tolkien had had his way and it was all three books in one volume called The War of the Ring. His publisher forced him to split it into three, and from a marketing perspective, that was absolutely the right call. It gave him three bites at the apple financially, and it made it less of a commitment for the reader. The Fellowship of the Ring feels like a complete story. Nobody finishes it thinking it was too short, but they are excited to go read The Two Towers. Book Splitter helps you figure out where to make that split.

The Zeitgeist Vibe Checker and the AI Copyright Question

Colleen Mitchell: Are there any other tools that listeners should know about?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I have so many. One more I'll point out is the Zeitgeist Vibe Checker. It looks at your manuscript from the perspective of culture. Where is culture headed? How is culture changing? Is your book vibing with where culture is right now, where it was five years ago, or where it's headed in five years?

This is based on my extensive coverage on Author Update. The whole back portion of that podcast every week is just talking about cultural trends. It's the most controversial part of the show because we're talking about religion, politics, and the hot-button issues of society. But we're not talking about what's hot in the news right now. We're talking about long-term trends. If you see the trend and it's continuing, you can say, "In ten years it's going to mean this. In twenty years it's going to mean this," or "I think this trend is shifting. The pendulum's going to start going back the other way, and here's why." It's a vibrant conversation every week. The Zeitgeist Vibe Checker is a weaponized, distilled version of all of those segments applied to your manuscript specifically.

Colleen Mitchell: On that topic, I heard about this from the Author Update show on YouTube, but can you talk about how the copyright office seems to be flagging human-written work as AI?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: They have humans reviewing submissions, and if the human thinks your work is AI, they'll ask you to confirm that it's not, and then you just confirm that it's not. It does not seem to be a very robust process at the moment. They don't seem to be using any sort of automated tool to scan manuscripts.

And they are arguably surpassing their statutory authority in doing this. We live in a country made up of laws derived from the people. Government bureaucracies can't just give themselves powers. The copyright office has given themselves this power, but it's a shaky foundation. That does not mean it will uphold in court. This power to determine what is copyright and what is not, or what is AI and what is not, is not an authority delegated to the copyright office by Congress, or even by the courts or the higher-up executive branch. It's just a power the copyright office gave itself. So it's technically kind of sort of there right now. I would not worry too much about it.

The One Thing to Remember: Let the Agent Do the Grunt Work

Colleen Mitchell: If listeners remember just one thing from this episode, what do you want it to be?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: I want to go back to the agentic thing, because I think that's the most important. Helping write a better book is helpful, but there are human editors, and you already know how to interact with human editors. While AI editors are faster and cheaper, they're not necessarily better.

But your AI agent may be better than any webmaster you can afford to hire for your website, and almost certainly better than you at updating your website. This is where it's kind of a no-brainer. Nobody went into writing a book because they really wanted to have an author website. For most authors, their website is really weak. It's not very professional. It hurts their sales. They know it could be made better, but it's so much work and complexity that it's always something for tomorrow.

With Grok Bot or some similar agentic tool, you can just have it done today and not by you. I'd encourage you to watch my episode on Grok Bot for authors, and maybe come to one of my webinars where I answer questions and get into the nitty-gritty more. I have not had anybody push back on this, not even the AI haters. Nobody's saying, "No, I want to update my website myself. I want to do my own search engine optimization. I want to write my meta tags by hand." I'm sure that person exists, and I'm sure they'll leave a comment on this post. But I think most people are happy to delegate the meta description and meta title to a bot.

Colleen Mitchell: Yeah, I don't even do those. I just leave them blank. So maybe I'll end up using this. Where's the best place for listeners to connect with you, find out more about the webinars you do, and listen to your podcasts?

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Authormedia.com. You can find all three podcasts there. You can find the patron toolbox there. You can find AI Thomas there, where you can just ask questions and get answers based on my five-hundred-plus episodes about publishing and marketing. It will also recommend toolbox tools if it thinks one is appropriate for your question.

Colleen Mitchell: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about all this.

Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Colleen Mitchell: All right, everyone, that is it for today's episode. Thanks for joining us, and remember, the first draft is supposed to be garbage.