Harnessing AI For Book Marketing

Brooke Dobson is Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Shimmr AI, the first fully automated advertising platform built specifically for books. With expertise in economic forecasting, marketing analytics, and AI technologies, she brings a unique perspective on how AI can transform publishing. Brooke’s executive background spans AI-native SaaS businesses, where she has held roles as COO, CSO, and President (US). At Shimmr, she oversees global Sales, Marketing, and Finance, translating cutting-edge AI into practical, revenue-generating strategies for publishers. Her perspective is valuable for an industry seeking to unlock new audiences, scale book discoverability, and maximize the commercial potential of every title in today’s digital landscape.

Over the last year, AI crossed a threshold—from mimicking language to modeling aspects of cognition. That shift unlocks genuinely new creative and commercial possibilities. This isn’t about ‘faster copywriting’; it’s about systems that can reason about books, readers, and moments—and then act.

AI in Publishing…

In publishing, we’re already seeing AI help across the value chain—from editorial workflows to marketing. Legal frameworks are still evolving, but we’re seeing clearer ground rules emerging around usage and compensation. Meanwhile, the practical benefits are here now, especially in marketing.

From efficient to experimental

AI started as ‘confident efficiency’—saving time on the routine. The next leap is ‘experimental creativity’: using AI to expand ideas, explore more directions, and test more hypotheses than any human team could do alone. That’s where the growth lives.

Here’s the broad picture. AI can help screen submissions more fairly and quickly, catch proofing inconsistencies, generate affordable translations and synthetic audio, reconcile rights and royalties, improve supply chain planning—and, most relevant for us today, reduce marketing waste while lifting performance.

Creative emancipation

AI is a lever for creative emancipation. Use it to spark ideas, self-edit with precision, try new voices and narrative forms, extend authors through avatars and live Q&A, and imagine ‘living books’—interactive experiences that evolve. Keep humans where authenticity matters; let AI carry the heavy lifts.

Here’s a simple creative workflow from Nadim Sadek’s new book Quiver, don’t Quake: How Creativity can Embrace AI: Spark ? Draft ? Polish.

• Spark: prompt the system with the promise and mood of your book.Be conversational and detailed.
• Draft: let AI generate first iterations across styles. Work with your AI to improve and narrow down the drafts.
• Polish: a human editor shapes the final—on-brand, on-voice, on-brief. This rhythm gives you speed without losing taste.

The book marketing crunch

We all feel the crunch. Media is fragmented, attention is shrinking to sub-two seconds, and it’s expensive to learn what works. For low-margin books, trial-and-error marketing is unsustainable. So the question becomes: how do we learn faster, cheaper, and smarter?

AI helps in five ways:

1. Generate at scale—turn a creative brief into many high-quality variants in minutes.
2. Launch broad—start wide, then quickly narrow to what converts.
3. Advertise emotively—bring the book’s heart to life, not just its metadata.
4. Learn and optimize—continuous feedback loops that keep improving.
5. Slash spend—fund only what’s working and kill the rest early.

Impact zones for marketing

The practical playbook for marketing includes:

• Research & Strategy—use AI to segment audiences and prep keywords/content.
• Creative Ideation—expand concepts and storyboards rapidly.
• Asset Production—spin up A+ content, blurbs, descriptions, social, images, video.
• Testing & Optimisation—test high quantities, reduce uncertainty.
• Metadata & SEO—enrich keywords and categories, and—equally important—publish the right content at the right time.

Measuring success…

How do you measure success? Start with your business priorities, not shiny tools. Track efficiency—time saved versus your baseline. Measure commercial lift with A/B tests. And democratize analytics so more people can interrogate results without waiting on an analyst.

Search behavior is shifting from typed keywords to natural questions asked to AI assistants. GEO—Generative Engine Optimization—prepares your titles to be recommended by those systems.

• Clear metadata: not just keywords; give plain-language context—genre, setting, tone.
• Descriptive copy: rich, factual storytelling AIs can match to real reader queries.
• Context content: build small ecosystems of meaning around your books—articles, explainers, guides.
• Test & iterate: literally ask AIs ‘Which books fit X?’ and see whether yours appear. Then adjust.

Win with Amazon’s A10

A10 rewards satisfaction signals and external engagement. That means:

• External traffic wins—off-Amazon content and socials boost visibility.
• Reader behavior rules—engagement, reviews, and repeat reads drive rank beyond raw velocity.
• Cohesive presentation—cover, title, and blurb must align to earn trust.
• Smarter metadata—specific, conversion-oriented terms beat broad bait.
• Mobile-first listings—front-load the hook; most shoppers only see ~70–80 characters on phones.

Role in Publishing

At Shimmr, we focus on unlocking catalogs. Publishers have over 100 million English-language titles—and roughly 95% are under-monetized because discoverability is broken. Our mission is to reduce marketing waste and increase the hit-rate of matches between books and buyers.Our system runs three collaborating agents in a loop:

• The Strategizer extracts a book’s ‘BookDNA’ and creates a creative brief.
• The Generator turns that BookDNA into emotive campaigns.
• The Deployer targets channels and audiences, feeding results back for continuous optimization.

The loop never stops learning.

How readers buy?

• Narrative, emotive ads: Readers buy feelings and futures, not formats. Emotive, narrative ads surface the essence: the world, tension, promise, and payoff. That’s what compels a click and, ultimately, a purchase.
• Video drives attention (2–5x): Short, emotive video consistently drives 2–5× stronger attention in our experience. Use it to open the funnel, then let high-clarity static and text units ‘close’ by making the value concrete. The best mixes vary by genre, but the ‘video opens / static or text closes’ pattern is a reliable starting point.
• Holiday & seasonal ads: Seasonality matters. We run festive and seasonal frames to align with how readers shop and gift. A simple seasonal context shift can lift relevance and CTR without changing the core message.

Impact: clicks, shop visits, conversion

What do results look like when you operationalize this?

• More clicks—AI-generated ads can 6x engagement by matching mood and motive.
• More shop visits—12x increases to product pages when the targeting and creative ‘click.’
• Better efficiency—media budgets flow only to what’s working, in near-real-time, guided by BookDNA.

AI as a capable partner…

AI is one of the biggest innovations in human history. The winning posture isn’t fear—it’s informed, structured excitement. Start small, measure ruthlessly, scale what works. We often under-ask AI. If you only use it for a short email or a quick poem, you’re missing the point. Ask for reasoning, for options, for trade-offs; ask it to challenge your brief; ask it to simulate audiences. Treat it like a capable partner, not a vending machine.