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Join for freePosted: Thu 16th Jul 2026
Everywhere you look, there are AI tools that promise to write your book for you. The appeal is obvious.
When you're busy, and not a professional writer, the idea of cutting potentially 12 months of writing down to a few weekends sounds genuinely useful.
The problem is that the book AI produces is rarely the book your business actually needs.
Publishers, editors, journalists and serious readers can spot AI-generated writing within a paragraph. And more and more ordinary readers can too.
Just as importantly, the parts of writing a book that AI can't do are the parts that determine whether the finished book opens doors, attracts the right clients and builds the authority you wrote it for in the first place.
In this session, Taryn Johnston explains what AI is genuinely useful for when writing a business book, what it can't do regardless of how sophisticated the tools become, and how to use it sensibly without compromising the book itself.
Why the industry and readers can easily recognise AI-generated writing, and why this matters more than most authors realise
How to use AI helpfully for the parts of writing a book where it genuinely saves time, without compromising the work
What separates a book that does real work for your business from one that simply exists, and why the difference is almost entirely about voice and judgment
Taryn is an award-winning independent publisher and book writing partner based in Lincoln. She runs FCM Publishing for non-fiction, business and self-help, alongside Chronos Publishing for autobiographies and novels.
She works with founders, executives and business owners on writing books that build their authority and grow their businesses, and is one of the few publishers willing to talk openly about what AI is actually doing to the industry.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn webinar for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
Beth: I'm very pleased to introduce Taryn Johnston, who is an independent publisher. In this session, Taryn explains what AI is genuinely useful for when writing a business book, what it can't do regardless of how sophisticated the tools have become, and how to use it sensibly without compromising the book itself.
Beth: If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's session will be recorded, and we will send follow-up resources and the recording via email later today.
Beth: So thanks very much, and over to you, Taryn.
Taryn: Thank you for that, Beth. Hi, everybody. As Beth said, I'm an independent publisher. I've been a business owner for 15 years, and I've been in publishing for 13 years. Prior to that, and ongoing, I've been in marketing for 30 years.
So I have a really good idea of what makes an excellent business book, and also what makes a really good marketing tool for you and your business. So what I wanted to do is talk about AI in the industry, because I'm sure you've come across it and maybe even thought, I wonder if that will give me a good starting point for writing my book.
I'll be completely honest and straightforward with you, to tell you exactly what it can do really well and what it certainly can't do for you. So I was just going to start my slides so that you can see where we're at, and we'll go from there. If you do want to connect with me, I'm on Enterprise Nation, and I think they'll be showing a link to my website later on.
Okay, so you've probably seen this somewhere: write your book in a weekend, or ten prompts, and your book's written. I think I saw one the other day that was “your business book written in minutes”.
Now I understand that that can seem like a brilliant thing to do. You're really busy people. You've got family commitments, you've got a business to run, but you understand that you need a book. And I stand by this: every business owner should have a book.
It opens doors for you. It allows you to become an expert in your industry. It tells people, I'm so good at what I do, I wrote a book about it. It gives people a reason to trust you and know you before they've even met you. So I think as a business owner, having a book is massively important.
But writing a book is not something you can do overnight. It takes time, and it can take anything from 6 to 18 months. We've got one I'm working on at the moment where the author wanted it to be out last November, and actually, it's going to be this November that it gets released. Things happen, life happens, it gets in the way.
So I get that a platform offering you the ability to do it in a weekend sounds great. Why wouldn't I choose to do that? Why would I take 12, 18 months to write a book when there's a platform here that can do it in a weekend for me?
The problem is that the book that AI writes for you is not what you and your business need. I imagine you've all been through LinkedIn and seen posts, and if you're anything like me, you've started to spot the posts that are written by AI. You can hear it in videos, you can see it. There's certain phraseology, a certain way of writing: it's not x, it's y and zed, is one of the ways it will do it.
They will put in lots of emojis. There are certain phrases – I've got an entire list of them here. I can spot them a mile away.
A couple of weeks ago, I had three books sent to me from different people, different authors. I knew them either through networking, through having heard them speak themselves, or just as an acquaintance. And I could see the AI in those books straight away.
As a publisher, it's quite difficult to go back to somebody and say, have you used AI to write this? Because you don't want to embarrass somebody. But equally, I'm not going to publish a book that is very obviously written by AI. I am very much human-led, so anything that I publish has got to be the author's original thoughts.
Editors, journalists and readers will spot it. They'll know straight away. If they know anything about you, they'll know straight away it's not your voice. And there are some very precise parts of the book that will determine you and your voice.
So, where it gets spotted: firstly, we've got a generic structure. They'll do the same structure – it's a business book, same number of chapters, the same breakdown in the chapters. You'll see bullet points throughout. When you know what you're looking for, you can see it.
There will be no personality and no perspective. AI cannot recreate your lived experience – how can it? It's yours. So it can give a generic view on that subject, and it can do a very good generic view on that subject. But if people know you, they know how you speak. They know exactly what you're going to say.
You'll have different colloquialisms. You'll have words that you say, and you're known for saying them. I remember doing a business book for somebody, and he said “so” at the beginning of every sentence, and he wrote “so” at the beginning of every sentence. I think I deleted about 400 “so”s out of that book, because in writing form, you need to lay it out a bit better. But I kept a lot of them in there because it needed to sound like him.
I've done various ghostwriting and writing-partnership roles where I have to listen really closely to the author to make sure I pick up the phrases that they use. AI cannot do that. It doesn't know you, and it doesn't have the time to get to know you. So it will just put out lots of generic things that don't sound like you.
An example from one that I received recently: there was a lot of talk about parquet flooring and the description of the waiting room. And I said to the author, I don't think you've ever mentioned parquet flooring in your life. It's not important – the AI was trying to create an atmosphere that didn't need to be there at that point.
You get things like hedging language, so it'll say an awful lot of things that mean nothing. There'll be phrases in there, and the reader will think, what on earth does that mean? You're saying an awful lot there, but you're telling me genuinely nothing. And it's not the way a human being would speak.
As I've said, there are certain phrases and sentence structures – if you know what you're looking for, they're there. And it can't commit to anything, because it's pulling out generic information from what's already been previously written. So it's not tailored to you – it's just information that everybody else has already written on that topic. It's not your information.
So you put all of those things together, and what you've got is basically just an expanded LinkedIn post. There's nothing in there that gives me a real clue to you and to why you're passionate about writing this book. And that's the absolute key thing about writing a business book.
You are giving up your time, you are giving up your energy, so you need to write about what you're passionate about. Have you done something in your industry that's different to the way everybody else does it? If you let AI write it, it can't do that. It can't show those things that you know deep down and that are personal to you.
So I think for me, that's probably other than the sentence structure and the phraseology, it's the fact that it's not about you – it's about what everybody else has written.
Beth: Sorry, your slides aren't showing.
Taryn: Oh, sorry – hang on, let me try that again. Sorry, I'm not sure why that's not working.
Beth: No worries. And Adrian says not to worry, we've all had our eyes closed imagining the slide, so we're all good – we're just listening to you speak.
Taryn: Right, here's the slide – there we go. Okay, so the book that's supposed to build your authority is a book that could have been written by anybody, and it builds no authority for anyone at all. This is just a purely generic book. It's not your book.
Now, I'm not anti-AI in the slightest. I think AI is actually great. I think when it's used properly, and used for what it's designed for, it's phenomenally helpful. An example of that in my industry: I have to create royalty reports for all of my authors quarterly. I've got 75 authors, and we've published over 120 books.
So you can imagine, creating individual reports for that takes a lot of time. It used to take me three or four days to compile, because I'm not getting information in from one place – I'm getting it from lots of different distributors. I used AI to help me write a script to pull it all together, and it now takes me less than an hour. So, for an industry job, fantastic – that has massively earned me a lot of time back. So I am not anti-AI in the slightest.
I've said “with caveats” here because there are ways of doing it. So firstly, research. It's brilliant, particularly Google's version of it, Gemini – a lot more fact-based when you're doing your research. That said, you cannot automatically trust the results. It does make things up, it does go off on a creative tangent, and it hallucinates. So do your due diligence. Use it as a great starting point to get your data, statistics and relevant sources for footnotes and things, but don't necessarily trust it straight away.
Structure. It can give you outlines. It can help you think about what it is you really want to write about. So you can put in and say, I want to write a book about my time as a business coach specialising in business owners that have had PTSD – I'm pulling this out of the air, I haven't done that one.
AI can give you a really nice structure of how that book could look, and it can suggest what the skeleton would be like. When I say skeleton, that's the way the book's broken down – so the different chapter headings. It could even give you pointers on what you might want to include in those chapters. But again, check that it actually follows what you really want to write about, because it has a tendency to go off and think about what it thinks would make a great book. So it might not be exactly what you want to write about, but definitely use it as a way of structuring and creating the outline.
This is a good one: writer's block. Particularly if you're writing fiction, you can hit that point where you're like, I don't know how I'm going to put this, I don't know what I'm supposed to say here. I've hit a blank, and we all get that – we all hit a wall.
So you can put into it at that point: this is where I'm at with my book, this is where I think I need to go next, but I'm not sure, I don't quite know what to do. And it'll give you some scaffolding. It might even give you some content that could fit into that section.
But as I've said here, don't be lazy. Don't keep that in, because then you go back to my previous point – the book doesn't sound like you. And then you get three or four different voices in the book, which is just as bad as having a flat one. So use it to give you pointers and ideas, but don't keep it in.
For a first run of your editing and your grammar, absolutely – run it through, get it to check, look for obvious mistakes, but add in rules. And the other thing I would say, and I probably should have said this before: if you are using any form of AI, make sure that your settings are set to not allow the AI to learn from it. Because what that means is it then can't take what you're putting in and share it.
Because, obviously, what you don't want to do is put your manuscript up there, and then have it be available for everybody else to take from. I saw a LinkedIn post this week where a lady had written her book, and somebody on her team had uploaded it through AI. And suddenly, she was seeing very unique phrases that she uses – unique to her – being used elsewhere. And when she checked, she found that somebody had uploaded her book through AI.
So make sure, if you are doing that, your settings are very clear that it cannot use your content to learn from. So when you put your manuscript through there, give it rules: don't change any of the content, make suggestions, or highlight where changes should be made. Only look at the editing structure and look for text edits – don't allow it to change. Otherwise, it will go through, and it will flatten your voice; it will take out your tone of voice. Because it likes to condense content, it likes to make it run the way it thinks it should read, and it will take your voice out. So be very, very careful with that.
This is something that I've used myself: summarising transcripts. If you are interviewing people and you've got a lot of content in there, it can summarise that. It can pull out the key areas that you want to talk about, that you want to go in the book, so that saves you the time of having to keep reading through to find things out. That's a brilliant tool to use. But again, check that when it pulls the summary out, it hasn't changed the text and flattened it.
I had a book sent to me, and it was a series of interviews, and I said, every single interviewee sounds the same. And when we looked back, what it had done was take the transcript and flatten it. So just be careful with that.
So, in a nutshell, it can help you prepare, but it can't be you. It is a tool – just keep that in your mind at all times. It's a tool, it's not you. They're not the same thing.
What it can't do: it can't know your experience. It doesn't know what you know. You are the only person who knows what you know. So, that for me is first and foremost.
It cannot reproduce – well, I say it can't. If you've worked with it long enough and you've given it enough examples of your own writing, so you put your own blogs through there, posts that you've written, it can get a sense of your voice. But it will still revert to the comfort of its own writing. It's almost like it's got a set of standards that it thinks it needs to write to.
So you can give it your voice. I've set my own up, and I've given a whole set of rules that say, never use these things. And yet they creep in. I'll see certain words that I've said categorically, do not use this word unless you're using that word to mean what it says – “quietly”, for instance. You'll see this in AI writing all the time: “it's something that quietly caused you to do whatever.” No, you don't do that quietly. So think about your voice. It's got to be in your voice. I want to hear from you.
What I want to happen is when I get your book, and I read it, and then I meet you, I want the two to sound the same. I want to go, oh, of course, that's exactly what you would say. And I had this at a book launch recently. I was standing next to the author, and one of his clients came up to him and said, I could hear you – when I was reading this section, it's something I knew that you would say. That's what you want. That's a good sign of a really good business book: that they can hear you and they can feel you in it.
It can't make judgment calls. You know what has to be in there, or a really good editor will know. I work with authors – I'm working with somebody at the moment, and I've said to them the first 40 per cent of your book needs to be reduced down to 10 per cent, because the rest of it is unnecessary. You've got too much in there before we get to the point. AI can't do that, because it doesn't recognise what the book's intended to do. You know what you want this book to do, and it's something that I'll mention in a minute. But it can't make those judgment calls for you.
It can't tell your stories. It has no proof that you were actually there – you were there, you knew what happened. It can only use other people's experience, so it'll put theirs in, not yours.
It can't argue the position. You are the expert in your field, you are the person who knows what you're talking about, you can take a stand. If you're doing something in your industry that no one's done before, how can AI make the position that you're making? It can't, because it's not there – it's talking about things that other people have done. So it's really important that you make sure that it's your stand, your position that's in there.
And it can't build your authority. It could help you understand perhaps the stepping stones that you want to put in there, but it's your authority, it's your voice. I'm going to say “authentically you” – it's a bit of a buzzword, because we're not authentic. The person who is brushing their teeth in the morning is not the person that you want your clients to see.
So when we say that we are our authentic selves – no, we're not, we're our authentic business selves. We're not the person who was watching the England game last night, we are not the person who's digging the garden on a Sunday. We are authentically our business person. So that's the voice that has to come across, and that's the authority that you want to create.
So a business book is only going to work because it demonstrates the way you think. It's really important that whoever reads it trusts you, trusts that you are the person that's written it, that you know what you're talking about. And it will never ever be able to produce the human connection that a well-written book in your voice creates. Once people read that, and they trust you and they believe in you, that's when the doors start to open for you.
So, in a nutshell: use AI for your research, for generating the scaffolding, grammar, those sorts of things, but don't use it for writing, full stop. I've added those points there, but the bottom line: don't use it for writing, because it has to be you.
One of the things I'll quickly say is, when you start writing a book, make sure you understand what job that book's got to have. You need it to do something for you, whether that is to get you on a speaking circuit, whether that is to open doors, get you connections – all of those things are important, but you need to fully understand what role that book has to have for you. And again, AI can't do that for you.
Just a feeling to finish on then: a book comes out when it's supposed to. I believe that with every fibre of my being, there is a reason a book comes out when it's supposed to. And I'll go back to the author that I mentioned earlier: he wanted his book out in November last year, then he wanted it out in March this year. It's coming out in November this year, and it's coming out the day before his 60th birthday.
I didn't know that when I gave him the date and said, this is the date we're going to have to work to. He said, that's the day before my 60th birthday. Books come out when they're supposed to.
There you go. Have clarity on what the job is that the book's supposed to do. Create a solid structure. Who are you writing it for, and why are you writing it? If you don't know that in your own head, the book's not going to be the book that you want it to be.
And, yeah, just make sure that it's your stories, and you're telling them your way, and that you're telling them so that it sounds like you. That's the absolute bottom line there – I can't iterate that enough, the book has to sound like you.
And then, use humans for editorial judgement, because AI will never be 100 per cent honest. You'll have seen that yourself – it tells you what it thinks you want to hear. A human editor will tell you the truth. You send me your manuscript, you're going to get absolute honest feedback that says, this has got to go, this is great, you're missing something here. AI will pad it out for you and tell you it's great, it's wonderful.
Taryn: So that's the talk. I hope that's helped. Thank you for listening.
Beth: Thanks so much, Taryn, and that was great. We'll just have time for a few questions, if that's okay. So you mentioned that readers can recognise AI-generated writing – so in your opinion, what are the biggest telltale signs?
Taryn: So it's “it's not x, it's y, and zed” – that one for me. It's not that AI can't do it, but AI can't do it this way, and it can't do it. It does phrases like “quietly”, “journey”, “navigate”, “delve” – the strings. I think you mentioned the rule of three – three bullet points, the short sentences as well.
It is written in very short, blocky sentences. Sentences start with “and” and “but”. We wouldn't normally do that – if we're talking, we might start a sentence with “and”, but when you're writing, you probably don't. So they're the ones that jump out.
Beth: Definitely, they're the real obvious ones, aren't they?
Taryn: Absolutely.
Beth: So, which AI prompts or workflows do you find most useful when it comes to the research, planning or editing side of things?
Taryn: That's all down to whichever platform you're using. I would recommend using Google Gemini for the research, because it has access to Google Scholar – there's a lot more factual research based on that. I would use Claude probably for editing, but the prompts that you put in need to be specific to you.
We can create some generic ones that just sort of protect you, but you need to be thinking really carefully about what you want it to do, and you have to give it a very, very strict set of parameters.
Beth: Yeah, absolutely, that makes sense. So, AI aside, what characteristics make a business book genuinely influential, rather than simply informative?
Taryn: Solve a problem. Think about this – this is why I said the book needs to have a job. So when you're writing it, if you want it to get you onto a speaker platform, for instance, then you need to be thinking about what people will get from that, and what will make them want to come and hear me talk more, which will then do the upselling for whatever course it is that you're giving out.
But if you think about what your reader is going through, how do you solve a problem for them? How do you make their life better in one small way? And I think that the best business books are the ones that do that.
Beth: Absolutely, yeah, that's a really solid bit of advice. So, I think one more, if that's okay: where do you draw the line between using AI as an assistant and becoming overly dependent on it?
Taryn: That's a really good question. It's made us lazy – it's made us terribly lazy. It's so easy to go in and say, can you write me a 1,500-word blog on whatever. I think at the point where you recognise that you are not thinking for yourself, when you find yourself reaching for it first, then you realise that there's a problem.
But there's nothing wrong with you chucking an absolute load of nonsense onto a page, and then asking it to review that for you, to see what writing is good. It's so hard for people to start writing, and I know that not everyone is a natural writer. I'm in the middle of writing a novel at the minute, and that's taken me out of my comfort zone, so I get that.
But when you think about the quality of it – the way AI writes, for instance, I'll go to the novel writing: AI will say something like, “he walked across the floor like a man used to getting his own way.” What does that look like? If you're writing that as a human, you'll actually describe how he walks – that he had a confident stride, his posture, the way he'd made no eye contact. AI won't do it – it'll bring it into short bits.
So it's looking at your own writing and thinking, how lazy am I being? I think that's it, isn't it.
Beth: Absolutely. Oh, wow, and good luck on the novel, Taryn – that's very exciting, that's brilliant.
Taryn: Oh, well, thank you so much.
Beth: I think that's all we've got time for today, but a really informative session. So just as a reminder to everyone on the call, we will send out the recording and some further resources today. But yes, thanks so much, Taryn, and thank you everyone for joining, and we'll see you in the next one.
Taryn: Thank you. Bye.
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