How I'm Using AI in Publishing: Automating Ulysses Marketing Assets

The Problem

One of the biggest time-sucks I’ve found in the marketing of entire catalogs of books is producing the visual assets needed for everything from Shopify merchandise images and social media carousel cards to product images for the Amazon A+ Standard Comparison Chart.   These media are critical to allowing your publishing house to maximize title awareness and create free cross-promotional opportunities, keeping readers within, what I call, the “publisher ecosystem”.

Examples of publishing book cover image cards on Amazon, Facebook and Shopify

But producing these assets normally requires a few minutes each (in Photoshop or Canva). And for a catalog of 1,000 titles, that means about 8 days-worth of work! That project can cost your publishing house thousands of dollars to do manually in house.

The AI Fix

With ChatGPT, we can reduce those 8 days down to about 20 minutes of actual work (and less than hour of the computer working behind the scenes). In this use case, I asked ChatGPT the following prompt to create square Facebook carousel title cards complete with a light drop shadow using Python:

ChatGPT prompt to create Python code

Here is the code it generated:

ChatGPT writes Python code to produce automated marketing assets

All I had to do was match up the name of the folder I was directing it to and click “Run”. The code iterates through that folder, filled with cover images, and quickly produces perfect, uniform social media cards. Check it out:

Python code running and creating assets in realtime.

Examples of the finished products for Shopify and Amazon’s A+ Comparison Module

Of course, I can also have it create A+ comparison cards at the same time, simply by dropping in the additional code for more cards with the different aspect ratios and margins.

Click on the image to download the .ipynb file

The Result

All in all, this project allowed me to build out every combination of assets we might need going forward (and with the uniform naming conventions). It took less than 30 minutes. These are the types of truly startling productivity gains that you can achieve with AI—start with the tedious tasks that are necessary but take a lot of time and AI can pay massive dividends almost immediately.