If you follow Joanna Penn through her podcasts, videos, or books, you’ll know she’s a huge advocate of using AI tools to help her business. I’ve shied away from AI in my writing and publishing processes but began to rethink that after my sister mentioned how she used Claude to help with descriptions of some of the tapestries displayed in the recent Heallreaf exhibition.

As I had been struggling with getting the right sales copy for one of my stories, I thought, why not give it a try. I signed up with Claude.ai from Anthropic, and selected the free plan. There are two other plans available: the Pro Plan at $17.00 a month and the Max plan which start at $100.00 a month. Once you’re signed up, Claude asks for your name, and your area of interest, offering coding, writing, business and strategy and number of other options.

After that you see a text box with Claude asking how it can help you. I typed in that I wanted sales copy for a novel added the genre and a couple of bullet points. What came back was okay, so I refined it a little more, then again, and a fourth time. I expected the iterations as Joanna Penn talks about adding specificity to your queries to get better results.

What I ended up with was just over a hundred words of pretty good sales copy.

Encouraged, I tried again with the ideas I have for the next Jacob and Miriam story. Using what I’d learned previously, I was able to be quite detailed with the initial request, and got a good response. Further tweaking got me closer to what I had in mind, and then I hit the daily limit for the free account.

At the moment I don’t think I’ll be upgrading to the Pro account although some of the Pro features, like Projects do look interesting and bear further investigation.