How to Teach the Robots to Recommend Your Book

Want to try a fun experiment?

Open up ChatGPT and type in the question: "What are the best books on X topic (eg, transformational memoir, romantasy, business) by debut authors?" Then do the same in Claude, and again in Gemini. Sit back to study what comes tumbling out.

How do the Robots decide what to recommend? 

Well, it turns out that getting an AI chatbot to suggest your book is not the dark art you might assume it to be.

I have been following the research coming out of the team at Reedsy. Ricardo Fayet is the same editor whose findings about the Google Books Library I shared with you a few weeks back, and his latest discoveries are worth their weight in gold. He puts it plainly, "LLMs are not omniscient machines with godlike powers." They are simply very, very good at scouring the internet and weaving together whatever they find there into a tidy answer, which means the path to being recommended is far more within your control than you might fear.

When an AI hands you a list of recommendations, it will often show you the sources it consulted to arrive at them, and those sources are a window straight into the machine's reasoning. You might discover, as the Reedsy editor did, that a particular recommendation traces back to a single article or roundup that happens to mention the book.

Because these tools are essentially synthesizing what already exists online, your job as an author is to make sure your book exists in as many corners of the internet as possible. I am talking about the listicles of best books in your genre, citations in Goodreads, Listopia, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, podcasts and blog reviews. 

Every single mention of you and your book is another breadcrumb leading the AI back to you. You can even publish your own roundup of the top ten books in your genre on your author website, and nestle your own title proudly among them! While that one move alone will not win the algorithm, it is a perfectly legitimate stone to lay on the path.

I will be honest about something that has shifted in my own thinking over the years. I used to be deeply skeptical of blog tours and influencer campaigns. But the truth is, the more human beings talk about your book, the more the Robots take notice. Traditionally published books get recommended by AI roughly three times as often as indie titles. This is a reflection of the enormous online footprint that big publishers build for their books through reviewers, bloggers, and bookstores. The lesson for us is not to despair, but to do the same thing on our own terms, one genuine connection and one honest review at a time.

The writers who thrive are the ones who treat their book like a living presence. Plant your book everywhere. Get people talking. Enlist your Book Tribe in doing your talking for you. Teach the Robots that you are worth recommending.

I would love to hear how your own experiment goes. Hit Reply and tell me which AI you tried, what you asked, and whether your book showed up. I read every message that lands in this inbox, and I always write back.

Aloha, MeiMei  

TIP OF THE WEEK: 

Run the Recommendation Test

Open ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini this week and ask it the exact question your ideal reader would type when looking for a book like yours. 

Notice which titles appear. Then scroll down and read the sources the Robots pulled from. 

Those citations will show you precisely which websites, articles, and lists are shaping its recommendations, and that knowledge becomes your roadmap for where to get your book mentioned next.

Want to know more about the next cohort of my 6-week online program and other offerings from Your Bestselling Book?  Learn More Here!