July 11th, 2025
The best presentation about AI and book publishing that I’ve ever “seen” is Keith Riegert’s June presentation to the U.S. Book Show in New York. (The show was a great success!)
Slide by slide, 90 slides in all, Keith paints a vivid picture of AI’s applicability to book publishing today, and its plausible future within the industry.
Keith has become something of a book publishing superstar in the last few years, by dint of his aggressive business development path, his ongoing adventuring with AI for book publishing, alongside his willingness to document and share the results of his experiments. I won’t describe all of Keith’s many endeavors and affiliations here, whether at Stable Book Group, at Perfect Bound, and at several other undertakings. Check Keith’s website for more.
Above I used quotation marks around ‘seen’ because, regrettably, I wasn’t in New York in June, and so didn’t have a chance to see the presentation. But his slides are so well-prepared (including some vivid videos) that it’s easy to work your way through Keith’s thinking about AI as if you saw the presentation live.
I recommend that you set aside (at least) a half-hour to work through the presentation. Here are some of the moments that stood out for me.
(Slide 3) “AI has terrified me from the start.” — A frank confession!
(Slide 13) “If you work in the publishing industry, you should now be integrating AI into everything you do.” — Not, ‘might’ or ‘possibly could.’ No, ‘should.’
(Slide 16) “Try using AI for every possible task you do during the day—and shoot to use AI platforms for one hour per day.” I’m also seeing that practice is the big differentiator in success with AI tools. The more you use AI tech day-to-day, the more its value become obvious.
(Slide 16) “Today’s AI is the worst you will ever use.” This is a tough one for people to appreciate at the outset. The AI tech we’re using today is often dazzling. And often frustrating. It’s tempting sometimes just to toss the whole thing into the trashbin. But this is still an early version of AI. Think about the first iPhone or the early days of the web. It’s going to get a whole lot better.
(Slide 20) “My goal in this session is to give you practical, step-by-step examples of how our companies are using current AI tools in our daily operations… Using seven different AI platforms.” And he certainly does! Among them:
• Start a New Publishing Company
• Sales and Marketing Generators
• Helping New Editors Pitch a Book
• Amazon A+ Content–Automated
• Design a Placeholder Cover
• Create a Book Trailer
(Slide 57) Keith uses video very effectively throughout the presentation, perhaps most effectively with his demonstration of automating a Sales/Rights ‘Podcast’. I’d consider buying the rights to the book the he’s illustrated on slide 58!
(Slide 67) Rather than bland handwringing because of AI’s potential threat to publishing jobs, Keith drills down on ways in which AI ‘agents’ will subsume many publishing job functions, and how this is both bane and benefit.
(Slide 85) “Keith’s Predictions for 2030 (or sooner).” As a responsible futurist should do, Keith offers (two) predictions for AI’s future in publishing:
“1. There will be a publishing company that is operated almost entirely by AI agents that publishes a New York Times bestseller (written by a human).
2. There will be a billion dollar company that has no humans working for it.”
And, he emphasizes: “This is happening remarkably fast.”
Please take a look, here.
(Note: I used the title of Keith’s presentation as the subtitle of this post.)