Most people who read a lot will tell you that many of the novels they love are way better than the ones on the various “best books of the year” roundups from major newspapers and BookTokers. But if those novels are superior, why don’t they make it onto those lists, instead?
Much of it comes down to awareness. Those reviewers are aware of the titles that make their roundups mostly because those books are among the few dozen or so each year with large marketing and publicity budgets behind them. Money won’t buy a novel a spot on a coveted list, but it can definitely buy a higher likelihood that a novel will be considered.
Most novelists are left trying to drum up awareness for their books themselves, via social media. But as every author will tell you, myself included, tweets exclaiming “Check out my new book!” rarely go far.
That’s where Hypnovels comes in. It’s a new generative AI tool that allows authors to make audiovisual excerpts of their novels, which they can then share on their website or on platforms like TikTok.
Hypnovels is the brainchild of Silverside AI, a San Fransisco-based AI innovation and incubation lab founded by Pereira O’Dell ad veteran (and novelist) PJ Pereira and Ask Jeeves founding CEO Rob Wrubel.
The tool allows novelists to upload an excerpt of their novel and enter some details about its genre and themes, which the AI will then crunch to yield a video that brings their prose to life in both audio and visual form.
Because my latest novel, a piece of speculative fiction called Beautiful Shining People, deals with the way AI will radically alter our relationships with each other and society in the decades ahead, I figured it was apropos that I give Hypnovels a trial run.
Hypnovel of the jacket blurb for Beautiful Shining People.
As the name “Hypnovels” suggests, and as you can see from the Hypnovel of Beautiful Shining People’s jacket blurb above, the video’s output isn’t a literal visual representation of the prose. Instead, it’s a surreal representation of the words, themes, and tones of the novel—or as Hypnovel’s website calls it, a “hypnotic dream.”
After copying and pasting your prose and answering some questions about your novel, you’ll choose from over 20 visual themes ranging from retro-futurism to noir to street art. Choose the theme you want and then select the AI voice you wish to narrate your prose. Finally, select one of the four visual style refinement options Hypnovel’s AI offers, based on the parameters you’ve set. Out will come a video that you can then share on your author’s website and social channels.
“People have difficulty stopping to read a book today. There’s too much stimulation. Hypnovels makes them pause, makes them pay attention,” says Pereira. “If, after watching a sample, they want to read the full book or listen to the audio book, that’s our main goal. The important thing is: they’re engrossed in the story and want to read on.”
Pereira says he got the idea for Hypnovels when he was brainstorming ways to promote his latest novel, The Girl from Wudang. It features a character that is AI, so he decided to experiment with the actual technology itself. “The thought was: If I think of my book as one giant prompt, can I use it to generate a video? I played with that idea for months.”
A Hypnovel of a chapter from Beautiful Shining People.
Of course, as with any generative AI text-to-video output, you’ll never get the same thing twice, as I found out when trying Hypnovel’s tool on the jacket blurb for Beautiful Shining People a few different times (below is a second Hypnovel of the jacket copy of Beautiful Shining People). You also won’t have the ability to fine-tune elements in the video. This lack of control may be frustrating to some, especially considering it can take hours for the AI to generate a video that is only a few minutes long.
Yet this is par for the course of any generative AI tool today. Besides, for me, the roll-of-the-dice outcome was appealing, and not being able to predict what form the next visuals would take as I listened to my own prose being read back to me made listening to a story I knew well feel novel (if you’ll excuse the pun).
It should also be noted that Hypnovels in its current form is an early work in progress, and the authors who use it now will be helping fine-tune the tool. That’s also why Hypnovels is currently free to use, though Pereira says it will eventually need to become a service that authors pay for, due to operating costs.
Another Hypnovel of the jacket blurb for Beautiful Shining People.
As a journalist who frequently writes about artificial intelligence, the technology fascinates me to no end. But as a novelist, I can’t help seeing AI as a potential threat to be monitored. AI-written books may abound in just a few more years, making it even harder for novelists like me to capture awareness for their own human-written works.
Still, as I explored in Beautiful Shining People, no technology is inherently evil. The same knife can be used to take a life or butter bread. There are ways in which AI can be beneficial to novelists and other creators, and because it can draw attention to terrific novels that lack the good fortune of having large marketing budgets, Hypnovels is a great example of that.
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