First, decide what your book will be about using low-cost software such as Publisher Rocket, which tracks Amazon searches to determine keywords book buyers are typing. It will tell you the number of books competing for each keyword and how much money their authors are making. Pick the hottest topic you can find.

Next, ask ChatGPT to create an outline. This should take less than 30 seconds. For popular themes—such as "How to Lose Weight on a Vegan Diet"—the results are surprisingly good.

Once you're happy with the outline, ask ChatGPT to write the book. Make separate queries, one chapter at a time.

Because Amazon frowns on content created by artificial intelligence, the next step is crucial: Paste each of your chapters into Originality.AI to determine its "AI score." A score of 100% is bad, meaning your content is blatantly AI-generated.

Use QuillBot to find synonyms and alternate phrases. Then paste your revised material into the Grammarly app, which will act as a copy editor to clean things up.

Return to Originality.AI and continue fiddling with your content until its AI score drops below 50%—the lower, the better.

Now you'll need a cover, There are dozens of YouTube videos such as "How to Make Your Own Book Cover in Under 10 Minutes," by Rachel Harrison-Sund, which has had more than 80,000 views. She recommends using free software from Canva, which offers images, type fonts and book templates.

Thanks to the wonder of printing on demand, Amazon will be happy to produce a single copy or hundreds, and bill it through your Prime account.

Maybe you'll become another Sean Dollwet, a self-publishing guru who claims to have made more than $1 million in the past few years by churning out dozens of quickie books. Or Dale L. Roberts, who began writing books about diet and fitness 10 years ago but quickly discovered there was more money in writing books about writing books, of which he is the author of five.

More likely, you'll make tens of dollars selling your book to friends and relatives. You'll have a carton of unsold copies in your garage as a reminder that while writing books these days is simpler than ever, selling them is practically impossible.

(c) Peter Funt. This column originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.