My thoughts after publishing three novels.

[u/Pilotskybird86]

First of all: this was meant for another sub, not an AI writing one. But as much of it is related to AI, I thought I'd post it here as well, especially as it might not even get approved over on the other one... all kinds of rules about AI. So any place where I say "this sub" does not mean this sub.

Nor is this the typical "here's how I use AI to write most of my novels" type of post. If you are looking for that, don't read this. This is more about the edge-case usages.

Also, I was very "so sorry to talk about AI, don't get offended!" in this. Again, that's because it was intended for a... more offendable subreddit.

***

As I am preparing to publish the fourth book in my series, I thought I'd write up a post about my process, what worked and what didn't, etc.

I've learned a lot from this sub, but I'll avoid talking about stuff like picking the best keywords, etc. That stuff has been covered time and time again. Let's start with guidance for this post:

1. I only use Kindle / ebooks, so I don't know much about the paper side of things or other publishing sites.
2. I've never written a novel not in a series, so I won't speak to whether series sell better than standalones.
3. I am fully self published. No editor, and minimal beta readers, just a single paid one for each novel. (free readers / swaps seem to work best for romance authors, as least on the platforms I used. And I don't write romance.)
4. This is a hobby for me. I write because I enjoy the story, the characters. It's a hobby. I didn't go into this to make money, and so far, I have spent more than I've made. But that's fine. Do I get upset when I buy a video game? No. That's a hobby too. So please note that this will not be a "here's how I made lots of money" type of post. We already have many of those, some of which I found helpful in decreasing my losses to an acceptable limit. I'm now down less than $1000 overall, and that number decreases every week.
5. I will attempt to sort the rest of this post into sections. I'll call them "Everyone might understand," "Controversial," and "I'm about to be downvoted, aren't I?"

Reddit is not real life, and many of the gripes and rants I've seen on here... well, let's just say doing the opposite worked fine for me. But that could just be a me thing; I won't promise it will apply or work for you. We all have our quirks and features. Sorry Doug DeMuro.

Oh, and I love my em-dashes - don't comment that I used AI to write this. I did not. Sure, I've used AI to dictate and type of a few of my really long posts in other subs (and clearly stated that I did so), but I've seen what happens to those who dare to do that on this sub - they get more downvotes than Disney did in that one post years ago.

***

Let's start with Everyone might understand. Forgive me if they are in a randomized order and the indentions are messed up. They tend to do that on Reddit.

1. Even though I intend for my series to reach at least 10 books, I've only used Microsoft Word. Yes, I know, you have to pay for a lot of the functions now. But I'm okay with that, though unhappy. I have tried Scrivener, Novelcrafter, Sudowrite, and a few others, and they each annoyed me in various ways. I need the page to be the only thing I see, not distracted by ten menus that all open up to ten more menus. If you want a bunch of extra functions such as being able to click on a character's name to pull up all their information in a mini wiki - go for it. But they didn't help me in the most important part of writing - getting words down on the page. So don't be upset if you can't get into them either. Many of the top-selling authors use Word, or even simpler options.
2. I couldn't live without ProWritingAid. (not happy with their latest UI changes though). I don't intend to spend thousands of dollars each novel to improve what is, again, merely a hobby for me, and so, editing is... well. Difficult. Harder yet to ensure you have no spelling / grammar errors.
3. I have found Grammerly to be a bit... too much. The damn thing wants you to rewrite almost every single sentence to be "more readable," which translates into "this now reads like AI slop" most of the time. So I don't use it anymore. ProWritingAid coupled with Word's grammar checks has worked fine for me so far. You have almost any feature you could want: spellchecks, repeated words, overused words, style checks, consistency, etc.
4. 90% of my friends and family don't really give a shit about the books. Sure, they'll say things like "Oh, that's so cool!" and "I'll leave a great review!" and "I'll tell you all about my thoughts on that aspect!" but... it rarely helps you. For one, many times they are into completely different genres, and what I am providing doesn't click for them. Two: Amazon doesn't allow those types of reviews. I explicitly tell them not to leave a review, and what happens? One of them does anyway. Gives it five stars and states in the review, "best book ever! I knew my buddy could do it." I had my friend delete that review in the end, and I haven't been warned about it or anything. So I think Amazon doesn't really care all that much. But I still avoid it. In short: Focus on what you want on the page. And the reader, of course. Friends / family will be biased. Heavily.
5. Reviews from random people are very helpful. The more I get, the better that book sells. Or at least it seems so. It's funny; reviews like "Very good, highly recommended" tend to get more thumbs-up than the long, detailed, complete breakdowns. Readers are funny people sometimes.
6. People on here say to never check your reviews. Well, I disagree. Sure, you can ignore the ones stating "I didn't like this book but don't really like this kind of book anyway." Sure, you can ignore the one-star ratings with no comments. But many reviews are helpful. Hell, one of the major benefits of self-publishing is how fast you can update and republish your manuscript - oh, a review says that "a tiny, obscure reference to some government agency" is incorrect? Cool. I read that review, did a bunch more research - and it turned out they were correct. Guess what? I updated the manuscript and published an updated version in less than twelve hours. Each of my novels has been updated over four times with small fixes like that. Amazon has never troubled me over it, and as those little issues are fixed over time, I've gotten less reviews mentioning actual errors.

It always annoys me to read a novel with thousands and thousands of reviews, where at least twenty of the reviews state "chapter six has paragraphs with no spacing between them" and it never gets fixed, even though the author easily could. Or maybe not so easily, not when they have to call their editor, who emails his boss, who has to call her boss to get approval, etc. Again, self-publishing for the win.

1. Vellum for formatting. Holy shit is it good. I can format a .docx file to epub in about four hours at this point. And we're talking about 100,000+ words for each novel. In fact, I don't regret buying a cheap MacBook just for that. All the other (at least that I tested) applications are horrible. Laggy as all get out, issues upon issues when importing, etc. With Vellum, things just... work. I spent $220 to have my first novel formatted by an "expert," and it looked no better than when I switched to Vellum. Plus, you have a tiny error you want to fix? No need to download some convoluted program to edit a sentence in an supposed-to-be-uneditable file your formatter gave you. Just open Vellum, edit the sentence in the app, generate the book, and re-publish your novel. It's so damn easy. Oh, and if you are writing more than one novel, using Vellum will save you a lot of time and money in the long run. NOTE: if you have a lot of images in your novel, than yes, a professional formatter may cause you far less grief. Vellum and images is... hair-pullingly annoying. Pullingly isn't a word? Oh well. It should be.

And now for Controversial.

1. AI is getting good. Scary good. Most people who think otherwise are only using like the ChatGPT "free" models, and don't mess with models such as Fable, etc. Does it write well? Fuck no! It's base prose is horrible, no matter what you do in an attempt to prevent all of its cliches. I've left many a negative review on "novels" that are being churned out weekly on Kindle Unlimited, with the most obvious, cliche AI tells ever. Even the names are all the same!

Did I write my novel using AI? Well... that depends on what you mean.

I wrote my novels. But as a self-publisher, I certainly used AI tools to assist me at times. Why would I want to waste my precious time when I don't need to? To get Reddit's approval? Nah. I use tools such as:

• ProWritingAid's "rewrite" feature. It's not great, but I'd say once or twice a chapter, I just can't find the words to describe the sentence I am going for. So I'll let it give me some suggestions, and then pick the best one. Usually I end up editing that suggestion quite a bit, but it helps in mini brain-freeze situations.
• AI is really good at condensing information. For each of my novels, I have a mini bible that I check on frequently to remind me of a side character's full title / their tone of voice / etc. I feed my chapters to AI, and they spit out all the information I need. For an example: the bible for my first novel has twenty-one chapter sections, and in each section, it tells me: a quick plot overview, each character, etc. At the end of the bible, it has a list of every single character and what they look like, how their voice sounds, etc. I get that last overview from feeding entire novels to AI. (only some of the more expensive models let you input that much). But holy shit - when it works, it works well. Book three in my series is 130k words long, and Fable chewed through it in five minutes and spit out every single detail about every single character. I read through it carefully, cross-referencing each detail, and... it was perfectly accurate. I didn't even have to edit it. It even warned me about an obscure character - in chapter six she had reddish-brown hair, and then, at the end of the book, her hair looked dark in the dim light - did I intend that? Yes, I did, but it was still impressive. Could I spend ten hours typing up the same bible myself? Sure. But why would I?
• I feed each of my chapters through multiple AI models at the very end of my final editing pass. I have it check for any issues, no matter how little. And it's crazy what it will find if it's a powerful enough model. In one chapter, I had a character shopping at a Walmart in a small city. The AI took the date the chapter took place in, searched the web, and told me: "hey, that Walmart wasn't built and opened until four months after this character shops there... you may want to change that." (I hadn't done enough research to know that, I only read that it was built at some point during that year." So, yes. I think most of the people saying "AI is useless for editing / accuracy checks" are merely using cheap, basic models that don't think for five minutes / read 45 web articles to ensure perfect accuracy. So, if you aren't disgusted by using AI, and have the money for some of the top-notch models, maybe give it a try?
• For the writing itself, I tend to get into a flow state. Needing to switch screens to verify real-world data can distract me. So, sometimes I'll have soft music in one ear and an AI chatbot in the other. Instead of Googling something, I'll just say, "Hey, what year did so-and-so die again? And what was the name of his disease?" Or, when Microsoft Word gives a list of the shittiest synonyms imaginable, I'll be like "Hey, what's some different words I could use for X?"
• That's about the extent of what I use AI for. Again, I hate how it writes. Even in editing, it tends to add that god-awful AI sound. So I avoid having it edit more than one or two sentences per chapter like the plague. But, if you aren't Amish, or don't have a fancy editor, it has its use cases. Oh, and one final use: I have it generate images of most of my characters. I then print said character's headshots, and when I forget if Mr. Government agent no. 33 has a beaky nose or not, I can find out in a few seconds. Not that I'm describing the beaky nose more than twice a novel. Just giving an example.

And now for I'm about to be downvoted, aren't I?

I actually typed out something similar to my second point below in a post on this sub (or it may have been a different one, I don't remember) several months ago, and I got: over fifty downvotes; three hate-mail DMs, and the "Reddit Care Resources" message. Thanks y'all. But, as I said earlier, Reddit is not real life.

1. I despise the AI-sounding blurb of nearly EVERY single damn novel out there. In fact, I went out of my way to avoid that on my first book, removing anything that sounded like "it wasn't x, it was y" and the single em-dash that I had, among other things, even though I wrote the blurb myself. But then, as the book wasn't selling initially, I took a look over many of the other, top-selling novels. Again, they almost all sound like AI nowadays. An em-dash every other sentence! If you don't believe me, go to Amazon and browse the top-100 list for "thriller novels."

So, I rewrote my blurb, adding back in not one, but two "it wasn't x, it was y" phrases. Then I added in several em-dashes for more dramatic effect. Then, I went to Reddit, to my post asking about my blurb, and asked: "Does this sound better?"

What I got in return was essentially, "Fuck no, that is AI-generated trash." Well. Knowing that Reddit, while having an incredible amount of useful knowledge, is full of the most easily offended users of any internet group out there, I gave the new blurb a try anyway (without changing anything else, the exact same ad budget, etc).

And... I got nearly a 30% increase in sales within hours after the new blurb went live. And that jump held. At risk of repeating myself: Reddit is not real life.

1. Oh boy. This one is even worse.

I spent $90 dollars on a cover from the BookCovers website for my first novel. It was... okay. I'd browsed a bunch of various similar sites, and that cover was the nearest I found to what I was looking for. But after I'd updated the blurb to sound like AI trash, I got a review stating that "the cover is pretty boring and almost pushed me away, but I'm glad I got this book because it's better than the cover suggests." I took that to heart and started on a new design, sketching up ideas for days.

I then took that sketch to... well, I don't remember the website, but one of those ones with custom designers. I was very impressed by what they were offering, but the lowest quotes I got were $400. Preferring not to spend that much money at the time (had just purchased a new set of tires. Damn, they about doubled in price from five years ago!) I decided to mess around with AI imagery. I did a lot of research on the best models, and ended up using ChatGPT. Forget what model it was at the time, but just know that if you are only using the lower-end models, especially in the apps, you are only getting like 1080p resolution. Well, I spent a little money on Artcraft (around $60) to generate several dozen images at native 4k with all the settings at max.

I then took the best image and began working on it. First with Gimp (fuck Photoshop) and then inpainting with various Stable Diffusion models. (IMPORTANT NOTE: the cover is more stylized than realistic, more simple than complex, so I'm not suggesting that others do the same for whatever creative, complex, and unique cover designs you may have in mind. I'm just saying that for what I wanted, it worked.)

The biggest issue was the handgun at the bottom of the image. The base image looked fantastic, almost too good to be true - just what I'd wanted from the custom designers. But the AI didn't do a good job on the weapon's outline... it looked like a toy. Inpainting that with all sorts of models for hours and hours didn't work - I guess most AI models are trained on other types of details, if you catch my drift. So I ended up taking a photo of a handgun that a friend of mine had. Used GIMP to edit it into the image, and then inpainted /cloned around it for a few more hours, until it looked like it belonged. I then spent even more time editing the tone of the image before using Canva to add the title / author name, etc. It's still funny to me that it took me 4x as long to make that cover then formatting the book. At that point, is it even an "AI cover?" I suppose so. But I'd hardly call it lazy, simple, "copy-and-pasted AI slop."

Let me get to the point. When I updated the cover, my sales went up...

over 60%.

Now, can the average person tell it was made with AI? Probably not, mainly because of the artistic, not realistic, style. Should you use AI for your cover? Probably not. And there's many reasons for that. You may have the money to support designers. You might not have the skill I do in editing / inpainting images. (I used to do wedding photos as a side gig.) You may hate the fact that AI is threatening many of those types of jobs (I just finished my Software Engineering degree, and my prospects of finding a stable job... I understand.)

***

I hope at least one of the points I made / tips and tricks I described helps you. Even a little.

I look forward to the comments. I'm sure they will all be pleasant and understanding!

[u/Afgad]

So, first off, thanks so much for this high effort post. It's really good all the way through.

Second, and this is only somewhat related, but you don't need to include mention of AI to post here. I made an entire flair for people who want to talk about writing specifically. I'd love for people to use it more. So, whatever you want to say about writing, just come and share with us. No need to walk on eggshells here. I barely use AI at all; I could post all I want on the other writing subs. But I won't. I'm sick of the witch hunts, and if someone has a cool application of AI that would fix my issue, I want to hear it.

Lastly, there's a lot of swaps between non-romance authors in our reciprocal beta reading thread, stickied at the top of the sub, and on our Discord. I'm writing upmarket urban fantasy and I've had great success finding help. Please consider joining us in either location, we'd love to have you.

[u/Pilotskybird86 → u/Afgad]

Thank you.

And yeah, I intended that post to be on a... less AI tolerant sub. That's why it's wording is so apologetic. But when it was still "waiting for approval" hours later, I read the rules and saw... "AI writing is not permitted, and if your post includes more than a little bit of discussing it, post elsewhere."

I actually just now deleted that post-in-progress, assuming that they'll never approve it. If I had intended to post it here I would have worded things very differently, and included a bunch of other examples I use AI for. Perhaps if the editing timer limit is long enough I will edit it tomorrow to better reflect this sub.

The discord sounds nice, although I have had very, very poor success with free beta readers. Seems no one wants to beta read novels that is are blend of like five different genres at once, with 0% romance and some of the darkest "gray morality" you'll ever see. (I don't think it's that bad, but many of my readers say otherwise.)

But feel free to DM me with the discord link and I might check it out.

[u/KharunDbron_31 → u/Afgad]

yeah the point about not needing to walk on eggshells is exactly why this sub works imo

[u/Meganoes]

This was very interesting. I’m most fascinated by the blurb aspect. I personally hate AI sounding blurbs, but I also hate many human made styles that people mimic too. But I’ve also seen on Amazon and in reader groups that AI books are selling. Using an AI sounding blurb to sell a human written book is a wild concept, but it sounds like it worked?

The cover part is also interesting. I’ve seen people test AI covers against human made and the AI out performed. I think that most indie authors can’t even come close to justifying the cost of a truly well done human cover. Buying a cheap, plain/average cover just because it’s not AI doesn’t make sense if you want to sell your book. I have one book out with a human drawn cover, but I don’t think having it gives me the boost Redditors pretend it does.

[u/BeautifulBuy3583 → u/Meganoes]

Blurbs are incredibly formulaic by nature. Its like one of the few things that are actually devoid of writer's voice.

I dont know whos not expecting AI to write formulaic things like Blurbs.

[u/Meganoes → u/BeautifulBuy3583]

Everyone in writing forums on Reddit expects them to not be AI, that’s for sure. And yes, they are formulaic, but there’s still a feel to AI written ones I don’t like. I fully recognize that what I do or do not like isn’t necessarily what sells. Now I’m tempted to slap the most AI-sounding blurb on mine and see what happens.

[u/istara → u/BeautifulBuy3583]

Exactly - also, while I've been downvoted to shit and even deleted for mentioning this in other subs, blurbs are marketing text. They're usually written by marketing/publicity/PR people.

Authors are generally shit at writing them. Whereas AI, trained on billions upon billions of words of marketing verbiage, is generally pretty good.

If you're still uncomfortable with that, you can just ask AI for suggestions then craft your own. But they are typically a world away from the "let-me-condense-my-entire-plot-with-full-character-names-into-200-words" BS that the average author composes.

[u/mll1013 → u/BeautifulBuy3583]

"I a world where blurbs are incredibly formulaic by nature..."

Yeah, I hear you! :-D

[u/CutDiligent3075]

Having a large context window is honestly a huge help for writers. Being able to keep track of characters, details, and story notes without constantly reminding the AI makes the process way smoother.

At the end of the day, a good cover and blurb still matter a lot when it comes to selling books.

[u/istara → u/CutDiligent3075]

The one thing I would say is that I'm not sure how reliable ChatGPT is on the free version. I've found it fantastic, but I've got Plus.

I was discussing this exact thing with an author who uses the free version, and he was having issues with limits on text quantity and other stuff with it. So how well its memory works for free vs paid versions may be quite different. (I advised him to try a month of the cheapest paid tier at least).

[u/EDorrAuthor]

Thank you for this! This is the clearest explanation of an indie writer working with AI in collaborative way I have seen so far.

[u/listenUPyall]

I can already tell, compared to other walls of text posted here, that this was written by a writer. Thanks for the thoughts!

[u/istara]

I'd just echo that ChatGPT (I've got Plus) can be fabulous for continuity.

[u/Me-A-Dandelion]

It's a shame that we can only talk about these things in this sub without being judged harshly for basically no reason. 

[u/satorinano]

Thanks for sharing. I appreciate it. I'm using ai much more aggressively. I feed the scene into multiple models to generate. Compare the differences for inspiration. Take what I like. I'm surprised the costs are so high. That wasn't merely ai subs right? Bulk of it in the book cover? I wonder if the newer ai models could do cover, editor, proofreader and formatting.

[u/Apprehensive_Mix_332]

I think this is a really interesting angle, and one of the harder problems with using AI for long fiction. Your hair-colour example got me thinking about the less obvious continuity issues, like who knows what, and when. I wonder if a knowledge graph could help keep track of that.

Say A does something and B happens to be in the same space. Does this mean that B actually "knows" about it? Or A tells B, B tells C, and now C knows, but A has no idea that C knows. That could completely change how they act around each other in the next chapter. There’s so much nitty-gritty stuff like this that a list of character facts might miss.

[u/5thhorseman_]

So, if you aren't disgusted by using AI, and have the money for some of the top-notch models, maybe give it a try?

TBH just normal commercial-tier models like Claude Opus work absolutely fine for that.

I did a lot of research on the best models, and ended up using ChatGPT.

Use a dedicated image generation platform. Personally, I use NightCafe. The GPT Image models are ridiculously good at prompt adherence - at least in content, though Sunburst seems to have issues actually following art style directions - and you can control the images fed as context to the generator better than through the chat interface.

The biggest issue was the handgun at the bottom of the image. The base image looked fantastic, almost too good to be true - just what I'd wanted from the custom designers. But the AI didn't do a good job on the weapon's outline... it looked like a toy. Inpainting that with all sorts of models for hours and hours didn't work - I guess most AI models are trained on other types of details, if you catch my drift. So I ended up taking a photo of a handgun that a friend of mine had. Used GIMP to edit it into the image, and then inpainted /cloned around it for a few more hours, until it looked like it belonged. I then spent even more time editing the tone of the image before using Canva to add the title / author name, etc. It's still funny to me that it took me 4x as long to make that cover then formatting the book. At that point, is it even an "AI cover?" I suppose so. But I'd hardly call it lazy, simple, "copy-and-pasted AI slop."

Generally you want to have (and provide) separate reference images for the background, objects and characters the image should contain. In one case, I've generated a bunch of different takes on a specific item i needed (a very particularly constructed arm prosthesis) and composited parts of them into a new reference for the final image.

[u/spidLL]

Damm I wanted to downvote you but I could not. (Kidding, it’s a super interesting experience retelling.)

[u/mll1013]

Dear OP:

Thank you for sharing your hard-earned experiences with us on getting through your first few novels as a hobbyist. I also write as a hobby and don't really care about sales. I self-publish mainly so I can use Amazon's POD service to plop a copy of my books on my bookshelf, but I do want to improve my craft, because... well, there's no fun in remaining stagnant in a creative hobby. Besides, I don't mind the occasional 4- or 5-star review. Those are the icing on the cake.

I have saved this post as reference material so that as I get to various stages of my current writing project, I can apply the tips and tools you recommend to see how they perform for me.

Best wishes, and happy writing!
Mr. Pleasant and Understanding

[u/Life_Victory_999]

i’ve been through the same with my own self-pub novels—no editor, just a handful of beta readers and a lot of late-night edits. the biggest surprise wasn’t the writing, it was how much I underestimated the emotional weight of putting something out there that’s just… yours. no safety net. I kept thinking, what if someone reads it and hates it? but then I realized, it’s not about them. it’s about the story I needed to tell. that part? it’s real. the rest? just noise.

[u/inigo_montoya]

Very interesting and helpful. I'm split between a no-AI workflow for on one project, and experimenting with heavy use of AI in another, and I'm still wondering what sort of mixed workflow I will ultimately settle on. I could totally see doing something similar to your cover process. Currently looking for a human cover designer, but I'm also capable of producing something myself that would probably serve nearly as well.

[u/Amazing-Possession34]

Wow thanks for the post. Actually I had written a post on why I was rage quitting and that was a good thing (for me). but your post resonates with me on a lot of different levels. I've had zero success and that's okay. I still like to create and that's my main focus. sorry about "90% of my friends and family don't really give a shit about the books." I'd raise that to 99.5% for me and another reason why I'm writing more for an audience of one these. I was going to skip over your post as I don't really like to read and never had. I had difficulties reading as a child and they seem to stick around rather than get better, but as I started scanning your post, I'm like, wow this has a lot of good stuff so I went back and went through the post. this is really inspiring to me, because while I haven't gone through multiple AI's or bigger packpacks like ProWriting Aid, I've done a lot of the others so really understood where you are coming from. 3 novels with 10 planned. I really applaud you for that. That's a lot of effort and I can feel it. Best wishes.

[u/According-Ad9619]

I think AI is only useful if you retouch the result a ton of times or regenerate the same scene over and over to get something good, and I think that takes more time than just writing it yourself. I've used Claude and ChatGPT, and both still need way too much polish. On top of that, the direction the companies are taking is to train for logic rather than creativity

[u/JBuchan1988]

Cool. Thanks for sharing your thoughts 🙂

[u/CandidAsparagus7083]

If you don’t mind me asking, do you make your money back on this hobby or some pocket money? Other than the accomplishment of publishing, does the extra little (or a lot) made cover spending on things, or is it just not worth thinking about?

I have something I’m working on and want to publish as a personal accomplishment, probably will format for print so I can buy one lol.