To the extent that I have a philosophy of AI use, it comes to this: I want AI to handle the tasks I don’t enjoy. Falling in love with a set of characters, following them through their adventures, figuring out how the world around them works…to me, those are the fun parts. If I care enough about a story to want to see it on Amazon with a proper cover and a nonzero chance of someone besides me reading it and caring about it, I want to draft it myself. Hunting for typos and logic fails and things I did wrong? Not the fun parts, which is why I have been using AI more in the revision process. Writing a fanfic nobody but me wants to read? Fun but not as fun as it might be, plus it takes mental energy away from writing things that I might be able to sell. Hence, the Fanficcing with Claude label that turns up in this blog. And then there’s marketing. 

Marketing does not come easily to some writers, and I am one of them. When I’m happy with my writing, my opinion of it sounds too egotistical to share. When I’m unhappy with it, my opinion is too depressing for words. As for keywords, blurbs, covers, search engine optimization, noun phrase optimization, my brain tends to lock up or go down unhelpful rabbit holes. So, I turned to AI, first for cover art and blurb help and then for other marketing tasks.  So, a quick rundown on what I’ve done: 

Cover art: I started using Midjourney for this in mid-late 2023, when I generated the cover art for the Hunter Healer King trilogy. By now, all my covers are Midjourney-generated, with text and tweaks by me. I still continue to bounce the results off other humans, because there’s “doesn’t sit comfortably in an established genre, therefore doesn’t have obvious cover conventions to adhere to,” and then there’s “pretty but it doesn’t make me want to click on your book.” 

Blurbs: When I first turned to Google Bard in late 2023 for help with the blurb to Wolf’s Trail, what I got was a panful of river dirt with a couple of bright nuggets in it, and I used those nuggets to build out what I considered to be a decent blurb. The signal to noise ratio has improved a lot since then. The blurb for Pride & Planetoids is about half me and half Claude Sonnet 4.6, but the basic principle remains the same. I keep an eye out for the catchy bits that feel like they would work, and then build out something more specific to the story than the generic bits that the AI tends to throw out alongside its better ideas. 

Amazon categories and keywords: I only started messing around with this late last year and early this year, using variations on the Nerdy Novelist’s Summarizer Plus automation to boil my books down to something a chatbot could look at without turning into a gibbering wreck. Claude’s advice seemed to help the Hunter Healer King Trilogy somewhat in terms of sales and visibility, although I was also doing some cross-promotions with other authors, and experimenting with… 

Book quote graphics: I built an automation to look over my books for quotes suitable for social media, because let’s face it: what do I know about social media? Perplexity told me that Google Flash Lite 2.5 would do well at this. Perplexity…lied. A good chunk of the Hunter Healer King quotes I’ve been posting were ones I personally found after combing through the manuscripts myself. On the other hand, the Claude chatbot offered moderately good advice about prompting Midjourney for the style of background images I might need. I kind of enjoy playing with text on images, and Affinity Designer 2 took a lot of guess work out of the text spacing process. These have been good as content to keep my usually moribund blog alive.  

I plan to do something similar for Pride & Planetoids, although the book quote campaign is still a WIP at the time I write this post. Running the book quote automation with Claude Opus 4.5 instead of Google Flash Lite seemed to help a lot in terms of returning useable results, with a proportionate increase in cost. Still, we’re talking like a few bucks instead of what a human marketing guru would charge.  

Book videos on Youtube: As you may have gathered, I like to play with Midjourney. I was also playing around with Suno on the free plan. When I saw writers promoting their books with Midjourney/Suno videos on youtube, I thought: “ooh, that looks like fun! I always wanted to be a filmmaker!” (Spoiler alert: it is fun. It is also murder on the neck muscles if you sit there editing videos for too long). I used automations to check the Hunter Healer King books for suitable video moments, and then had to use my own judgment about what was actually doable given my dependence on Midjourney, my lack of an AI text to voice tool, and the content of the books. It seemed to help with the visibility of my books somewhat, but so far it’s not justifying the annual cost of a paid Suno subscription. Mostly, I’m just just doing it for the satisfaction of seeing my characters come to life in cute little videos that I produced and edited and wrote the intertitles for.  

I’m doing something similar for Pride & Planetoids, but with Nano Banana as a keyframing tool to turn my Midjourney concept art into specific images that I can use to generate footage in Midjourney. (Here’s the tutorial I used.) This project is still a work in progress as I write this. I will say that the Claude chatbot was helpful in terms of figuring out how workable specific video ideas were, and how to prompt Midjourney for some of the concept art I needed. Yes, I’ve heard good things about Higgsfield and Weavy and OpenArt and the rest of the trendy AI video tools beloved of people who actually do this for a living. No, I’m not going to change my process just yet.

Lore Drops: for the Hunter Healer King Trilogy, I drafted these, and took them to Claude for SEO review. I grudgingly restructured the profiles of the lead characters to line up with Claude’s advice, and borrowed a few rephrasings. My versions of the setting-oriented lore drops were coming out too dry and abstract, so I had Claude redraft those wholesale, with revisions by me when the chatbot drifted too far off point. (I may have made some sarcastic remarks at the expense of Peter Jackson and his interpretation of Lord of the Rings the fourth time Claude tried to frame Maxim’s distaste for the kingship as a fear of being corrupted by power.)  

For Pride & Planetoids, I felt too brain-burned to even try to write lore drops, so I ran my story bible automation on the manuscripts and took the results to Claude. Claude proposed the idea of treating all the lore drops as in-universe media, mostly Parliamentary records and journalist’s profiles of the main characters. This made sense to me, because a big chunk of the P&P characters ended up in politics in this retelling, notably Elizabeth Bennet. Again, I had to tweak a few things to fix continuity issues and remove Claude’s excessive enthusiasm for the bad guy faction in the setting, but it took less time and brain power than trying to write them myself. You should start seeing the results of this process in May.

Where do we go from here? I have started playing with Elevenlabs and its text to speech tools, but it will take me a few months on the free plan to get a feel for whether I want to do anything serious with it. As a rule of thumb, spend as long as you can on the free plan for any tool before you have to make the decision to pay for it. But if I decide I like Elevenlabs, voiced book vids might be a possibility…or even audiobooks!