Category: Marketing

AI as Writer’s Assistant: Marketing with AI 

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Cool Websites, Covers, Fantasy, Hunter Healer King, Jane Austen, LLMs, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Music, One Weird Trick, Publishing Plans, videos, Weird Science, Writing2 Comments

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: 

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Ten Years Ago Today…

Posted on Posted in Art, Covers, Fantasy, Hunter Healer King, Jaiya, Marketing, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Publishing Plans, science-fiction, Space Opera, Star Wars, Tia Baden, Weird Science, Writing3 Comments

I put a short story with a lousy cover up on Amazon. A couple of months later, I took it down again. It was October of that year before I published my first novel. and now, well…

I would lying if I said I’d found fame or fortune doing this. But it’s been a fun adventure and I plan to keep on with it.

Speaking Thukiel: The Lost Language of Thule | Hunter Healer King

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Hunter Healer King, Lore Drop, Marketing, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

Three thousand years after Thule sank beneath the waves, its language survives in fragments.

The Stormcrows still use Thukiel in certain ceremonies. Banishing daggers carry runes in the ancient tongue. The Pledge of Arent, which binds a king to the Armor, must be spoken in Thukiel, and the speaker must mean every word.

This is the language of a civilization that built airships and tamed gravity, that imprisoned demons and fell to its own hubris. And in the world of the Hunter Healer King trilogy, Thukiel isn’t just history: it’s power.

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Spring Book Sale

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Cool Books, Cool Websites, Fantasy, Hunter Healer King, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Space Opera, Steampunk, Weird Science8 Comments

It’s time for the latest Book Sale hosted by Hans G. Schantz, where indie authors from across genres join together to offer great stories at great prices. 

I’m glad to be participating once again. This event has always been a great opportunity for readers and writers to connect through their shared love of good books, without all the noise. 

My contribution this quarter is Undead Flight, the second book in my Hunter Hunter Trilogy. It’s a gaslamp fantasy where our horse-loving heroine faces vampires and zombies ON AN AIRSHIP, while sorting out her feelings for a certain sharp-dressed monster hunter.  It continues on from the first book in the trilogy in terms of the setting and the leads’ dynamic, but stands on its own as a story. 

You can find it, and many others, at the sale here. 

As always, I’m thankful for everyone who stops by, whether to browse, buy, or spread the word. Every bit of attention helps keep indie pub going. 

Happy reading! 

Due Disclosure: Me and AI and Marketing

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To me, AI is a flawed but interesting tool, brought to us by the same flawed (and often corrupt) people who brought us the rest of the modern conveniences we live with. Other people have other opinions about it, and out of respect for them, I try to be transparent about my use of AI.

I do not use AI for first draft writing or for high-level concept and character background work. I have found ai chatbots (mostly Claude.ai) helpful for tasks like:

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State of the Author, 4Q2025

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Dictation, Editing, Fantasy, Jane Austen, LLMs, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Music, Mystery, Myth, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Star Wars, Steampunk, videos, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

It’s been roughly three months since the last State of the Author, so here’s where I’m at:

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Hunter Healer King 3 blurb

Posted on Posted in ai, Dictation, Editing, Fantasy, LLMs, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Mystery, Myth, One Weird Trick, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

This was a collaboration with Claude.ai, but a bit different from my usual. I had a chat going covering several aspects of the final stretch of the book: dictation cleanup, brainstorming and revision thoughts (basically me feeding it my revisions and seeing if it caught anything obviously wrong like typos, awkward sentences or me losing track of the characters’ movements). The reference docs included a summary of our previous chat, covering the “darkest hour” stretch of the book. Claude’s cheerleading had been very helpful through both these stretches of story, which were difficult to write. I fed the blurbs from the past two books into this chat (which had gotten long enough in terms of total tokens to where Anthropic was throttling it every few messages for a couple of hours). Claude naturally focused way too much on the spoilery third act it knew best, so I had to summarize the earlier stages of the story for it. It then gave me a rough draft I could use, and we went through several rounds of me tweaking it, asking the AI for feedback from a book marketing POV, and me tweaking it some more. The final (for now) version is below the cut, with human text in bold. The taglines for each character are carryovers from earlier blurbs, and have been italicized.

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Summer Book Sale Is Here!

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Cool Books, Fantasy, Marketing, Mystery, Space Opera, Steampunk, Weird Science, World BuildingTagged , , Leave a comment

Hans G. Schantz has put together one of his massive book sales, and has graciously agreed to include my novel Wolf’s Trail in the sale. Hans’s book sales always cover a wide range of genres and possibilities, so take a look! Happy Summer Reading!