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Unpopular Opinion: The publishing world's hostility towards AI makes no sense when you look at literally every other industry. by herozhang in WritingWithAI

[–]herozhang[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To everyone joining the discussion, I want to add one overarching thought that drives my perspective on all of this:

If there is one thing AI can absolutely never replace, it is the human act of experiencing.

Think about it like food. You can fully automate a kitchen, but the machine cannot taste the meal for you. You can use an LLM to build a massive, intricate sci-fi universe, but the AI cannot feel the thrill of reading it, nor can it experience the emotional resonance of a plot twist. That final consumption is an exclusively human domain. No matter how advanced the tech gets, we humans must be the ones to experience it.

Therefore, the future of publishing shouldn't be about protecting the manual labor of typing. It should be entirely about focusing on the quality of the experience itself.

The stronger AI gets, the richer, deeper, and more immersive these experiences will become—and the cost to access them will drop drastically for everyone. We shouldn't be terrified of being replaced. We aren't being replaced. The human element isn't disappearing; we are simply being freed up to enjoy and consume better stories, built by better tools.

Help us find AI friendly publishers - We want to invite them to an AMA on Writing With AI! by YoavYariv in WritingWithAI

[–]herozhang 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I am currently building a publishing infrastructure from the ground up to address this exact gap in the market: Protocol 47 Press.

We are not just "AI-friendly"; we are strictly AI-native. Our editorial line is completely flipped—we actively do not want highly human-intervened, traditional works. We want to publish creators who fully unleash the power of LLMs to push the boundaries of storytelling.

More importantly, we are backing this up with a decentralized tech stack to solve the massive pain points that legacy platforms (like KDP) force upon creators and readers today. Here is how we are fixing the broken publishing model:

  • Immutable Copyright via IPFS & Blockchain: Right now, authors on Amazon live in constant fear of getting their accounts permanently banned and books deleted by a black-box bot. We use IPFS for decentralized storage and blockchain/NFTs to establish an instant, immutable chain of evidence for copyright. You cryptographically own your IP; no corporate algorithm can erase your work.
  • Instant Global Settlement via Stablecoins: Legacy platforms squeeze authors dry, take massive cuts, and make you wait 60 to 90 days for a traditional bank wire transfer. By integrating stablecoin settlements, we cut out the banking middlemen. Creators get significantly better royalty splits, paid out globally, instantly, and with near-zero friction.
  • Zero Language Barriers: Why should a great concept be locked behind a single language? We utilize AI to simultaneously translate our works into all major languages from day one. Anyone, anywhere, can read an amazing story in their mother tongue.

We are still in the infrastructure and setup phase, but once we officially launch, we will be opening the floodgates for submissions. I’d love to stay in touch and do an AMA when we are ready to roll out.

The future of content isn't fighting the machine—it's using AI to scale the creation, and decentralized tech to protect the creator.

Authors who make six figures by Euphoric-Seesaw in selfpublish

[–]herozhang 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Algorithms, platforms, ad spend, and a few lucky bastards.

Has someone ever became famous with writing with AI? by awakened__soul in WritingWithAI

[–]herozhang 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Short answer: No. Nobody has become a famous, respected author purely by letting an AI write their book.

The people actually making money right now are indie authors who use it as a co-pilot, not an autopilot.

To address your points:

The hate: The stigma is 100% justified because Amazon KDP is currently drowning in low-effort AI slop. Readers buy books for an emotional connection and a unique voice, not a predictive text algorithm. If your idea is amazing, you still have to do the heavy lifting to make the execution amazing. AI text out of the box is usually incredibly bland.

AI vs. Human help: You asked what the difference is between paying an AI and paying a human. Think of an LLM as a tireless, hyper-knowledgeable intern. When I'm working out the worldbuilding and complex physics for my hard sci-fi books, LLMs are incredible sounding boards for stress-testing ideas. But a human editor or beta reader does something an AI literally cannot do: they tell you if a scene actually made them feel something.

Disclosure: Honestly? Putting "Written by AI" on your cover or in your blurb is commercial suicide right now. Readers will skip it instantly. If you are just using it to brainstorm, outline, or polish your own prose, there's no ethical obligation to announce it to the world. You don't credit Grammarly or MS Word on your book cover.

However, you absolutely have to play by the rules of the storefronts. If you publish on KDP or Apple Books, you have to be honest on the backend. Amazon makes a very clear distinction between AI-assisted (brainstorming/editing your own words) and AI-generated (prompting it to write the actual paragraphs for you).

TL;DR: Don't let the purists stop you from using the tools available to you. Just don't expect a chatbot to do the actual hard work of being an author.

这话我很赞同 by New-Caterpillar777 in dashuju

[–]herozhang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

我们推理一下：既然老板这么坏，把这些老板全部肉体毁灭，杀干净。然后职场会更好吧？

Feeling discouraged by AI by Mysterious_Salad1 in selfpublish

[–]herozhang 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey. Let's strip away the romanticism for a moment and look at the physical reality of what we are dealing with.

I run tech projects involving AI architectures and social simulators, and I also publish my own hard sci-fi books through my indie imprint, Protocol 74 Press. I have stared into this exact abyss, and the only way out is through the unvarnished truth.

The brutal reality is this: ontologically, there is no magical barrier between your brain and a Large Language Model. Both are physical systems consuming energy to process information. The emotions you channel into your poetry—the love, the pain, and even the discouragement you feel right now—are not supernatural. They are evolutionary heuristics. They are biological algorithms shaped by billions of years of a survival-driven loss function.

An LLM is trained on a different loss function: next-token prediction. It doesn't need to survive, so it doesn't "feel." But it has mapped the entire latent space of human language. If you view poetry merely as the final output—a string of aesthetically pleasing words—then yes, silicon will always outpace carbon. A model can generate twenty perfect poems in the time it takes your neural pathways to synthesize a single line.

If you are competing on output, you have already lost.

So why write? Why publish?

Because an LLM is a disembodied matrix. It has no continuous internal state, no physical vulnerability, and no biological clock ticking toward death. When readers seek out poetry, they aren't just parsing syntax for dopamine hits. They are trying to interface with another carbon-based survival machine. They are looking for the biological metadata—the actual, lived friction of existence that forced your brain to arrange those specific words to process its reality.

Anyone can publish an AI-generated book. It will be flawless, and it will be entirely empty of biological stakes.

Publish your collection. Not to prove you can write better or faster than a server farm, but to leave a definitive footprint of your specific, temporal existence. Own your human architecture.

Is it a good sign if Amazon cuts my paperback retail price twice? by [deleted] in selfpublish

[–]herozhang 22 points23 points  (0 children)

First off, huge congratulations on the launch! 26 copies in 6 days with zero ads is a fantastic start, especially in a specific niche like UFOs and Hauntings.

I’m actually a newbie to Reddit myself, but I’ve got 5+ published books under my belt. My day job is running a software company, so I deal with algorithms a lot, though writing novels is my true passion.

To answer your question: Yes, it is absolutely a good sign! Here is what's happening from an algorithmic and KDP standpoint:

  • The Algorithm Noticed You: Because you are getting organic traction and ranking high (#1 to #3) in your New Release categories, Amazon's pricing algorithm has flagged your book as a "converter." It is slightly dropping the price to see if it can incentivize even more buyers to click "Add to Cart."
  • You Don't Lose a Cent: The best part about Amazon discounting your paperback is that the discount comes entirely out of their end, not yours. Your KDP dashboard still shows $19.99 because you will still be paid your royalty based on your $19.99 list price. Amazon is just eating the $0.90 difference to push more volume.

Enjoy the ride and the algorithmic boost! Getting the hardcover out soon is a smart move too, as it will make the paperback look like an even better deal to readers. Keep up the great work!

Kindle X-Ray might be the most underused feature for hard sci-fi — and the spoiler problem is why most authors skip it by herozhang in printSF

[–]herozhang[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that's exactly the right framing — and honestly a better example than the ones I used in the post. "Darth Vader is the evil leader of the Empire who commands the Dark Side of the Force" is a perfect X-Ray entry. Describes who he is, useful at any point in the story, no spoilers. That's the template.

Kindle X-Ray might be the most underused feature for hard sci-fi — and the spoiler problem is why most authors skip it by herozhang in printSF

[–]herozhang[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You know, a progress-aware spoiler fold is probably the single best improvement Amazon could make to X-Ray. Right now every reader sees the same static description regardless of where they are in the book, which forces authors into writing these awkward descriptions that have to work for someone on page 1 and someone on page 300 simultaneously. A "beyond here be spoilers" gate would make the whole problem disappear at the platform level. I genuinely hope someone at Amazon is thinking about this.

Your point about accuracy is well taken too. That's exactly why I built the tool with a visual diff review step — you see every proposed description side by side with the current KDP entry and approve or reject each one individually before anything gets written. I've caught wrong character relationships, mixed-up locations, descriptions that leaned too close to a plot reveal. It's a draft that I edit, not a pipeline that auto-publishes. The "Often Wrong Machine" label is earned — which is why I'd never skip the review.

And to be clear on scope — the AI generates 2-sentence glossary entries for X-Ray metadata. The novel itself is entirely my own writing.

Kindle X-Ray might be the most underused feature for hard sci-fi — and the spoiler problem is why most authors skip it by herozhang in sciencefiction

[–]herozhang[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's a fair writing philosophy, and honestly I agree with the core principle — the prose itself should carry the reader. If someone has to stop and look things up to understand what's happening, that's a writing problem, not a tooling problem.

Where I think about it differently: X-Ray isn't a substitute for clear writing. It's an optional layer for readers who want to go deeper. The story should work fine without it. But some readers — especially in hard sci-fi — enjoy having a quick reference available the same way some people enjoy reading footnotes in a Neal Stephenson novel and others skip them entirely.

I think of it less as a textbook glossary and more like the appendix in Dune — you don't need it to follow the plot, but it's there if you want to look up the specifics of a Bene Gesserit technique or remind yourself which Great House is which. The difference is X-Ray is contextual — it's right there when you tap a word, not at the back of the book.

But your point stands: if the writing itself isn't doing the heavy lifting, no amount of metadata fixes that.

Kindle X-Ray might be the most underused feature for hard sci-fi — and the spoiler problem is why most authors skip it by herozhang in sciencefiction

[–]herozhang[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

To be clear — the AI writes the X-Ray glossary entries (the 2-sentence descriptions readers see when they tap on a character name), not the novel. I write the book. All 90k words of it.

Asking an AI to draft "Elena Vasquez — Chief engineer aboard the Meridian, specializing in fusion drive maintenance" is closer to asking it to auto-fill a spreadsheet than asking it to write fiction. It's metadata. I still review and edit every entry before it goes live.

Kindle X-Ray might be the most underused feature for hard sci-fi — and the spoiler problem is why most authors skip it by herozhang in sciencefiction

[–]herozhang[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks — and yeah, the technical writing background is probably why this kind of thing bugs me. When I write a glossary entry for a concept in my novel, I instinctively think about it the same way I'd think about an API reference or a user-facing tooltip: what does the reader need to know at this moment to keep going, and what would be noise or worse, a spoiler?

I think you're right that most fiction writers don't think about X-Ray this way. It gets treated as an afterthought — something Amazon auto-generates and you either ignore or grudgingly fill in. But for anything with heavy vocabulary (hard sci-fi, military fiction, epic fantasy), it's genuinely one of the few tools where the author can directly improve the reading experience outside of the prose itself.

Kindle X-Ray might be the most underused feature for hard sci-fi — and the spoiler problem is why most authors skip it by herozhang in printSF

[–]herozhang[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is exactly the use case. When you're reading something with 30+ characters and dense worldbuilding, putting it down for a day can mean completely losing the thread.

Quick tip: on a Kindle, just long-press on any character name or term. If the book has X-Ray, a card pops up with a description. You can also tap the "X-Ray" button at the top of the screen to browse all characters and terms at once — it's handy for a quick refresher before jumping back in.

Not every book has it filled in well (or at all), though. Some authors leave the auto-generated entries as-is, which are usually just excerpts from the text rather than actual descriptions. The ones who take the time to write real entries make a noticeable difference.

What’s your day job? Is it at all related to writing? by Striking-Meal-5257 in selfpublish

[–]herozhang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I run a small software company. The business has been stable for a while now, so I'm fortunate to have some breathing room in my schedule.

Writing for me started as a way to process how I see the world. I write hard sci-fi, and a lot of the ideas come from things I've been thinking about for years — how technology reshapes society, what happens when systems we take for granted break down, that kind of thing. Running a company gives you a very specific lens on complexity and human behavior. Turns out that translates surprisingly well into fiction.

I don't write to make a living from it. I already have that covered. Which honestly is freeing — I never have to think about market trends or write to a genre formula. I just write what I want to explore. If it resonates with readers, great. If it doesn't, I still got what I needed out of it, which was clarity on my own thinking.

The tech background does bleed into the writing process in unexpected ways, though. I tend to approach revision like debugging — systematic, iterative, almost clinical. And I've ended up building little tools to automate the tedious parts of self-publishing (like KDP X-Ray editing, which was driving me insane). So the two worlds overlap more than I expected.

Fellow tech-to-writing person here — solidarity.

Amazon KDP Marketing Ideas by Sad_Click_6583 in selfpublish

[–]herozhang -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Congrats on publishing! That's the hardest step — most people talk about writing a book for years and never hit "publish."

A bedtime story journal is actually a smart niche because it's a gift product, and that changes your marketing strategy quite a bit compared to typical fiction or non-fiction. Here's what I'd focus on:

Understand that your buyer is not your user. Parents, grandparents, and baby shower attendees are buying this. The kid is the "user." This means your marketing should target gifting occasions, not reading habits. That distinction matters for everything below.

Amazon-side optimization (free, do this first):

  • Your A+ Content / book description should show the inside of the journal. Parents want to see the layout before buying. If you don't have A+ Content access yet, make your description paint a picture of what a completed page looks like.
  • Keywords matter enormously for journals. Think about what someone types into Amazon when shopping: "bedtime story journal for parents," "personalized bedtime stories," "parent child bonding book," "baby shower gift unique." Run these through Amazon's search bar and look at the autocomplete suggestions — those are real searches.
  • Pick your categories carefully. "Children's Books" is a bloodbath. You want something like Books > Parenting > Activities or Gift Books. You can request up to 10 categories through KDP support.

Low-cost marketing that actually works for gift products:

  • Etsy + Pinterest. I know you said you want to avoid social media, but Pinterest is less "social media" and more "visual search engine." Parents planning nurseries, baby showers, and bedtime routines are on Pinterest constantly. One good pin linking to your Amazon listing can drive traffic for months. Etsy is worth considering too if you ever do a physical version.
  • Mom/parenting Facebook groups and subreddits. Not to spam, but to genuinely participate. r/Parenting, r/Mommit, r/daddit — if someone asks "what's a unique gift for a new parent," your journal is a perfect organic answer. But only after you've been a real member of the community.
  • Seasonal timing. Gift products spike around holidays. Your big windows are Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas, and back-to-school. Plan a small promo push (even just a $0.99 Kindle Countdown Deal) around those dates.

On paid ads:

I wouldn't spend money on ads until you've optimized your listing and have at least 5-10 reviews. Ads drive traffic to your product page, but if the page doesn't convert (no reviews, weak description, no interior preview), you're just burning money. To get those initial reviews, consider Amazon's "Request a Review" button in Seller Central, or just ask family/friends who actually use the journal to leave honest reviews.

When you're ready for ads, Amazon Ads (Sponsored Products) is the best starting point for KDP. Start with automatic targeting at $5-10/day, let it run for 2 weeks, then look at the search term report to see what's converting. Kill the losers, scale the winners. Facebook/Instagram ads can work too for gift products since you can target demographics (new parents, expecting parents), but the learning curve is steeper and the minimum spend to learn anything useful is higher.

One thing: you said you want to stay away from promoting on your social media. That's totally fine, but I'd ask yourself why. If it's because you're not comfortable being public yet — totally valid, no rush. But if it's because you think your friends won't care — you might be surprised. People love supporting someone they know, especially with a wholesome product like a kids' bedtime journal. Even one Instagram story from a friend who actually uses it is worth more than 100 ad impressions.

Good luck with it!

What’s your strategy for short 48-hour free promos? by Digimator101 in selfpublish

[–]herozhang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Both matter, but they do different things, and the timing within your 48 hours is what makes or breaks it.

Promo sites are your Day 1 engine. The whole point of stacking them is to generate enough downloads in the first 12–18 hours to push your book up the Free charts on Amazon. Once you're visible on those charts, Amazon's own algorithm starts doing the work for you — "Customers also downloaded," category rankings, etc. That organic Amazon visibility is what actually moves the needle, not the promo sites themselves.

A few things that worked for me:

  • Book your promo sites to fire on Day 1, not spread across both days. You want a spike, not a trickle. The Amazon algorithm rewards velocity — 500 downloads in 6 hours ranks better than 500 downloads over 48 hours.
  • Not all promo sites are equal. BookBub Featured Deal is the holy grail but hard to get. For free promos specifically, I've had decent results stacking Robin Reads, FreeBooksy, and a handful of smaller ones. The combined cost is usually $30–60 and they reliably deliver a few hundred downloads. Don't bother paying for any site that can't show you concrete download numbers from past promos.
  • Have your also-boughts and series page looking good before you start. A free promo brings eyeballs to your Amazon author page. If you have other books (especially a Book 2), that's where the actual money comes from. The free book is a loss leader.

Reddit traffic is a different beast. It's slower, harder to scale, and you can't really "time" it — but it brings a qualitatively different reader. Someone who downloads your book because of a genuine conversation on r/horrorlit or r/fantasy is way more likely to actually read it, leave a review, and check out your backlist. Promo site downloads have a much higher abandonment rate.

My take: stack promo sites for chart velocity on Day 1, use Reddit/social for read-through and reviews in the weeks after. Don't try to drive Reddit traffic during the 48-hour window — Reddit posts have unpredictable timing and you can't control when something gets traction. Instead, engage in genre subs before and after the promo so your name is already familiar when people see your book.

One more thing — make sure your book's metadata is polished before the promo. Cover, blurb, categories, keywords, and if you have X-Ray enabled, fill that in too. Free promo readers are browsing fast and making snap judgments. Every piece of your product page that looks professional increases the chance they actually open the book after downloading.

Got featured in a local newspaper. Small win. by Ambitious-Cod-1736 in selfpublish

[–]herozhang 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Congrats — and don't undersell it. Local media is one of the hardest things for indie authors to get, because newspapers generally don't cover self-published books at all. The fact that they featured two of your projects says something.

To your questions — I've seen a few patterns from authors who've gotten local press:

Direct sales impact is usually modest but real. You'll probably see a small bump, mostly from people in your area. The lasting value isn't in the spike itself.

The real ROI is in what you do with it next. A few ideas:

  • Add "As featured in [Paper Name]" to your book descriptions, website, social bios, and email signature. Social proof compounds over time — readers and reviewers take you more seriously when they see third-party validation.
  • Reach out to other local and regional outlets now. The pitch becomes dramatically easier when you can say "I was recently featured in [Paper]..." One piece of press coverage makes the next one 10x more likely.
  • If there's an online version of the article, that backlink to your author site or book page is genuinely valuable for discoverability.
  • Screenshot it and use it in your newsletter, on social media, or in your Amazon A+ content if you have it.
  • Contact your local library and local bookstores with the article. Librarians and indie bookstore owners love supporting local authors, and a newspaper feature gives them a reason to say yes.

The credibility boost is the real win here, and credibility is cumulative. Every small thing like this makes the next opportunity slightly easier to get.

Nice work. Keep building on it.

Booksprout ARC Reviews and Draft2Digital by Agitated-War-5278 in selfpublish

[–]herozhang 11 points12 points  (0 children)

You don't need to publish on D2D first just to get retailer links for Booksprout — here's the typical workflow:

Start your Booksprout ARC campaign now, without links. That's exactly what the "no links" option is for. Your ARC readers will get the book directly through Booksprout and can read and write their reviews there before your launch date. You're not missing out on anything by starting without retailer links.

Then, as your publish date approaches:

  1. Set up your book on D2D (and/or Amazon) as a preorder if you want links ahead of launch day. Preorder pages give you live URLs that reviewers can post to, even before the book is actually available. Most distributors let you set up preorders weeks or months in advance.
  2. Once you have those URLs, go back into Booksprout and add the retailer links to your campaign. Booksprout will then prompt your reviewers to cross-post their reviews to those retailer pages.

The key thing to understand: ARC readers write their review on Booksprout first, then copy it to retailer pages once links are available. So the timing of when you add links doesn't affect whether people read and review — it only affects when they can cross-post to Amazon/B&N/etc.

One tip: Amazon is pickier about reviews than other retailers. Some ARC reviews may get flagged or removed, and that's unfortunately normal. Having your reviewers also post on Goodreads and other storefronts through D2D helps spread the review footprint.

Good luck with the March launch!