Before Juneteenth, I launched a superhero identity quiz.

I had one basic question: would complete strangers take it?

I did not know that question was about to eat my entire summer.

It Started With a Quiz

Back in May, I wrote about The Quiz That Almost Broke Me (And Why I Built It Anyway).

The quiz was built around three superhero identities in my storyworld. At the time, this was an experiment:

• Would cold readers take it?

• Would the archetypes make sense?

• Would people give me their email addresses?

• Could Pinterest ads bring complete strangers into my storyworld?

• Could this work better than the traditional author welcome funnel I’d used before?

So I launched it, watched, tweaked, and questioned everything, including having an existential crisis about the existence of quiz funnels in the first place.

You know. Normal neurotic author stuff. 😂

Then the Experiment Started Answering Me

People took the quiz. A lot of people.

Some joined my email list, opened my emails, clicked, and someone even bought something after entering through the quiz funnel, which I wasn’t expecting this early.

Then I did something that felt counterintuitive: I stopped requiring an email address to get the quiz result.

I wrote about that experiment in June in I Stopped Optimizing for Email Subscribers.

Naturally, fewer people gave me their email addresses. But I realized I was measuring the quiz too narrowly.

Even when someone doesn’t opt in, they still spent several minutes interacting with my storyworld, told me which identities appeal to them, what kinds of stories they’re drawn toward, and something about how they see themselves.

The quiz wasn’t just an email acquisition tool anymore.

It was audience research, reader segmentation, storyworld discovery, and lead generation.

And then it created another problem.

Okay. They’re Here. Now What?

People weren’t just taking the quiz.

They were clicking deeper into my website.

And suddenly I had to look at my website through the eyes of someone who knew absolutely nothing about me.

Great! Now what? Ummm... yes, my string of four-letter words…

My acquisition experiment had exposed an information architecture problem.

Somehow AI Got Mixed Up in All of This

At the same time, I’d gone pretty far down my AI discoverability rabbit hole.

I’d already been writing about GEO. Then came What My Grad School Cataloging Class Taught Me About AI Discoverability, followed by Can AI Find, Understand, and Recommend Your Author Website?

That last question sent me directly into my own website.

• Could AI understand who I was?

• Could it understand my current storyworld project?

• Could it figure out where a new reader should start?

The answer was basically: kinda-ish. 😂 Groan…

So I started rebuilding.

I created a real Start Here page. I strengthened my storyworld hub. I built out character, lore, setting, and reading-order pages. I reorganized navigation. I started making the relationships between my stories much more explicit.

At one point I even wrote I Had to Make My Author Website Uglier because making some of this information machine-readable required me to rethink how I’d designed my pages.

But somewhere in all of that work, I realized something.

The humans and the machines needed many of the same things.

Clear names, relationships, descriptions, and pathways. Answers to obvious questions.

I’d started working on information architecture because I wanted AI systems to understand and recommend my fiction. Meanwhile, my quiz was sending actual humans into the same architecture.

My two summer rabbit holes had collided.

Then Google Sent Me a Receipt

Google Analytics sent me its report for July 30 through August 26.

And that’s when I finally stopped.

My superhero quiz had received 2,290 views from 2,026 active users.

I looked farther down the report at some of the pages I’d built as part of my new information architecture.

• The Start Here page had 80 views.

• The Books Out of Print page had 63 views.

• The Storyworld hub had 56 views.

Those aren’t enormous numbers. But that’s not really what caught my attention. Those pathways didn’t exist in this form before this summer. Now, I’m not claiming less than 100 views on each new page as some gigantic internet achievement.

It isn’t.

What matters to me is that it wasn’t there before. And now somebody is using it.

I Think I Finally Understand What Happened This Summer

I started this summer experimenting with a quiz funnel but really spent it following my readers.

The quiz brought strangers in, and their behavior showed me what I needed to understand about them. But their clicks exposed weaknesses in my website. Those weaknesses pushed me toward better information architecture.

My AI discoverability research gave me another reason to build that architecture. And now the analytics are starting to show people moving through pieces of the ecosystem I built.

I don’t know yet whether this reader journey is better than the one I had before.

That’s the part I want to be careful about. I have evidence that people are entering and moving through pieces of it. But now my serial is starting again, and I want to see whether these new readers actually engage with my fiction and eventually buy.

Because lead generation isn’t the finish line.

And maybe that’s the biggest thing this summer’s experiment gave me.

I finally have enough evidence to ask a different question.

I know I can bring new people into my ecosystem. Now I’m trying to figure out which lever I pull next.

• Do I build a product-based quiz designed around purchasing instead of identity?

• Do I focus on increasing average order value?

• Do I concentrate on moving these new readers deeper into my product funnel?

• Or is there another bottleneck I haven’t seen yet?

I don’t know.

That’s the next experiment.

But it’s a very different experiment from the one I started this summer.

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In all the latest discussions about AI in the fiction community, something occurred to me:

A fiction author can refuse to use generative AI to write a single word of their novel and still have their author business profoundly affected by AI.

Our current AI conversation is obsessively focused on AI tools.

Should authors use AI to write books? Make images? Narrate audiobooks? What about copyright? Ethics? Creativity?

Those conversations matter.

But I’ve realized something:

You don’t have to USE AI for AI to profoundly CHANGE your author business.

Search and discoverability are changing whether authors use AI tools or not. Businesses, marketers, SEO companies, and Google itself are already trying to figure out what this means for websites, content, traffic, and customer discovery.

And over the last few months, I’ve become both terrified and fascinated by what those changes could mean specifically for fiction authors.

AI is changing how our books are discovered.

Industry-wide, I think we need to understand what that means.

Here are ten changes I think we should ALL be paying attention to.

1. Search Engines Are Becoming Answer Engines

Traditional search gave us a list of links. Increasingly, AI search can give the user an answer.

Someone can ask a complicated question, receive a synthesized response, ask a follow-up question, and potentially make a decision without conducting ten separate searches.

For fiction authors, that means a future reader may not simply search:

fantasy books

They might ask:

What fantasy series should I read if I want a morally complicated heroine over 40, a slow-burn romance, and a detailed magical world?

That’s a very different discovery environment. Searches with more than 6 words or full sentences are a huge thing now.

2. Ranking Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Getting the Click

If Google can answer more questions directly in search, ranking well doesn’t necessarily produce the same website traffic it once did. That doesn’t mean websites, SEO, or keywords are dead. In fact, I suspect the language we use to describe our fiction may become even more important.

Fiction authors have traditionally thought about search in broad categories like urban fantasy, romance, or science fiction. Those terms still matter. But conversational search gives readers the ability to get much more specific.

A reader might search for a genre, but they might also ask for “fantasy about female rage”, “romance featuring women starting over after 40”, or “science fiction about artificial intelligence and grief.”

That means we may need to think beyond ranking for genre alone and make sure our websites clearly communicate our stories’ themes, tropes, characters, conflicts, settings, and other characteristics readers might actually search for.

Visibility and traffic are no longer necessarily the same thing. And for fiction authors, visibility may increasingly mean making sure search and AI systems understand enough about our stories to match them with the right reader.

3. Being Findable Isn’t Enough

An AI system might find an author’s website and still have very little understanding of the fiction and might not choose to recommend that author if it doesn’t have strong signals. Authors might think their website answers the right questions (and maybe a human can understand), but AI machines need direct and specific context in an answerable way, like:

• What genre does this author write?

• What are the major series?

• Which book comes first?

• What are the stories about?

• Who are the major characters?

• What kind of reader would enjoy them?

Those questions require actual information, and I’ve learned the hard way that a website can exist without answering them particularly well for AI.

4. Generic Content Is Becoming Easier to Replace

Google is now explicitly encouraging website owners to create unique, non-commodity content based on original knowledge and first-hand experience.

That’s important in an environment where AI can generate or summarize generic information almost instantly.

Pre-2026, a fiction author might write:

“10 Fascinating Facts About Vampires”

That’s useful topical content, but thousands of websites can provide similar information. Now AI can summarize it easily too.

But what about:

“Why Vampires Can’t Cross the Mississippi River in the Nightborn Universe”

Now we have something different.

The post connects a recognizable search topic (vampires) with information unique to that author’s fictional world.

AI can learn about vampires from thousands of sources. But only the author can authoritatively explain why vampires behave a particular way inside the Nightborn Universe.

That makes me wonder if the opportunity for fiction authors isn’t to abandon traditional SEO topics, but to connect those recognizable search topics with our own original fictional knowledge.

Which raises the bigger question:

What information does a fiction author possess that isn’t generic?

5. Our Storyworlds May Be Our Proprietary Knowledge

This is my current working hypothesis. Fiction authors are the primary sources for our own intellectual property.

We know our characters, relationships, locations, lore, chronology, magic systems, technology, organizations, themes, creative decisions, and the research behind the fiction.

That’s information competitors can’t simply know better than we do.

And I suspect intentionally putting some of that knowledge on the open web may become increasingly useful for helping search and AI systems understand our fiction.

That does not necessarily mean publishing our entire novels or body of work online.

BUT it means documenting enough of the world surrounding the novels to make the fiction understandable and potentially easier to recommend.

6. Depth May Matter More Than Content Volume

This has been my playground lately. I’m thinking the goal is fast becoming having a smaller, interconnected body of useful information around the fictional world’s IP.

A series hub connects to its books. Books connect to characters. Characters connect to relationships. The storyworld connects to its lore. A reading order explains how everything fits together.

Now the website isn’t simply a collection of posts. It’s becoming a knowledge infrastructure.

7. The Traditional Author Website May Need to Evolve

For years, many author websites have essentially functioned as beautiful calling cards.

It was basic branding, and the mindset was things like:

• Here are my books and my bio.

• Hey! Join my newsletter.

• Buy something at so-and-so retailer.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

But a visual website designed primarily for humans may not explicitly communicate enough information for an AI system trying to understand the author’s body of work or knowledge infrastructure.

That’s why I’m increasingly interested in things like Start Here pages, series hubs, reading orders, character pages, FAQs, clear headings, internal links, and good old-fashioned readable text over heavy images (or a happy mix of both).

8. We May Need Both Knowledge Pages and Experience Pages

This is the distinction I accidentally stumbled into while working on making my website AI-friendly.

Some pages primarily help people experience the fiction. They’re image-heavy, beautiful, atmospheric, interactive, and emotional. They’re designed to make a human want to click, explore, subscribe, or buy.

Other pages primarily help someone (human or AI) understand the fiction. What is this series? Who is this character? Where should I start? What’s the reading order? How are these things connected?

In my experimenting, I realized I was creating Experience Pages (for humans) versus Knowledge Pages (for AI Machines). I’ve learned that these AI knowledge pages can be “ugly” or more text-based.

I think we may need to make sure the knowledge layer exists alongside the experience so trying to make things great for humans and AI discoverability. Personally, I’m still grappling with my mix.

9. Recommendation May Become More Important Than Ranking

This may be the biggest shift of all.

There’s a difference between:

“Who is this author?”

and:

“What author should I read if I want this particular kind of story?”

The first requires identification. The second requires understanding and matching.

That’s why I’ve started thinking about AI visibility in three stages:

Findable → Understandable → Recommendable

I don’t know yet exactly what makes an author reliably recommendable across AI systems.

But I’m increasingly convinced that giving those systems clear information about the fiction is a sensible place to start.

10. We May Need Different Measures of Visibility

Website traffic, search rankings, and sales still matter. But the measurement conversation is expanding.

Businesses are beginning to track things like visibility inside AI answers, citations, brand mentions, qualified traffic, conversions, and how accurately AI systems describe them.

That makes me wonder what fiction authors will eventually need to measure.

• Can AI find the author?

• Does it understand what they write?

• Does it correctly identify their books and series?

• Can it explain where a new reader should start?

• Can it match the fiction with an appropriate reader request?

And eventually:

Does it recommend the author?

This Is the AI Conversation I Think Fiction Authors Are Missing

I’m not suggesting we stop talking about AI-generated books, copyright, ethics, images, or narration (well, maybe I am 😂😉)

But AI isn’t ONLY changing creation. It’s changing the discovery of our books.

And businesses outside publishing are already taking that seriously.

I don’t know exactly where all of this is going. Some of what I’m exploring is established SEO practice. Some is emerging AEO/GEO practice. And some of it (especially how this applies specifically to fictional IP) is my own working hypothesis that I’m actively testing.

But I don’t want to wait until all the rules are settled before I start paying attention.

So I’m experimenting.

And right now, one question is driving most of that experimentation:

If a reader asks an AI system for exactly the kind of fiction I create, does that system know enough about my work to consider recommending it?

I think that’s a question worth asking.

Want to Dig Deeper?

A few of the resources that have been shaping my thinking:

• Google Search Central: Google’s current guidance about succeeding in AI-powered search and creating useful, original, non-commodity content.

• Entrepreneur: shared this one with me. “How Google Is Rewriting Search — and What Entrepreneurs Must Do Before Their Competitors Do.” This was particularly useful for thinking about the shift from traditional search traffic toward answer-based discovery.

• Neil Patel / NP Digital: Research and articles on AI Overviews, zero-click search, changing click-through rates, and what those shifts may mean for businesses dependent on organic search. This one on AEO is particularly intriguing.

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So I’ve spent the last few weeks really breaking down AEO, SEO, and GEO, and trying to determine what that looks like specifically for author websites. I had some ideas, and I ran my prompt to get a good feel for where I needed to improve. Take a look at my post “Can AI Find, Understand, and Recommend Your Author Website?” to catch up.

My prompt suggested that I needed a foundation for my storyworlds. Honestly, it suggested something simple, and I thought… easy.

Four days later, I finally got it finished, and the journey had some serious twists and turns.

The short version is that the page a reader admires, and the page AI can actually read, turned out to be two different pages on my site.

The First Twist Made Me Angry

I build my landing pages in Canvify. I like them. They look good. Layered images, clean type, everything sitting exactly where I placed it. I had a whole vision for what my Start Here page was going to look like.

Then I looked at what a machine actually sees when it visits a page like that.

Almost nothing.

The meaning was living inside the design. Whatever text sat underneath was thin and vague, because the images were doing the real work. A person landing on that page understood it in two seconds. AI reading the page as text found a few decorative fragments and no usable information at all. So the prettiest page I could build would also be the least readable one to AI.

I did not take that well. What I built instead is plainer, more rudimentary, and much more functional. Basically, headings, sentences, and a few images. It looks less impressive than what I had in my head.

The Second Twist Is That I Almost Skipped It

I had never built a Start Here page. I have watched other authors do it for years and waved it off. Who doesn’t already know this?

I was in my own head. That is the honest answer.

I also think the volume retailer model taught me not to need one. Under volume, sorting readers was the retailer's job with the also-boughts. The store decided who I was and pointed people toward the next thing. My site only had to be my author calling card.

Then I started running a quiz funnel and driving lots of real cold traffic to my author site. Cold traffic has no idea who I am. It has not read a blurb, it did not arrive from a category page, and it has nothing to compare me to.

And the Start Here page is already getting views, which I did not expect this fast.

That page sits right where acquisition meets conversion. Under the volume model, I never had to think about that, because I never really owned that part of the journey.

The Structure Underneath

Once I stripped out the design, a simple order showed up:

1. ORIENT. Who are you and what do you create?

2. CHOOSE. Give the reader the major ways into the fiction.

3. PARTICIPATE. Give the reader an identity or interactive doorway to sign up.

4. EXPLORE. Show the reader other recommended entrances.

Every one of those has to exist as readable text for AI. That was the whole lesson.

I think a Start Here page is going to be a mainstay for fiction authors who are moving towards an IP-based Depth Publishing model.

Still Sitting With This

I would love the pretty version back.

But for the moment, AI needs to be able to parse my text so it can find, understand, and recommend my storyworlds. The things we gotta do for AI today are very different.

Well, that’s my first update on this journey.

Any thoughts on what needs to be included on a Start Here page, or on switching your author website over to a storyworld depth model?

I’m currently intrigued with this. Let me know whether or not you used the prompt on your website.

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If you just finished reading my post about AI discoverability and storyworld information architecture, below is the prompt I used to evaluate my own website.

My Thought Process

Before I start redesigning anything, I wanted to understand where my website already provides strong context, and where it leaves readers (and AI) with unanswered questions.

The results surprised me.

Instead of looking at my website as a collection of pages, it helped me see it as the information architecture of my storyworld.

Read more

We’ve spent years debating whether authors should use AI. But the more I research this space, the more I think we’ve been focused on the wrong disruption.

The biggest disruption isn’t AI helping authors write.

It’s AI changing how readers discover books.

Over the last few weeks on Substack, much of the conversation has centered on AI tools, detection, and transparency. I understand why. Questions about authenticity and trust matter.

But I don’t think they’re the only questions fiction authors should be asking.

AI discoverability doesn’t care whether you’re pro-AI or anti-AI. It cares whether it has enough clear, trustworthy information to understand and recommend your work.

As AI becomes another layer between readers and the books they’re looking for, I’ve found myself asking a different question:

Can AI actually find, understand, and recommend my work?

Because the near future isn’t simply about whether AI helped write a novel.

It’s whether AI understands my storyworld well enough to introduce it to the right readers.

If AI can’t confidently understand who I am, what I write, who my books are for, where readers should begin, or how my stories connect...

...how can it confidently recommend my work?

For most fiction authors, our websites are one of the primary places where AI systems learn about us.

That realization sent me down a rabbit hole that completely changed how I think about author websites.

• What if I’ve been thinking about them all wrong?

• What if my author website isn’t simply a place to sell books...

• What if it’s becoming the information architecture of my storyworld?

This question builds on something I’ve been exploring over the past few months. In ‘What My Grad School Cataloging Class Taught Me About AI Discoverability,’ I argued that fiction authors may need to think more like information architects.

Today, I want to take that idea one step further.

From Brand Positioning to Storyworld Organization

My thinking didn’t arrive here all at once. Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring what AI discoverability might look like for fiction authors.

First, I realized our author brands need to communicate more than genre and tropes. They need enough context for readers (and increasingly AI systems) to understand who we are, what we write, and why our work matters. That led me to create the Your eCommerce Author Brand kit.

I’d also started thinking about GEO and AEO. What kinds of pages help AI answer questions about my books? Reading order. Character pages. FAQs. Author's philosophy. Theme pages. Those ideas became the AI Overview workbook.

Now I’m beginning to wonder if there’s another layer.

What If We’ve Been Thinking About Author Websites the Wrong Way?

What if the website itself isn’t just a “buy my books” website built for the volume publishing model but is built as more than an author’s professional calling card?

For years, the goal was simple: establish an online presence, showcase your books, collect email subscribers, and give readers a place to learn a little more about you.

Traditional author websites often introduced the author and showcased the books.

That model still makes a great deal of sense.

But how much context does a direct-to-reader business need to create trust?

I wondered whether direct-to-reader fiction websites needed to help readers go a step further and understand the world surrounding those books.

I’ve driven cold traffic directly to book pages and made sales. But I’ve also learned that readers buying directly from an author’s Shopify store often want more than a product description. They want confidence, context, and to understand the world they’re stepping into.

The more distance there is between a reader and a purchase, the more context the website may need to provide.

I don’t know if that’s where author websites are headed. I only suspect it… But I think it’s an experiment worth running.

The Evolution of the Author Website

As I keep working on this issue of author discoverability, I realize this feels very similar to what happened when I started to rethink author branding.

For years, many author brands were fairly basic: A logo, a tagline, a genre, maybe a color palette, and a website.

As AI continues to reshape author discoverability, I’m now arguing that an author’s brand needs more context than that. It needs to communicate identity, expertise, themes, values, and the larger body of work so both readers and AI can understand it.

Here I am again, asking myself whether the same evolution is beginning to happen with author websites. Traditionally, many author websites have been wonderfully simple:

• Home

• About

• Books

• Blog

• Contact

For many authors, that’s still exactly what’s needed. But I’m building a direct-to-reader business around a rich fictional universe, my intuition tells me the website has another job to do. Basically, helping readers (and AI) understand the storyworld surrounding my books.

Three Things I Think I Know

Right now, I see three different levels of confidence.

1. Well Established

Readers already ask information architecture questions.

• Where should I start?

• Who is this character?

• What’s the reading order?

• How are these stories connected?

Authors have been answering these questions for years.

2. Strongly Plausible

AI systems appear to perform better when information is organized around entities, relationships, context, and internal connections rather than isolated product pages.

We already know search engines and AI systems benefit from structured information and clear relationships between concepts.

3. Still Unproven

What I don’t know yet is whether reorganizing an author's website around storyworlds instead of books will improve:

• AI discoverability

• Reader navigation

• Reader engagement

• Search visibility

• Sales

I don’t think anyone can honestly answer those questions yet, but my librarian mind highly suspects it. That’s my experiment.

Not Every Author Needs This

I also don’t think this website version is for everyone. If your publishing model is built around rapid release, high-volume publishing, Kindle Unlimited, or getting readers quickly to the next book, a straightforward author website may continue to serve you extremely well.

But if you’re building a direct-to-reader business around a rich fictional universe…

…if your readers ask about characters, timelines, mythology, locations, organizations, reading order, or the meaning behind your stories…

…then investing in your storyworld’s information architecture may be a logical next step.

My Next Experiment

So over the coming months, I’m going to redesign parts of my own website, not because I know this approach will work, but because I want to find out.

I’m going to experiment with treating my website as the information architecture of my storyworld rather than simply the place where my books are listed and sold.

If it works, I’ll share what I learn.

If it doesn’t, I’ll share that too.

Paid Subscriber Bonus

As I was working through this experiment, I realized I should audit my own website before suggesting anyone else rethink theirs. So I created an Information Architecture Audit Prompt and used it to evaluate my own site (whew, I’ve got a lot of work to do).

If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll find that prompt in a separate paid subscribers post with the link to the prompt. You can use it to evaluate your own author website and begin identifying where it already provides strong context, and where there may be opportunities to deepen your storyworld’s information architecture for both readers and AI.

Paid Subscribers Can Download it [HERE].

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So…

Substack just announced AI transparency for authors, and well, writers everywhere are scrambling to craft their statements.

I wrote my statement in a few minutes and posted it. ❤️

I believe it helps to know how you feel about AI creatively before you share your AI statement to the world. Last year, I created this quiz for fiction authors, but it was buried at the bottom of Fiction Authors: Are You Anti-AI OR Fanatically Pro-AI: If So, You’re Missing the Real Disruption.

I decided to pull it out and create a separate post so authors can easily access the quiz only and use it to help frame their own AI Statements.

No Judgement On My Part

And just to be clear, in my mind, there’s no single “right” way to do or feel about AI.

Some authors never use it. Others lean in on it heavily, but many of us fall somewhere in between. That “in-between” part is critical. Knowing how (or if) AI has a place in your creative process, business, or writing empire is a part of your author branding and keeps everything consistent and grounded.

Not knowing where you stand is where things get messy.

Mini Diagnostic: Where Are You on the AI Spectrum?

Instructions: Choose the option that sounds most like you for each question. Keep track of your letters (A–F) and see where you land.

1. How do you feel about AI in creative work?

• A. I avoid it completely: I brainstorm, write, and edit on my own.

• B. I’m cautiously curious: I read about it, but rarely test it.

• C. I use it to support my human-led process (for prompts, outlines, or light editing).

• D. I co-create with it: human-assisted, still guided by my voice and intent.

• E. I direct AI systems that run my writing or marketing frameworks, using my creative input to keep them aligned.

• F. I oversee AI-driven drafting at scale: using structured systems to generate for multiple pen names under my editorial direction.

2. What best describes your current relationship with AI?

• A. Distrustful: I don’t see value in it.

• B. Observing: still deciding what’s ethical.

• C. Human-led: I use it for admin or metadata only.

• D. Human-assisted: I collaborate with it for brainstorming, editing, or marketing ideas.

• E. Human-directed: I design and maintain AI systems that rely on my story strategy and feedback.

• F. AI-directed: I guide AI as my virtual writing team, managing outputs across genres or brands.

3. What’s your main reason for (or against) using AI?

• A. To protect human creativity.

• B. To learn before acting.

• C. To save time on small, repetitive tasks.

• D. To expand creative flow through collaboration.

• E. To systemize my marketing and writing workflow efficiency.

• F. To build a scalable publishing model where AI drafts and I edit, refine, and brand the final work.

4. How would you describe your boundaries?

• A. Hard line: No AI in my process.

• B. Flexible: I test occasionally but keep my writing fully human.

• C. Human-led: AI supports but never decides.

• D. Human-assisted: I co-create, but my human edits guide the final story.

• E. Human-directed: AI executes within the frameworks I design, monitor closely, and supervise.

• F. AI-directed: I manage AI outputs like an editor-in-chief, ensuring tone, ethics, and brand alignment.

5. What’s your next step?

• A. Continue creating without AI.

• B. Learn more about responsible use.

• C. Refine my human-led workflow with light AI support.

• D. Deepen my human-assisted creative collaboration.

• E. Strengthen my human-directed systems and strategies.

• F. Build or refine an AI-assisted publishing model with clear human oversight.

Results

Mostly A’s – The Purist

“I prefer my creativity untouched.”

I’ve examined what AI means for creatives and made an intentional choice to keep my work fully human.

Mostly B’s – The Cautious Observer

“I’m watching from the sidelines.”

I’m taking time to learn before leaping.

Mostly C’s – The Human-Led Experimenter

“I use AI only where it supports me.”

I stay in control, using AI for light support so my energy stays focused on storytelling and voice.

Mostly D’s – The Human-Assisted Collaborator

“I co-create with AI but remain the author.”

I use AI like a creative assistant for brainstorming, editing, or testing ideas.

Mostly E’s – The Human-Directed Orchestrator

“I direct the thinking.”

I use AI to pressure-test ideas, challenge assumptions, organize complex thoughts, and occasionally help me get a first draft moving. But I remain responsible for the thinking, the decisions, and the finished work.

Mostly F’s – The AI-Directed Publisher

“I manage a publishing-style ecosystem.”

I treat AI like an internal writing team while remaining responsible for quality, coherence, and audience experience.

Reflection Prompt

Now it’s your turn.

Using your results, write a short AI statement that honestly describes your creative process.

Mine looks like this:

I’m what I call a Human-Directed Orchestrator.

I use AI to pressure-test ideas, challenge assumptions, organize complex thoughts, and occasionally help me get a first draft moving. But I direct the thinking, make the decisions, and revise everything until it reflects my voice, my judgment, and my experience.

That description feels honest and gives me language to explain my creative process to readers without pretending AI isn’t part of it (or making it seem as if AI is doing all the work for me).

I hope this helps you put words to your own creative process.

If you’re willing to share, I’d love to hear your AI statements or even where you landed.

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People often ask me why I’ve become so interested in GEO, AEO, and AI discoverability, and the honest answer is that I learned the foundations of it more than thirty years ago in a required cataloging class at Clark Atlanta University.

One afternoon my then professor, Dr. Lorene Brown, walked to the front of the classroom and started writing a Dewey Decimal number across three blackboards. As fresh Library Science students we were all terrified because she kept going and going.

We all kept whispering “When is she going to stop.”

Whew…

Dr. Brown finally stopped, smiled, and said, “Find where this book should be cataloged in the library.”

We spent an eternity trying to determine exactly where that book belonged in the catalog. There was literally no way to avoid looking at every decimal point or additional numbers. Each one narrowed the subject and communicated something more precise about what the book actually was and where it should be cataloged.

Back then, I thought she was teaching us how to catalog books, and she was, but she was also teaching us that discoverability depends on how something is controlled and described.

Discoverability Depends on Description

A catalog record isn’t simply a title and an author’s name. It’s a carefully constructed description designed to help the right person find exactly the right book. Libraries don’t rely on one way to find a book. They create multiple access points:

• Author
• Title
• Controlled Subject Headings
• Genre
• Keywords
• Cross References
• Classification Numbers

Each field tells you something different and becomes another legitimate path to the same work.

From Thin Records to Rich Context

Traditional SEO reminds me of a relatively thin catalog record.
• Title
• Keywords
• Description
• Related Terms

Enough information to make something discoverable. Nothing wrong with that. But it is still a very compressed description.

GEO (and AEO) feel fundamentally different to me and is in a league of it’s own. Instead of simply asking us to optimize a page, they invite us to enrich the description.

Not simply what something is...but what it means (that’s a brand new level of access) because it’s asking for themes, context, relationships, deeper purpose and the place within a larger body of work. That’s mind blowing for a librarian like me.

We’ve never had this level of cataloging access.

What Does This Look Like for Fiction Authors?

Something clicked for me.

For years, fiction authors have been taught that marketing means creating content designed to persuade people to buy. We launch the preorder, announce the release, run the sale, write newsletters, and remind readers that a new book is available.

Those things still have a place.

But AI discoverability seems to reward authors who have organized their knowledge well enough for both readers and machines to understand it.

Instead of asking only, How do I convince someone to buy my book?

We also must begin asking, Where should readers begin? How are these books connected? Who is this character? Why do these themes keep appearing?

Honestly, those aren’t traditional content marketing questions. They’re actually information architecture questions.

That’s the part I’m still turning over.

I’m naturally attracted to storyselling over bro marketing tactics. Honestly storyselling expands context. Information architecture organizes context.

I know they’re not the same discipline, but they seem to work together in a way I hadn’t recognized before. The more context I create around my stories, the easier they become to understand, navigate, and discover.

Looking back, I don’t think I accidentally became interested in information architecture. I think I’ve been doing a librarian’s work this whole time without ever calling it that. Dr. Brown handed me that language thirty years ago while I was standing at a blackboard trying to find a book.

AI Discoverability Forces Our Author Catalog To Go Deeper

This is the part that excites my librarian heart. For decades catalogers did remarkable work inside finite MARC fields. A record could tell you a book was about grief, or family, or mythology, and those subject headings were valuable, but they were still compressed. There was never room to explain how grief shaped the story, why family mattered, what justice meant inside that fictional world, or why the author chose to tell it at all.

That context “all” lived outside the catalog.

For the first time, AI systems can take in much of that surrounding context. The essays, the interviews, the character pages, the lore, the FAQs, the reading order, the author’s own explanation of what the story means. As librarians we described books as faithfully as we could. Now authors have the chance to describe themselves, not just through metadata but through machine-readable context.

That doesn’t replace the traditional catalog…it deepens it.

AI Didn’t Teach Me This

Maybe that’s why GEO has never felt magical to me. It feels familiar. Dr. Brown wasn’t preparing us for artificial intelligence, she was teaching information architecture and good discoverability.

Looking back, I realize she wasn’t just teaching us how to catalog books. She was teaching us how knowledge becomes discoverable. Thirty years later, that lesson feels more relevant than ever.

The truth? Good discoverability has always been about controlled subject access and describing something clearly enough that the right person can find it.

So I’m no longer just selling stories. I’m building the information architecture of my storyworld, and I’m starting to think I’ve been taking notes on that assignment for over thirty years without knowing it.

And for that, I greatly appreciate Dr. Lorene Brown. She taught me well.

A Note on Dr. Brown

Dr. Lorene Byron Brown spent her career at the school that became the Clark Atlanta University School of Library and Information Studies. She served as Dean from 1982 to 1989, when it was still Atlanta University, and stayed on as a professor through the merger until she retired in 2003. She earned her own master’s degree there in 1956, studying under Dr. Virginia Lacy Jones, one of the first African Americans to earn a doctorate in library science and the dean who built that school into what it became. In 1995 Dr. Brown published Subject Headings for African-American Materials, a book about giving Black materials accurate description inside a catalog that was never built to hold them. She died in Atlanta in 2019.

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Confessional… I didn’t suddenly become obsessed with billionaire werewolves and idk Virginal brides (yeah, I can’t roll my eyes far enough to reach the back of my brain 😂😉).

I subscribed because I wanted to understand why millions of people are willing to pay for serialized dramas on their phones.

So I paid for one month. Then, well, I watched a whole lot of them. Some stories I abandoned after a few episodes. Others, I watched all seventy-two episodes.

By the end of the month, I was equal parts entertained, horrified, fascinated, and intellectually energized.

And it became clear that I was watching a master storyteller in motion.

My Research Habit

This isn’t a new habit for me. I generally do these deep dives all the time. Whenever I’ve wanted to crack a new niche or genre, I would read forty or fifty books, study the reviews, look for recurring patterns, and write reports. There were always plenty of DNFs along the way, but the goal was never to love every book.

I wanted to understand the ecosystem. I don’t study trends because I want to copy them. I study them because every new storytelling format reveals something about human behavior. Readers vote with their attention and their wallets long before the publishing industry writes articles explaining why. If millions of people suddenly start consuming stories differently, I’m curious enough to ask what they’re teaching us.

I approached ReelShort the same way. I wasn’t looking for masterpieces. I was conducting a deep dive into this serial storytelling format.

I Stopped Judging the Writing

If you spend any time online, you’ll find plenty of videos making fun of ReelShort and other apps like it.

Yup. The acting is over-the-top. The dialogue is melodramatic. The plots are outrageous. The alpha werewolves desperately need therapy. Some of the videos are obviously AI (and I might add a little like AI slop, but not all).

Honestly… some of those critiques are fair.

I also found myself uncomfortable with how often the stories relied on humiliation, abuse, or trauma to keep escalating the stakes. Some protagonists endure so much suffering that it stops feeling emotionally meaningful and starts feeling exploitative and some serious trauma porn.

However, the critics who only attack that these are just poorly written are asking the wrong question. This runs much deeper than bad writing. It can be both true that something can be badly written but has amazing storytelling that viewers or readers can’t put down.

Instead, I started asking: “Why are millions of people paying for this?”

So let’s talk numbers for a second, because they’re the reason I started taking notes.

ReelShort has somewhere around 50 million monthly active users. DramaBox, its biggest rival, is right there with it. Together they’re eating up roughly 70% of the money spent across this entire category. And this isn’t a fringe habit — global spending on these apps is somewhere north of $11 billion a year, on track to hit $14 billion by the end of 2026.

Mind blown…. That’s an industry that snuck up on all of us while we were busy making fun of the werewolves.

Here’s the stat that actually stopped me: people using ReelShort spend an average of 35.7 minutes a day in the app. Netflix, on mobile, gets 24.8. Disney+ gets 23. A platform full of one-minute episodes about secretly royal husbands is out-engaging Netflix.

And the price tag is not subtle. ReelShort’s VIP subscription runs $19.99 a week — yes, a week, that’s not a typo… or $199 a year. If you don’t subscribe, unlocking a single 80-episode series in coins can run you $37 to $47.

I did the math on my own month of “research” and quietly closed the tab.

So no. Cranky fiction authors can say what they want, but folks are shelling out a lot of dollars for the kind of writing that we were taught to be embarrassed about to share. That’s the part worth sitting with.

I Started to Study the Engine.

Once I stopped judging every line of dialogue, I started noticing patterns like:

• Every episode changes something.

• Each ending creates another question, or the cliffhanger demands one more click.

• The armature or third rail is immediately understandable and stays on task (they follow the story genius concept).

• The emotional stakes constantly escalate.

• Conflict rarely lets the audience breathe for very long.

• And the romances hit all the romantic beats each time.

These stories would never survive an MFA workshop, and the prose IS NOT pretty.

Then I noticed something even more interesting. ReelShort wasn’t only producing live-action vertical dramas. They were also experimenting with narrated audiobook stories built around still images.

I Don’t Think We’re Watching Books Disappear. I Think We’re Watching Them Expand.

For generations, a story usually lived inside one container: the book. Today, that same story might become an ebook, an audiobook, a YouTube serial, a motion comic, illustrated narrated chapters, vertical micro-dramas, lore articles, Pinterest story content, merchandise, and a reader community.

Honestly what I see… The storyworld becomes the intellectual property, and the book is one expression of that intellectual property.

This Isn’t Really About ReelShort

It’s about paying attention to the market changes. Hollywood has talked about transmedia storytelling for years.

What’s changing now is that independent creators finally have access to tools that make it possible: AI narration, AI illustration, AI video, affordable editing software, and direct-to-reader platforms.

None of these replaces good storytelling. They simply allow storytellers to express the same storyworld in multiple ways.

The Lesson Isn’t “Write Crazier Stories.”

So in my research deep dive, I think I left with more questions than answers, but honestly, the biggest takeaway from all of this is that as authors, we should be paying attention to things like ReelShort not to do what they do, but to continue to research this new serialized transmedia storytelling trend.

It’s quietly becoming part of the way readers experience stories.

What about you? Have you been checking out the Alpha Queen Mafia Boss with her Step Baby Daddy? (Sigh)

What’s your thought on this latest storytelling trend?

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Recently, I found myself thinking about how different my recent GEO posts felt compared to the SEO blog posts I wrote when I first started my author career.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I went back and looked at some of my highest-performing content from 2011.

In my comparison, I realized something surprising. My old posts were excellent examples of SEO. But they weren’t really about “me” or “what made my writing unique.”

I Was Doing Exactly What Indie Authors Were Taught to Do

One of my best performers from back then was a piece about Patricia Briggs’ River Marked, about how the novel handled Mercy’s Native American heritage and her biracial identity. I loved that book. I loved reviewing and writing about it. Thousands of people found that post, and by every SEO metric I had at the time, it worked.

Then I Read It Again

As I read it again, it dawned on me that this was all about Patricia Briggs and her SEO. People found it because they wanted more of her world, and I had built a very good doorway into it. That’s not a criticism of what I did. It worked exactly the way I’d been taught it should. Write to market. Connect yourself to the names readers already trust. Find the trend, ride the algorithm, and release my books faster. There’s real wisdom buried in all of that advice; readers do need ways to find us.

But somewhere in there, I’d quietly swapped a question I should have been asking myself for one that was really about someone else. I was spending my energy becoming a better echo of another author instead of figuring out what only I could say.

I don’t think I could have seen that at the time. I’m not sure I was supposed to.

GEO Changed the Question

The last few months, I’ve been deep in GEO and AEO, trying to figure out what discoverability even means now that AI and LLMs have rewritten the rules.

I expected that to feel like a technical problem. Mostly it has. But it did something else too.

I stopped chasing SEO keywords built around bigger-name authors. Stopped asking myself what I should write about to catch the algorithm’s attention. And began asking something different.

What’s actually mine here?

Where am I the specialist?

What questions does my storyworld answer that no one else can answer the same way?

GEO and AEO were never really about volume. They’re not asking how much traffic a keyword can pull in like SEO. They’re about the signal and by extension, context. Bringing the right ten readers instead of the wrong thousand.

And, somewhere in that shift, my content became more human.

If I Wrote That Patricia Briggs Post Today

If I wrote that Patricia Briggs piece today, I don’t think it would be a book review at all. It would probably be something like why cultural heritage makes supernatural worlds feel more real, or why I write Black women whose cultural identity is central to their power. Briggs might still show up in there somewhere. But she wouldn’t be the SEO keyword destination anymore. She’d be one example inside a conversation that’s mine to lead.

I stopped asking how to connect myself to someone else’s audience and started asking what conversation I was actually qualified to have.

My Content Isn’t About Borrowing Authority Anymore

GEO makes my content marketing look very different now. I write about what is uniquely me, such as my broader branding or my storyworlds. None of it involves living in some other author’s shadow to gain their audience.

The SIGNAL Matters More Than the Individual Blog Post

I no longer feel like I’m filling a content calendar, trying to attract another author’s audience. I feel like I’m building a knowledge base around my own storyworld, which involves creating one clear signal after another about my themes, characters, values, and expertise.

Together, they’re helping human readers, search engines, and AI understand what I uniquely bring to the table.

GEO Didn’t Just Change My Marketing

GEO made my content marketing more human. It forced me to focus on what actually makes me different instead of chasing someone else’s SEO keywords. AEO went further than that. It forced me to answer questions only I can answer, not questions anyone in my genre could answer.

I feel more empowered because of it. More confident as an author than I’ve felt in years.

The indie publishing model trained me to chase volume. This eCommerce model is teaching me depth, and more of me keeps showing up in the content marketing because of it.

Honestly, I don’t know where this is leading, but that’s the trade-off I’m willing to take.

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Sometimes the most valuable thing a funnel gives you isn’t more subscribers. It’s better questions.

The Quiz I Thought I Was Building

I’ve been building a new quiz funnel for my fiction business.

On paper, it seemed like your typical funnel:

• Create quiz.

• Run Pinterest ads.

• Capture email addresses.

• Send them through a welcome sequence.

• And... Autoresponders for days.

That’s what I thought I was building.

Upfront, everything looked fine. Quiz takers were proudly uncovering their superhero personas, then joining my list left and right. Yes, I was super excited.

Then I logged into Klaviyo, and all my hopes came crashing down. The back-end told a different story.

• Fake emails.

• Instant unsubscribes.

• Bounced email addresses.

I may have said a few four-letter words… I had to sit with it all, and instead of congratulating myself on increasing my subscriber count, I started asking questions.

Questions like:

Are these the right kinda leads for me?

That single question shifted the focus of the entire experiment.

What I’m Actually Trying to Build

I decided I’m not building an email list. I’m building a fanbase.

More specifically, I’m trying to build an audience who resonates with my stories. An audience who reads my books because they genuinely enjoy what I create. The subscribers who open my emails without guiltily snoozing them or half-engaging with them. Who eventually become Collectors or Selectors inside my storyworld ecosystem.

Vanity metrics excite me less and less as I spend more time on this journey. A thousand subscribers who ignore everything I create means less to me than 100 readers who genuinely care.

The Unexpected Gift

The thing that surprised me the most though, was the incredible insights into my audience. I could see insights into my reader’s identity, behavior, preferences, and even decisive moments.

I watched people discover which superhero archetypes they naturally gravitate towards plus which:

• Pinterest images grabbed their attention.

• Stories they’re naturally interested in reading.

• Story-based products they have the most questions about.

• Paths inside my storyworld, they’ll wander down without me prompting them in any way.

It’s been a mind-blown moment after mind-blown moment.

For someone who’s brain sees patterns everywhere, having funneled people into a space where they have to make a series of decisions has become fascinating.

Marketing this way feels less and less like marketing…

…and more like detective work, piecing clues together.

The Report I Wish I’d Had in 2012

This is when I stumbled onto the biggest realization of all. This quiz isn’t just building me an email list. It’s quietly becoming a market research report about the very readers I was trying to reach this entire time.

Because the other day I found myself thinking:

What if someone took the time to create this report for me in 2012?

What if I could have opened a file that read:

Dear Alicia:

We surveyed 141 of your future readers.

Almost half of them strongly identify as vigilante protectors.

They like novellas, but don’t mind serial fiction episodes.

World lore matters a lot to them.

Their go-to platforms are YouTube and Pinterest.

Some of them really love fandom and cons.

Over half listen to audiobooks.

When they’re described in one phrase, they respond with:

Don’t try me.

They’re attracted to women who fight back when others won’t stand up for themselves.

Had I known what these readers identified with when I first started…

I would’ve leaned into it from jump street.

All I had over my previous years were broad market research from the retailers in various forms and a bunch of questions; maybe what’s more accurate is educated guesses.

But now I’m finally starting to turn some of those guesses into something more concrete. Stuff that’s tailor-made for my personal core audience. Not about what I should write. …but about who naturally likes what I’ve already been writing.

Now, that is something that can fuel my confidence as a creator.

The Questions Changed

A huge email list doesn’t necessarily equal a healthy email list. Cheap cost per lead doesn’t necessarily mean you’re investing your money wisely. Having “X” number of subscribers also doesn’t tell me if those subscribers even want to read my stories.

So naturally, my questions changed.

I don’t care about…

VOLUME: “How do I get more email subscribers?”

I care about…

DEPTH: “What kind of readers are these? Which story resonates with them most? What kind of products fit their identity? What patterns can I NOT ignore?”

Suddenly, my welcome email funnel feels way more valuable than it used to.

The Experiment

So far, one of the biggest changes I’ve made is ditching the email gate altogether. Allowing readers to discover who their superhero identity is without having to give me their email address.

For those who skip the email step, I offer them a second chance on the actual landing page to continue on this journey with me. What does that mean? If they loved their results, I invite them to receive a free eBook, bonus content, and future story adventures by signing up for my list.

Will people skip signing up for my email list? Sure.

That’s okay with me.

Some will get their results and say: “Nope. Not for me.” And I respect them for their hard “NO.”

But some will reach the end and say: “I’d like more of this.”

And do you know what signals much stronger to me?

Someone giving me their email and WANTING to hear more from me because they enjoyed their results.

Which brings me to my next point…

A Different Kind of Optimization

Fun fact: This new experiment may actually result in LESS subscribers for me over time.

And you know what? I’m okay with that. Why? Because what I think I may be gaining in exchange is much, MUCH more valuable.

Trust.

…the more I think about it, the less I believe my quiz funnel is here to just “capture leads.” (A part of me even believes this type of volume-based thinking is an indie mindset hangover anyway.)

My quiz funnel is really here to listen. To listen to who these readers are, long before I try convincing them to read my books.

I have no clue where this experiment goes from here.

But this I do know:

I’m no longer optimizing for a huge volume of email subscribers.

I’m optimizing for depth and future highly engaged fans.

…and if that isn’t two completely different business mindsets, I don’t know what is.

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Most author social media lists are ranked by audience size, popularity, and cultural momentum. This one is ranked by a different question:

Can AI chatbots actually find and index you there?

That single question changes everything about which platforms matter.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of making yourself legible to AI systems so they route the right reader to your work. It is a structurally different kind of discoverability work, and most of the social media platforms that dominate the usual author advice lists fail it completely.

The five platforms below are indexed, long-lived, and capable of routing AI Chatbots directly to something you own. They are listed in the order they matter for a strong GEO signal.

1. Your Own Domain and Blog

This should have been on every list for the past decade, and it still gets treated as optional. Your website is the only platform where you control every signal, link, and piece of language the AI uses to understand who you are and what you write.

Everything else on this list is an echo of what lives here first. GEO work begins on your domain. The AI systems that surface author recommendations are pulling from the open web, and your site is where you establish identity, authority, and reader clarity before any algorithm gets involved.

If you have not written an author bio post, a book catalog post, and a core themes post on your own domain, that is the first work. The post can help [AI Overviews].

2. Substack

Substack is indexed by search engines and by AI systems in a way that most social platforms are not. Long-form posts with consistent language, clear authorial identity, and recurring themes build GEO authority over time. It also creates the email relationship, which is the one no algorithm can take away.

For authors specifically, Substack’s culture rewards depth over frequency, which means the signal you build is genuine rather than performative. It’s a platform for being found by the reader (and subsequently the AI Chatbot) who was already looking for you.

Revision about Substack (June 25, 2026)

A special thank you to fellow Substack , who pointed me toward an article that sent me down a very productive rabbit hole.

One piece I originally left out is that connecting your Substack publication to Google Search Console adds another layer to your discoverability infrastructure.

While Substack is already crawlable by Google, verifying your publication in Google Search Console allows you to:

• Submit your Substack sitemap directly to Google.

• Monitor which posts are being indexed.

• See which Google search queries are leading readers to your publication.

• Request indexing for important cornerstone articles.

• Monitor your publication’s search performance over time.

One small lesson I learned during setup: I had more success verifying my publication using my canonical publication URL (yourpublication.substack.com) rather than the newer substack.com/@username address. Once verified, submitting my sitemap (sitemap.xml) took less than a minute, allowing Google to periodically crawl and monitor my publication automatically.

3. YouTube

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, and its content has one of the longest shelf lives of any platform on this list. A video published in 2023 can still be driving traffic in 2026.

For fiction authors, the content that performs best is the kind that answers questions readers are already searching for, as well as deep storyworld content. Lore explainer videos (which can be entirely faceless), character and series deep dives, world-building breakdowns, and behind-the-scenes creative process content all build long-tail discoverability that compounds over time.

But YouTube is also a distribution platform for the fiction itself. Short audiobook episodes, longer serialized audiobook seasons, vertical micro-drama episodes, bedtime story audiobooks, and full audiodrama productions with full-cast narration (like the SpokenPress model) all live naturally here. Readers who discover one episode have a path directly into your storyworld and from there into your store.

The same audio content can also be distributed through podcast platforms like Acast, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, extending your indexing footprint without requiring separate production. One audiodrama season becomes a YouTube series and a podcast feed simultaneously.

It gets placed last on most author platform lists, with caveats about slow build and production demands. Those obstacles are real. But they do not change the GEO reality: YouTube content is indexed, it compounds, and it routes the listener somewhere.

The real advantage is that AI systems can actually learn from it. Every title, transcript, description, playlist, and episode becomes another signal helping machines understand who you are, what you write, and which readers should discover you.

4. Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual search engine, not social media, and that distinction matters for GEO. Pins index on Google. They drive traffic to your site for years after they are posted. The platform rewards clarity of identity and consistency of language in a way that directly mirrors what AI systems need to understand your work.

Don’t think this is the old version of the 2015 author mood board. In 2026, Pinterest is about discoverability infrastructure.

The practical application for fiction authors is this: treat Pinterest as a content creator, not a basic user. Every pin is an opportunity to name your reader, your genre, and themes, and link back to something you own. Just like your foundational GEO posts on your website, your Pinterest presence needs the same structural intentionality.

Three foundational boards anchor everything: a Bio board that establishes who you are and what you write, a Story Themes and Tropes board that names your world in the language your reader already uses to search, and a Start Here Bestseller board that routes new visitors directly into your best work.

All pins lead back to your website or storefront. Done consistently, Pinterest builds a discoverability layer that operates independently of any algorithm’s whims, because it is grounded in search behavior rather than engagement behavior. More on Pinterest [LINK].

5. Reddit

Reddit is one of the most heavily indexed platforms on the internet. Google has a direct data agreement with Reddit, which means Reddit threads surface regularly in search results. AI systems are also trained heavily on Reddit content, which gives it meaningful GEO weight that most social platforms cannot claim.

For fiction authors, the reader-driven subreddits are spaces where readers actively ask for recommendations. You cannot market there in any traditional sense. But you can be part of the conversation, and that participation is indexed, searchable, and long-lived in a way that an Instagram post is not.

One more thing.

Knowing which platforms pass the GEO test is only the first question. If you are still figuring out which of these fits your energy and the kind of content creation you will actually sustain, I created this quiz a few months ago for exactly that.

If this post resonated, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work. You’ll instantly unlock my growing library of Quiet Writers Workbooks and PDFs — including The Your eCommerce Author Brand Kit & The AI Overview Workbook— designed to help authors build bold, sustainable careers on their own terms.

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It started with Adapt or Die. I was watching Amazon block AI crawlers, and most authors weren’t paying attention. The real disruption wasn’t AI writing our books. It was AI becoming the librarian of the internet, and most fiction authors hadn’t introduced themselves yet.

Then came Anti-AI or Fanatically Pro-AI. The fighting in author communities was exhausting and beside the point. While everyone argued about tools, AI was already reshaping how readers find books. That was the door nobody was watching.

Then The AI Overview and the Fiction Author. The 20-year librarian in me finally had something useful to say. You have to write your own catalog record. The AI Librarian is already out there describing you, sometimes wrong, or even making stuff up. Five posts can start to fix that.

With Pinterest vs META, I thought I could just move my content strategy from one platform to the other. I was wrong. Pinterest is a search engine. META is a bar. My readers were in the library the whole time. I just hadn’t shown up there to use it like the discoverability tool it was.

Then The Brand Comes First: eCommerce authors don’t build the book first and figure out branding later. The emotional foundation has to come before everything. Brand isn’t packaging. It’s the skeleton the whole store is built on.

Then The Foundation Everybody Skipped. Two questions kept arriving in my inbox and I finally understood they were the same question wearing different clothes. So I built the Brand Kit. I thought I was just answering a branding question.

And then my latest post: I Thought I Was Building a Brand Kit. I wasn’t. Not exactly. I was building something bigger, and I didn’t have a name for it yet.

One more voice that belongs in this trail: my amazing friend, Jaime Buckley pulled me into this conversation early. His framing of GEO and AEO is one of the most useful I’ve seen. Worth reading alongside everything above.

The GEO Pattern

Looking back, all of these posts were really different angles on the same question:

How does a fiction author become discoverable in an AI-mediated world?

I don’t have a tidy conclusion for this one.

I’m still in the middle of building it myself. I’m a field researcher and a pattern tester, which means I experiment until I figure things out. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

What I can say is that the window to get ahead of this is still open. Probably 9 to 18 months for fiction authors before AI discovery becomes the norm rather than the edge.

Either way, I’ll keep writing about what I’m finding until I figure this thing out. I’m completely intrigued (maybe obsessed is the better word) with this now.

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After releasing my eCommerce Author Brand Position Kit, I kept feeling friction.

My librarian brain does this to me all the time.

I kept circling one question: how has AI discoverability changed the way I think about fiction author branding?

At first, I wondered if the branding advice many of us learned had simply broken. But the longer I sat with that question, the more I realized that wasn’t quite right.

I think what AI may be exposing is the discoverability gaps that previous branding and publishing systems could ignore.

For years, fiction author branding often functioned like an attractive book jacket. And honestly, that made sense in discovery systems built around human browsing. A reader scrolling Amazon or walking a bookstore aisle responds to visual cues, genre shorthand, tropes, and emotional promises.

But AI chatbots don’t browse like a human. Whether we’re talking about the crawlers that index your work, the models that synthesize answers for readers, or the newer agentic systems that browse and buy on a reader’s behalf, none of them experience your brand the way a person scrolling Amazon does.

And that changes what matters.

Pre-AI, a beautiful jacket helped someone pick up the book. Now, a rich catalog record helps them find it in the first place. That distinction has been rattling around in my head ever since.

The old advice wasn’t wrong

I want to say something clearly before anyone assumes this is an anti-branding argument.

For years, fiction authors were taught sensible things: know your genre, create cohesive covers, use recognizable tropes, be consistent with your author promise, write clear blurbs, choose metadata intentionally. None of that was bad advice. In the publishing ecosystems many authors were operating in, it was exactly the right advice. Discoverability often happened inside existing marketplaces like Amazon or BookBub, or through social recommendation loops. When readers are already inside a marketplace, branding functions like packaging.

That worked, until it didn’t have to work alone anymore.

A book’s discoverability now can begin before a reader ever reaches a marketplace. When AI, in an overview, a chatbot, or an agentic shopping layer, responds to a search request, things happen: themes get inferred, sometimes correctly, sometimes not. Some authors get surfaced. Others don’t. The AI increasingly sits between reader intent and discoverability, but most fiction authors are still only thinking about what human browsers notice.

I originally wondered whether high-volume authors had quietly solved this through repetition. And maybe, in older marketplace-driven systems, that was partially true. A larger catalog creates more metadata, reader interactions, and retailer-native signals.

But AI discoverability may complicate that assumption. Sheer volume doesn’t necessarily equal visibility if the discovery layer can’t meaningfully access or interpret the ecosystem where that content lives. A high-volume author deeply embedded inside Amazon may still be highly visible inside Amazon. But if AI discovery increasingly happens upstream of the marketplace, that’s a completely different question. The issue becomes signal density.

Which makes this conversation bigger than branding alone.

The question I’ve actually been circling

Because the question I’ve been slowly working toward isn’t really: do I have a recognizable fiction brand?

It’s: am I building an actual discoverability architecture?

That reframe is where some of my own recent work suddenly clicked differently. Before, the question was relatively simple. What genre do I write? Now I’m sitting with something harder: what emotional experience do I consistently create? What conceptual territory do my stories actually occupy? What journey do readers repeatedly take with me?

Those aren’t branding questions the way I used to understand branding. They’re something else.

We’re policing the wrong door

I kept noticing that the conversation about AI in fiction circles was almost entirely about whether AI would write our books. And I kept thinking: we’re paying attention to and policing the wrong door.

Because right now, AI is already describing fiction authors’ books to readers who may never visit an Amazon page or storefront. It’s using reviews to fill in some signals, cover art for others, and algorithmic guesses and adjacent-author comparisons to fill in the rest. Most authors have no idea what’s being said about their work in those AI responses.

I’m not sure most of us have reckoned with that yet.

Some authors will hear this and decide they don’t want to expand their brand into story themes or a core emotional journey. That’s a real position. But this machine-readable discovery layer won’t pause while we decide as an industry whether to engage with it or not.

With the brand position kit, I thought I was just talking about branding. I’m starting to think I’ve actually been circling a fiction author discoverability architecture. And the work I’ve been doing around storyselling, emotional positioning, reader journeys, and theme ecosystems, I used to think of that as adjacent to branding.

I’m starting to think it might be the next layer of it.

If you want to sit with this alongside me, the eCommerce Author Brand Position Kit is where I started this thinking, you can purchase it here [LINK] or become one of my paid subscribers to receive it for free.

If this post resonated, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work. You’ll instantly unlock my growing library of Quiet Writers Workbooks and PDFs — including The Your eCommerce Author Brand Kit & The AI Overview Workbook— designed to help authors build bold, sustainable careers on their own terms.

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So just recently I finished a huge project I’ve been working on. And I have to admit that some of the pressure was me over-achieving and placing unnecessary stress on myself.

The Quiz Course by Chanti Zak was super clear: use what you already have with your lead magnets and make a 2-sequence email course to build your quiz funnel. Simple enough, right?

Writer brain had other ideas. I went all in with a 3-episode mini serial season for each of my three archetypes, plus a 7 to 8 email sequence for each. I started giving myself a migraine. Thank God I finally figured it out and simplified everything.

And now I get to release my reader identity quiz into the world. I am genuinely excited.

But here’s the thing I want to document while it’s still fresh, because it connects to something I’ve been circling for over a year.

This Is Lever 5 Work

This quiz fits into my eCommerce Lever 5: Audience acquisition. Getting strangers into the ecosystem pre-trust, pre-purchase, just getting them close. That’s technically all it has to do.

But I kept asking myself why I was building a quiz specifically, when a free story or a free chapter could do the same job.

The answer I kept arriving at was identity; the welcome sequence was built for a different world.

The Welcome Sequence Was Built for a Different World

My welcome sequence, the one I built back when I was still operating in a retailer mindset, was designed to warm people up and hand them off to Amazon. Deliver the free read, build goodwill, remind them I exist. That formula worked perfectly for the world it was built for.

But I own the store now. Which means I also own the moment when a new reader tries to figure out if they belong here.

And a free story, as generous as it is, doesn’t answer that question. It says here is content. It doesn’t say here is your place in this storyworld.

That’s the gap I’ve been trying to close.

Claiming an Identity Before Reading a Single Word

When a reader takes this quiz and finds out they’re an Omega Superhero or an Elemental Goddess, something shifts before they ever read a single word of my fiction. They’re not sampling content. They’re claiming an identity. And everything that comes after, the welcome email, the free story, the first product invite, lands differently when someone already knows who they are in my universe.

I can’t prove this will convert better. I’m still running the experiment. But it’s the bet I’m making with Lever 5, and honestly? It feels like the most me version of audience acquisition I’ve built yet.

The Quiz IS Live!

The email flows are finally, blessedly simplified. And I’m curious what happens when readers start showing up and telling me who they are.

If you’ve used an identity quiz or an archetype-based entry point in your own reader ecosystem, or if you’ve thought about it and talked yourself out of it, I’d love to hear where you landed in the comments.

If this post resonated, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work. You’ll instantly unlock my growing library of Quiet Writers Workbooks and PDFs — including The Your eCommerce Author Brand Kit & The AI Overview Workbook— designed to help authors build bold, sustainable careers on their own terms.

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This week, an uncomfortable realization hit me: I’ve had 15 consecutive months of reliable revenue in my Shopify store, and somehow, I still wasn’t letting myself feel successful.

It wasn’t massive, screenshot-worthy revenue or the “six-figures-in-twelve-minutes” viral success that floods our social media feeds. But it was consistent. Every single month, without fail, the system I built produced sales. Yet, when I sat with that fact, I realized I had been judging my business against a standard that was never actually mine.

Somewhere Along the Way, I Internalized the Wrong Scoreboard

Somewhere in the noise of online business advice, I absorbed the idea that success had to be explosive. I thought it needed to look like massive launches, huge traffic spikes, and momentum that everyone could see.

When your business doesn’t look like that, it’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind or failing. But that’s a dangerous story, because it completely ignores the quieter, far more sustainable forms of success.

But That’s Not the Business I’m Actually Building

I am not building a creator business dependent on virality. As an author writing justice-driven fiction about Black women, I’ve deliberately chosen a different path. I am building an eCommerce storyworld rooted in architecture.

My foundation relies on Pinterest content that compounds, GEO blog posts that work for months, email nurture sequences, and merchandise that acts as an artifact of a moral identity. It’s a slow-build philosophy designed for longevity, not a quick cash grab. So, an uncomfortable question landed square in my chest:

If my business was designed to compound slowly, why was I judging it by emergency and viral metrics?

I Was Judging Phase 2 by Phase 4 Standards

I recently mapped out the 5 maturity phases of an eCommerce author business:

• Phase 1: Proof of Life

• Phase 2: Reliable Revenue Floor

• Phase 3: Strategic Scale

• Phase 4: Predictable Business Scale

• Phase 5: Storyworld Empire

Looking at that list, something finally clicked. I am solidly in Phase 2. My store produces revenue every month. The architecture functions, discovery happens, and my 35% returning customer rate proves that my readers are deeply connecting with the world I’ve built. That isn’t a theory; it’s evidence.

Emotionally, however, I’ve been judging myself against Phase 4 expectations and demanding predictable $10K months and fully optimized systems from a mid-stage business. No wonder I’ve been feeling so much unnecessary friction. I was expecting a Phase 2 business to emotionally perform like a far more mature one.

Quiet Compounding Still Counts

Here is the truth I needed to say out loud: A business does not need to be loud to be real. You don’t need explosive spikes to prove your model works.

Quiet compounding and reliable systems count. Doubling your year-over-year revenue (which I did) counts. Progress that doesn’t look flashy is still progress. I suspect I’m not the only creator carrying around a distorted scoreboard, punishing myself for building a brick house while everyone else is building tents.

So I Changed the Questions

Moving forward, I am changing the questions I ask myself. Instead of asking, Why am I not bigger yet?

I’m asking, “What is already working that I’m refusing to acknowledge?”

Instead of white-knuckling my way to the next milestone, I’m asking how I can step fully into the role of the architect, rather than acting like an exhausted day laborer inside my own business.

I built this. It works. And I am finally allowing myself to be proud of it. Now, I keep climbing with grace, not shame.

Fifteen months of reliable revenue isn’t just a stepping stone to “real” success. It is the success that makes the next phase possible.

What about you? Take a look at those 5 phases. Where are you currently sitting, and more importantly, what quiet progress are you finally ready to give yourself credit for?

Let me know in the comments. Let’s celebrate the brick houses we’re building.

If this post resonated, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work. You’ll instantly unlock my growing library of Quiet Writers Workbooks and PDFs — including The Your eCommerce Author Brand Kit & The AI Overview Workbook— designed to help authors build bold, sustainable careers on their own terms.

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This week, while reviewing comments on a recent blog post, I noticed a new tab resting quietly inside my Shopify admin dashboard.

It was labeled simply: Agentic.

I clicked it out of curiosity, expecting a minor feature update. Instead, I found myself staring at a fundamental shift in commerce infrastructure. My store had already generated $22.19 in sales over the last thirty days from a channel I didn’t even know was active. It was on by default, syncing 187 of my products, and (most importantly) showing me the exact search queries where my products had appeared.

I was looking at readers with real intent, finding my work through queries like “shophaven superheroes art print set of 6 i am affirmations.”

I realized this was an early signal of a much larger shift in how readers discover my work.

The Reality of Agentic Shopping

“Agentic shopping” sounds like an overly robotic buzzword, but the translation is quite simple: it is AI-assisted shopping.

We are moving away from an era where a reader types “cozy mystery book” or “dragon fantasy” into Amazon’s search bar. Instead, they are increasingly having conversational interactions with AI assistants.

They are asking, “Find me a gift for a reader who loves slow-burn romance and autumnal aesthetics,” or “Recommend a fast-paced sci-fi novel about found family and space exploration.” The AI then synthesizes the request and surfaces highly relevant options.

Initially, when Shopify announced its Agentic Storefronts, I assumed this was strictly a ChatGPT integration. But looking at my dashboard, the scope is much wider. The active channels included ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the Shop App (an application already installed on millions of mobile devices).

The thought occurred to me that this is no longer just about LLMs or chatbots; this is the new infrastructure of eCommerce discovery.

Structured Data vs. The Scraping Guesswork

What makes this development so critical is how the information is sourced. Historically, AI models have relied on random internet scraping, which often results in stale, hallucinated, or wildly inaccurate product information.

Shopify’s solution is different. They are utilizing structured catalog data directly from the merchant. Structured data is clean, accurate, and inherently machine-readable; AI systems can interpret it with precision.

This is where the conversation expands far beyond direct sales. For years, fiction authors have confined their discoverability strategies to Amazon categories, social media algorithms, and paid ads. But as AI-assisted eCommerce matures, discoverability will increasingly happen long before a reader ever sets foot on a traditional retailer platform.

Discoverability as the New Moat

We are entering an era where discoverability itself becomes a business moat. Success will no longer rely solely on publishing faster or chasing algorithmic trends; it will depend on how easily machines (and by extension, humans) can find, understand, and recommend your work.

This requires a layered approach to your digital ecosystem. Your product titles, metadata, storyworld blog posts, and Pinterest boards are no longer just marketing collateral. They are vital signals feeding into Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and traditional SEO.

If your fiction brand’s positioning is vague, machines will struggle to interpret it. If your catalog is highly specific and structured, AI systems can confidently hand your work to the exact reader looking for it.

The Quiet Truth

I want to be transparent: I did not aggressively optimize for this new feature. In fact, I didn’t do anything different. I’d already built my Shopify store, written my blog posts, trained the AI Librarian through my AI Overview posts, and refined my product descriptions so they explicitly stated my brand’s position.

While I was doing that quiet, consistent work, the digital infrastructure shifted beneath me. When the door to AI-assisted commerce finally opened, I was already standing on the right side of it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments:

• Do you see this shift in AI-assisted shopping changing everything for how we sell books?

• If you have a Shopify store, do you feel ready for Agentic discoverability?

• What surprises you the most about this new landscape?

If this post resonated, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work. You’ll instantly unlock my growing library of Quiet Writers Workbooks and PDFs — including The Your eCommerce Author Brand Kit & The AI Overview Workbook— designed to help authors build bold, sustainable careers on their own terms.

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“Real success means thousands of book sales.”

I believed that for years. Then I learned about average order value, and suddenly the emotional math changed.

The Question I Couldn’t Answer

I remember sitting across from my eCommerce coach. To be transparent, she wasn’t an author, just someone who understood the eCommerce business. On my coaching session, she asked me a simple question.

What’s your average order value?

I confessed I didn’t really know what that was.

She didn’t laugh or make me feel small. She just looked at me and said, “Oh, you don’t know what you have.”

Then she shared the sales conversion calculator with me and showed me where to find my AOV on my Shopify reports.

Her advice? Find a way to raise my Average Order Value as soon as possible so I could reach my revenue goal.

Later, I thought about everything she said, and I went back inside the calculator and reviewed my options.

Honestly, the math genuinely shocked me. And if I’m honest, made me angry.

Mostly, at the years I’d spent not understanding the power of Average Order Value.

The Cost of Chasing Volume

I’d spent a long time in the indie model chasing volume sales. Thousands of sales at $2.99. Watching royalty rates and Amazon rankings. Hoping Amazon’s algorithm kept sending people. Measuring success in units moved and page reads. Always needing more traffic and viral visibility.

The indie model taught me to think in thousands—readers, sales, and page reads. My brain got wired around volume because that’s the only lever the indie model gave me. I kept failing at the indie model. I never could reach those thousand benchmarks (not for a long period anyway). I wrote faster, marketed harder, chased the next trending trope, and wondered why it still didn’t feel like enough.

Nobody ever handed me a different calculator.

So there I sat after that meeting with my eComm coach, using a tool I’d never seen before to process life-changing math.

The Indie Author Math

The calculator said I needed 837 ebook sales at $2.99 to make $2,500.

The eCommerce Author Math

The calculator said I needed 53 bundle sales at $47.99 to make roughly the same $2,500.

Same revenue. 16x the orders.

I sat with that for a long moment because something inside me shifted immediately.

What it meant was devastating in the best possible way.

Maybe I didn’t need thousands of readers. Maybe I needed a smaller number of collectors who loved my world deeply enough to spend more in a single visit.

That’s average order value. And nobody in the indie world had ever shown me that kind of math before.

Shock, Grief, and Something Close to Anger

The shock hit first. Then the dismay. Then something that felt uncomfortably close to anger. The questions came:

• Why was I selling my books so cheap?

• Why had I spent years chasing the idea that high volume was the only path?

• After all those damn writers’ workshops, why did nobody talk deeply about the power of Average Order Value for authors?

And to be fair, there were author gurus talking about bundling books, but you always needed at least three or more in a series, and I always seemed to be behind the 8-ball there. Basically, bundling isn’t a great option if you have a small backlist, and there was also the suggestion that you price your first bundle low (which is what I did) to catch more readers.

The indie model had handed me one lens and told me it was the only way to see. And I’d believed it because everyone around me believed it too.

Average order value isn’t a complicated concept. It’s simply the average amount a customer spends per order in my store.

Total revenue divided by total orders.

But what it meant for my author career? For my actual life as an author? Well, that was something much bigger than a formula.

For me, it’s the difference between Snickers bar pricing and a sustainable living.

Where I Am Now

Right now, I’m still sitting with what all of this means for me. Because understanding average order value intellectually is one thing. Actually building an author business around it is another. It means looking differently at my store. From my bestsellers and products to readers. It means asking harder questions about what people truly value enough to collect, return for, and experience more deeply.

And if I’m honest, part of me is scared as hell to make that leap fully. I can already see the next layer of work required to make it real. This is about:

• Book and merch bundles

• Bestseller extensions

• Thoughtful upsells

• And a store that behaves more like an ecosystem than books only marketplace.

It takes thoughtfulness. It’s not a switch you flip. It’s a lever you approach carefully because you want to pull it in the right direction.

I just need to learn how to see it differently and what that looks like for me.

But I know this much now:

I know I’m NOT chasing the same definition of success anymore. In this eCommerce model, my view of success has substantially changed.

If this post resonated, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work. You’ll instantly unlock my growing library of Quiet Writers Workbooks and PDFs — including The Your eCommerce Author Brand Kit & The AI Overview Workbook— designed to help authors build bold, sustainable careers on their own terms.

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The other day, I watched an interview featuring Coral Hart on YouTube.

And honestly, she was dropping real knowledge that every author should come to understand about AI and writing. She’s sharp, data-driven, and knows exactly how the indie model works. If that’s the path you’re on, you should absolutely listen to her advice.

But as I listened, I realized something. She was dropping real knowledge for authors following the indie model. And make no mistake, I’ve realized that I must be careful about the model and mindset behind the advice I’m tuning into. Because the model’s mindset shapes the answer before the question is even finished.

Here’s what I mean.

The interviewer asked about the 1000 true fans model. He used a hard sci-fi author as his example. Could you hook a reader into a fictional world through a popular romance trope (enemies to lovers, say) and eventually get them deep enough into that world that they’d follow you into a hardcore sci-fi book they never would have picked up on its own?

It’s a great question. But to me, I immediately clocked it as an eCommerce model question dressed up in indie language (and yes, I recognize the true fans question as an early indie model concept).

Coral answered it brilliantly for the indie model. She discussed stuff like trope mapping, overlapping audiences, and the idea of using familiar feelings as a gateway drug into unfamiliar territory.

She even said it plainly: readers don’t buy books. They buy feelings.

She’s right. But in my eyes, she’d provided an indie model solution for an eCommerce model question. And that’s where I had to pause the video to stop and think.

What happens when that same question is asked by an eCommerce author?

The hard sci-fi author in the indie model looks at Amazon’s category rankings, sees a small niche, and concludes the genre isn’t viable enough to build a career on. So they either abandon it or use romance as a Trojan horse to smuggle readers in.

But that hard sci-fi author in the eCommerce model asks a completely different question and gets a very viable solution.

How do I find 1000 hard sci-fi collectors who will spend $100 a year in my Shopify store?

The eCommerce answer? $100,000 in sales revenue annually. Those one thousand “true fans” or collectors who love the world deeply enough to come back for the special edition, the lore guide, the enamel pin, the all-over print “space is fun” bomber jacket, and the audiobook drop provide a very reliable income that’s livable.

The metrics change completely.

Coral Hart measures things like units sold, page reads, Amazon rankings, and category visibility. Those are the right metrics for her indie model.

An eCommerce hard sci-fi author measures something different entirely:

• Returning customer rate.

• Average order value.

• Customer lifetime value.

• Email flow conversion.

• Bestseller extensions.

• Store sessions to purchase ratio.

The returning customer rate is the one that tells you everything. Because a returning hard sci-fi collector isn’t coming back because the algorithm served them your book again. They’re coming back because they love the world and they want more of it.

That compounds. Every returning customer raises your lifetime value and new product deepens the relationship.

Coral Hart’s indie model optimizes for discoverability, but the eCommerce author model builds for loyalty.

Honestly, one is a funnel for the retailers, and the other is a home for the author.

I don’t need to trick my readers into my storyworld.

I show up and build the world first by finding the people who already want to live there. I give them more ways to go deeper. And then I watch the metrics that actually matter, like how many collectors came back.

To me, that interviewer was looking for something, but in truth, his real answer couldn’t be found in the indie model. He inadvertently asked the right question of the wrong publishing model.

My returning customer rate is 35%. That’s higher than the industry average.

I’ve never heard indie authors sharing metrics like that. It’s not because they’re hiding them, but honestly, it’s because they don’t have access to them. In the indie model, the only metric that matters is new traffic. Everything is transactional and not transformational. In fact, most times the relationship ends at the retailer’s checkout.

And, I almost never hear indie authors talk about average order value either. Because the indie model runs on Snickers bar pricing and bargain hunting (low cost, high volume, move as many units as possible). There’s this chronic indie obsession with the hope that the algorithm keeps sending people. There’s no room in that model’s mindset for a $85 special edition or even a $40 hardcover premium edition because the math only works at scale with disposable pricing.

But in the eCommerce model, when I extend my IP with identity merchandise, storyworld collectibles, and premium reader experiences, then my small niche becomes highly profitable, whether a large drive of whale readers follow my trending trope or not.

Evergreen niches are a real thing in eCommerce.

In the indie world, I remember the feeling that a niche was either trending or dying. I needed to catch the wave, or I would miss it. I’d hear stuff like hard sci-fi isn’t trending on Amazon right now, so it’s not viable. Move on.

In the eCommerce world, an evergreen niche means I have a dedicated collector base that doesn’t need a trending moment to shop. They come back because the world exists. Because I keep building it. Because every new product deepens something they already love.

I don’t need a wave. I need my storyworld.

One more thing.

I’ll be honest… several weeks ago, I shared a post on the 100 books per year goal. I think some of y’all thought I was exaggerating. 😄 I wasn’t. The indie model does what the indie model does, which optimizes for volume, speed, and algorithmic favor. None of which requires an author to build anything that lasts.

At the end of watching the full YouTube video, I found myself asking:

Whose advice am I actually following, and are they in the right model to answer my questions?

Because Coral Hart is brilliant inside the indie model. But my brain thinks in collectors, long-term reader relationships, and storyworld experiences.

My lesson?

Know my model, my metrics, and follow advice from other eCommerce authors.

If this post resonated, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work. You’ll instantly unlock my growing library of Quiet Writers Workbooks and PDFs — including The Your eCommerce Author Brand Kit & The AI Overview Workbook— designed to help authors build bold, sustainable careers on their own terms.

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Two questions kept showing up in my inbox.

They started coming in after I released the AI Overview book. I noticed them separately at first. Then I realized they were the same question wearing different clothes.

• Question One: What if I don’t know my story themes? How am I supposed to do the AI Overview posts if I haven’t figured that out yet?

• Question Two: How did you build your eCommerce brand so clearly? It feels tight and intentional. How did you get it like that?

I sat with both questions for a while. Because here’s the honest answer:

I really don’t have magic or superpowers. I just took a lot of eCommerce workshops and classes. At some point, I just came to understand my core author business foundation.

I realized, like big companies, branding is the emotional covenant underneath everything (from books to content marketing). Strong branding for an author creates a feeling (or vibe) for anyone who enters your storyworld ecosystem, and they are instantly attracted or repelled. Strong brands illicit strong reactions, and actually, that’s a really good thing.

In the indie publishing model, I feel as if authors are kinda trained to think of branding being for “all” readers and therefore the goal is to be broad (at least to the genre) and try to catch as many readers that you can with the right cover, tagline, and niche.

But in the eCommerce publishing model, brand is very different. But hold that thought for a minute.

The Publishing Landscape IS Shifting fast

Over the last few months but especially these recent weeks, something bigger is happening in the Indie Author community. The landscape is shifting in ways that feel significant to me.

D2D raising fees. Amazon’s algorithms becoming less predictable. AI flooding the catalog with volume-at-scale content. The “write faster, publish more, stay in KU” advice that used to work is starting to show its seams.

I think writers are going to have to choose which publishing model they actually want to live in.

I’ve made my choice. I chose the eCommerce author model. I’m leaning into relationships, storyworlds, and collector/selector audiences. And to be clear, this model isn’t about whale readers and Snickers-bar pricing, commodified books, and algorithmic discoverability.

They require a different foundation entirely.

That’s why the two questions hit me the way they did. Because I realized: the foundation is what’s missing. And branding is the thing that answers the everything question. What to write, sell, and say. It answers the question about who you’re building it for and why they come back.

So I built a thing.

It’s called Your eCommerce Author Brand — Kit One. And it does exactly what those two questions were asking for.

It’s a five-step kit that uses your personality data and feeds it into a series of AI prompts I designed using my librarian skills. What comes back is a Brand Position Report built specifically from your wiring.

I ran it myself through four different LLMs. What came back was the most accurate picture of my brand I’ve ever seen.

This is the foundation for all my workbooks.

Here’s what’s inside:

• An Author Information Form so your data is gathered before you run the prompt.

• Librarian-designed AI prompts that surface the most accurate picture of your brand.

• A Brand Position Report Template: The framework the AI uses to generate your report.

• Brand Position Statement: the living document you keep and return to forever.

• The Seven Pressure Points: a filter that protects your brand from the seven most common ways eCommerce authors go off-brand.

And this doesn’t stop at brand clarity. It becomes your SEO, GEO, and AI discoverability engine. It’s the source of every post, product, and story you create from here on.

It’ll probably take a weekend to complete, but it’ll build a foundation that lasts.

If you’re one of my paid subscribers, check your inbox for an email from me within the last 24-hours and if you’d like to purchase direct from my LemonSqueezy store here’s the Purchase [LINK].

My Final Thoughts About This

The model you choose determines the foundation you need. If eCommerce is where you’re headed (or even where you’re quietly curious), then your eCommerce brand needs to be strong and carry your core emotions.

If this post landed, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work. You’ll instantly unlock my growing library of Quiet Writers Workbooks and PDFs — including The Storyselling Superpower Workbook & The AI Overview Workbook— designed to help authors build bold, sustainable careers on their own terms.

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Most authors build the book first and figure out everything else later. And when they think of branding, it’s surface-level, like a cover, tagline, color scheme, and a niche to slot into.

eCommerce authors don’t. They start with the emotional foundation and build out from there. In an eCommerce model, branding is how your storyworld feels, and that feeling determines what gets created, bought, and what people come back for.

An eCommerce author brand is the emotional foundation your entire store is built on (the piece that ultimately drives consistent revenue). It defines:

• Who your work attracts

• What products you create

• How your store converts

• And, why readers stay

What Is an eCommerce Author Brand?

So… let me tell you a story. Yeah. I know, but hear me out.

Meet Harper

Let’s set the stage.

• Harper is writing her first paranormal romance novel.

• Beta heroes who are gentle giants, best friends, and quiet protectors.

• Alpha heroines who don’t need saving.

• And, a small town storyworld she’s been building in her head for two years.

Harper is a newbie and hasn’t published anything yet, but she’s already building her eCommerce author business.

Year One: The Book Isn’t Done Yet

Harper has already defined her genre or niche, but she does something a little different than other authors. She takes the time to define her unique eCommerce Author Brand, which helps her define her core themes and brand’s emotional foundation.

Her brand’s three core emotions set the tone or skeleton for everything. Then she starts drafting her first novel in the series and also drafts her “storyselling” GEO blog posts, which she saves for later.

These posts are gold since they include stuff like character quirks, side stories about her upcoming heroes, and glimpses into the small town world she’s building. Every blog post is rooted in the same emotional center. Harper builds discoverability assets and audience warmth at the same time that she’s drafting a first novel. She’s having a ball because she gets to geek out on all of the lore in her storyworld and her quiet obsessions.

Six Months Out: The Shopify Store Goes Up

Harper sets up and opens her Shopify store while she’s finishing up her book one in the series. She sets up her Klaviyo email account and creates her first welcome flow, designed to be her reader magnet. However, instead of a reader magnet, Harper creates an identity magnet.

A quiz. Who Is Your Beta Book Boyfriend? Each result ties to one of her upcoming heroes with his own side story, energy, and a quiet kind of devotion. Her early readers fall in love with characters who don’t have a book yet.

The welcome flow catches them. Each hero’s side story arrives in their inbox. An upsell appears naturally (a digital download tied to their result).

Harper also sets up her Pinterest business account and builds her first boards around her eCommerce brand identity. Then, she publishes her posts on her Shopify blog and pins them so she can find more of her collectors and selectors (the readers her core emotions were designed to attract).

But she doesn’t wait for the book to start selling.

Harper creates her first top-of-funnel products. She uses these as entry points to her upcoming storyworld that answers one question for a potential reader landing in her world for the first time: Is this for someone like me?

Her entry point is a digital download story pack, “Love Letters from Your Favorite Beta Boyfriend,” and a reader gift set (a tee and a mug) built around her ideal reader’s identity and three core emotions.

Harper is excited that everything is all woven together and leads back to her quirky small town. By the time Harper’s book launches, her readers already live there.

She Held the Premium Paperback Book and Cried

When Harper’s first book arrived, she held it in her hands and cried. A premium paperback with painted edges and raised typography on the cover. She created a collectible even though she didn’t go ultra premium or a full-on bespoke special edition.

Harper soft launches her book to her list with a full extended product funnel that includes an eBook, SpokenPress or ElevenLabs audiobook, book playlist created by Suno, and uploaded to Distrokid alongside her premium paperback.

After the Soft Launch: The System Runs

Then she writes Book 2 in her series. At her own pace. Without pressure. Because her Pinterest catalog ads are running. New readers are finding her store every week. What’s funny is that her existing readers aren’t waiting impatiently for the next book. They’re living inside the world she’s already built. They’re reading her GEO posts about:

• Why her werewolves are different from every other shifter on the market.

• Why she’s tired of alpha heroes who dominate every room.

• What it actually means to be an alpha woman in her universe.

Harper’s System Runs Quietly Underneath All of It.

Post-purchase flows nurture every new buyer. Abandoned cart flows catch the ones who hesitated. Win-back flows reach the readers who’ve gone quiet. Weekly campaigns go out without constant pitches, countdowns, or fake urgency tactics. She loves story-selling. Every email deepens the world, builds the mythology, and earns the next purchase.

Harper starts her YouTube channel for deeper discovery and connects her Shopify store. The side stories she wrote during that first year, she narrates or turns them into full-cast narration.

Now she has two traffic engines (Pinterest and YouTube), pointing to her Shopify store. Her system doesn’t need her to hustle. It needs her to keep building the world.

And that’s exactly what she does.

Harper easily makes $2,500 monthly in reliable revenue. Her life has substantially changed.

Yup. My story is a little oversimplified, but it’s exactly what’s happening to me at the moment.

I realized the other day that I’m over here enjoying what I do as a writer and creating a sustainable lifestyle without that same grind I was on in the indie model.

What about you? What’s the piece of Harper’s story that feels most out of reach for you right now? That’s where I want to focus next.

If this post landed, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work. You’ll instantly unlock my growing library of Quiet Writers Workbooks and PDFs — including The Storyselling Superpower Workbook & The AI Overview Workbook— designed to help authors build bold, sustainable careers on their own terms.

We’re in a quiet rebellion. We rise together.

Subscribe now

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