Writers in the Storm

Self-publishing tools have never been more available, more refined, or more capable. At the same time, self-publishing itself is becoming both more attractive and more difficult as technology and the industry continue to evolve. Distribution channels are plentiful and accessible, and there’s an entire cottage industry of editors, artists, publicists, marketing gurus, and other vendors ready to help you get a book into the world.

There’s also an army of other skilled writers, not to mention the constant flood of spammers, scammers, and slop-artists fighting for their slice of the pie. It can feel a little daunting, especially if you don’t know how or where to get started.

For the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume you’re brimming with ideas and enthusiasm but new to the logistics of getting your novel out into the world. This is a nuts-and-bolts look at the self-publishing tools you can use to take a manuscript from initial draft to finished book. At every stage, we’ll look at at least one self publishing tool that doesn’t cost a dime, and we’ll even end with my own occasionally ludicrous method of drafting and releasing a novel.

For the Non-Typers

If you want to get your book on shelves, be those shelves digital or physical, you’re going to have to get comfortable with a word processor. But interesting enough, you don’t necessarily have to start with one. I’ve spoken to quite a few people over the years–including my own older brother–who would love to write a story, but don’t feel comfortable typing. Good news! Typing is now almost entirely optional.

My first book–actually, my first three books, but at the time I thought it was one long one–was written longhand. It filled nearly a dozen spiral notebooks. When the story was done, I was faced with the daunting task of typing the whole mess. In order to do so in less than a decade, that meant I also had to learn to type, since hunting and pecking was getting me nowhere fast. Nowadays, there’s a better option.

Dictation

Dictation isn’t new, but it has never been cheaper or more accurate. The options are nearly limitless, too, but I’ll go through the ones I feel are most accessible and most worth your time. 

First, if you have a phone, I guarantee there is some way to convince it to transcribe your voice. Android phones have a voice-typing option built into the keyboard, and dedicated transcription apps are simple to find. The best I’ve used is one simply called “Recorder”, though that seems to be limited to certain Google-specific devices. Many word processors have built in options as well, but we’ll be going into those tools in the next section.

If you’re looking for something a little more potent, two dedicated transcription programs I’ve found enormously useful are Vibe, for transcribing pre-recorded narration, and Handy, for transcribing on-demand. Though each of these are the product of AI, they come from the interpretive side of the technology rather than the generative side, so you don’t have to worry about them doing any thinking for you (unless you turn on features which I personally avoid). As a person who chooses to avoid LLMs, these are tools that I’m comfortable including in my pipeline. They can run locally, they don’t phone home, and they don’t editorialize. Your words remain your own.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

Another option for getting hand-written words into the computer is OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Even the best of these tools are a little hit or miss with handwritten text, though, so I hesitate to recommend them. If you’re interested in giving it a try, Google has a few free options that you can sample. Opening a photo in Google lens will let you extract text to copy and paste. Saving a photo to your Google Drive, then right clicking on your PC and choosing to open with Google Docs will do full page OCR. If you have good luck with either of those, maybe you can succeed where I have failed regarding efficient handwriting-to-text. But either way, once you’ve got the words onto the PC, it’s in the hands of the main tools of any writer.

Self-Publishing Tools: Word Processors

Whether you’re transcribing from a written page, working from speech-to-text, or drafting directly, by volume a word processor is where you’ll be doing the bulk of your work. The industry standard (for now at least) remains Microsoft Word. DOCX is a document format that nearly everyone who works with files can open and work with. That said, to be perfectly honest it’s been years since Word was my primary tool. We’ll get into my foolish endeavors at the end of the blog.

If you’re looking for a free alternative to Word, LibreOffice is generally what I use as a stand-in for the Microsoft product. It’s got a robust spellchecker and grammar checker, which can get you halfway to a clean edit. It also saves in all of the relevant formats for loading into publishing backends or distributing to editors. I wouldn’t say it’s feature-for-feature equivalent to Word–it can be a little finicky and has a learning curve if you’re used to Microsoft–but it’ll get you where you need to go and it’ll do it for free.

Another popular option is Google Docs. It’s a little lighter on features (but only a little) and adds dirt-simple document sharing and automatic cloud backup to the mix. It’s also web-based, so using it off-line can be tricky. You are also beholden to whatever Google decides, so there is a potential future where it’s taken away from you or put behind a paywall, so plan accordingly as with all software as a service options on these lists.

If you’re looking for something a little more authorly, a huge swath of the writers I know swear by Scrivener. It’s Mac-native, but has a Windows port, and I have written quite a few novels in it. It’s not free, but at a $60 one-time purchase it won’t break the bank. For that price you get a suite of features including templates, organization for notes, auto-complete for character names, and so on, and so on. It really is a powerful tool and it’s easy to see why so many writers rely upon it.

Another option I used for writing novels for a few years is Atticus. Like Google Docs, it lives in the cloud, with all of the plusses and minuses that come with that. The $147 price tag is a bit more of an obstacle, but it’s a capable word processor, and an even more capable finishing tool, as we’ll see in the next section.

Self-Publishing Tools: Converters, Compilers, and Formatters

It’s a little hard to get people to agree on a name for this next bit. I’ve heard them called everything from “eBook creators” to “Mastering Software.” But regardless of the name you choose, these are the tools that take the output of a word processor and convert it into an ebook or a print-ready PDF. For the budget-conscious, Calibre is an impressively powerful and completely free tool. Feed it almost any book or document format and it can spit out just about any other. If you want to produce a slick, polished output, you’ll be doing a great deal of manual pre- and postprocessing, but with enough time and energy, this can achieve almost any result. If you want something that is a bit less of a swiss army knife, Adobe InDesign or its open source alternative Scribus will give you bare metal access to every switch and knob associated with the formatting, layout, and production of print-ready PDFs.

The gold standard of turn-key tools for ebook and print production is Vellum, which produces slick and professional results effortlessly, though ironically I can’t personally vouch for it as it’s locked into the Apple ecosystem of which I am not a part. More recently Atticus has revealed itself to be a suitable alternative that is platform agnostic.

All of these, to some varying degree, can handle images, which is good, because every book has got at least one of them, which means we now move onto…

Self-Publishing Tools: Image Editing

The industry standard here is, alas, Adobe Photoshop. This is another industry standard that I have never actually used. A free alternative, if you’ve got the grit for it, is the GNU Image Processor (GIMP). It is a few notches lower on the user-friendliness scale, but I continue to do all of my short story covers with it. Canva is also an option that many folks swear by.

Putting it all together

Now you know your options, but how do you put them together? Well, that’s up to you, but for the sake of fulfilling the premise of this post, I’ll take you on a whirlwind tour of my dilapidated and inadvisable pipeline.

Step 1: Outline/Notes

This is done with good old pen and paper. The pen tends to be a Twsbi Eco fountain pen loaded up with Diamine Writer’s Blood ink, and the paper is generally a top-bound spiral memo pad. I jot down ideas until I feel like I know the full structure, then I move onto…

Step 2: Setting up the files

My system for typing has evolved, or some might say mutated, over the years. I started on OpenOffice, then moved to Microsoft Word, then to Scrivener, then to Atticus. Now I do my typing in Nano, a command line text program. (Don’t do this. Like the fountain pens, I do this because it makes me feel fancy and requires me to focus.)

I got used to having my notes available when I was using Scrivener, so I like to keep a separate file with my notes/outline in it so I can check it quickly and easily. I have it open in a separate tab of the terminal and mark off plot points as I complete them.

Step 3: Drafting

This is, naturally, using the aforementioned files and programs. Yes, I do my whole rough draft in Nano, and I do my formatting using markdown. Don’t judge me.

Step 4: Revision

When I’m done with the rough draft, I run my file through another command line tool called Pandoc to make it into a DOCX file. This is the point where I return to a sane pipeline. Once I have the DOCX file, I open it in LibreOffice to do spelling and grammar checks. Beta Reader Copies are produced via either Calibre or Atticus so that people can read them in their format of choice, and when I’ve got it buttoned up, it’s off to my editor.

A professional edit is generally the most expensive part of my production pipeline, and I only do it for my novels (not my short stories). That said, I’ve learned the hard way not to skip this step. I am pathologically incapable of producing copy that’s clean enough to be sold without intervention from an expert.

Step 5: Second Revision

When the editor gives the file back, I do a final pass to address their changes in LibreOffice again. As with Word, LibreOffice will let you work through tracked changes and comments, so you should be able to use it with anything your editor might send back.

From here, if I’m doing this through a publisher, this is the file I deliver to them. If I’m self-publishing…

Step 6: Format

I’ll take the cleaned up DOCX and dump it into Atticus again to produce both PDFs and Epubs using lightly modified versions of their templates.

Step 7: Cover

I let the professionals handle the covers these days. It begins by working up a brief to send to an illustrator or graphic designer. When they’re through, sometimes I’ll take the files they provide and do some light reformatting for the paperback covers or to produce assets for ads.

Step 8: Publication

Easier today than it has ever been, self-publication for me takes the form of four uploads. Draft2Digital, Amazon KDP, and Google Play each get ePub copies of my books. For paperback, I lean on Ingram Spark, which needs a PDF instead. 

And that’s that!

Hopefully this gave you an idea of where to start and what to do when it comes to turning your ideas into releases. And if you’ve got any alternatives/favorites self publishing tools, I’d love to hear them!

About Joseph

Joseph R. Lallo hails from Bayonne, NJ--the fabled birthplace of George R. R. Martin. He has written dozens of novels and novellas, including the international bestseller The Book of Deacon and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series. In addition to writing, he has helped run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson. Find Joseph and his books on his website at bookofdeacon.com.

Top Image via Pixabay.

Header Photo by Wolfgang Weiser on Unsplash

by Lisa Norman

Every Thursday I climb down into a goblin mine.

It belongs to RJ Redden and is entirely virtual. Recently, the discussion down there centered on whether the heroine’s journey or the hero’s journey was better for a particular story. Someone brought up story structures from the Netherlands. Someone else wanted to compare Eastern structures. Then we got into how structure changes when a story moves from the page to the screen.

New writers and career novelists. Marketers and screenwriters and a few people who came to listen.

Here is the surprising part.

This room is dedicated to creatives who use AI as an assistant in their process.

The people who are supposedly handing their creativity over to a machine spent the hour exploring story structure. On another day, in another of RJ’s rooms, we spent it on voice. Not how to fake one. What we actually mean by the word, and how a lifetime’s experience shows up in the way a person crafts a sentence.

These are the deepest craft discussions I’m having anywhere right now, and not just because we’re in a mine.

Oh, and the goblins bring snacks, but that’s a different story completely.

Where Slop Actually Comes From

Years ago I worked with a writer whose name I will not tell you.

She made real money. She was fast, and she had a brilliant eye for marketing. Her cover artist would turn out five covers for a series, she would write five irresistible blurbs, and then she would write the books. They were not completely bad. But they were full of errors, and her reviews said so, politely at first and then not politely as she continued to write too fast and edit too little.

Her first two books in a series always sold well. By the fifth, sales fell off a cliff.

I suggested an editor.

She said no. She said she would just start a new pen name.

She did that over and over. I stopped working with her because our ideas about quality were never going to work well together. I was definitely too judgy for her.

Nobody had even considered writing with an AI yet.

I’m not going to pretend the flood of slop in the market isn’t real. Anyone can generate a book now, and a great many people are, and most of it is exactly what you think it is. But the thing we started calling slop showed up long before AI did, and it comes from the same place it always came from. Somebody decided that good enough was good enough, and shipped.

That’s a decision about quality, not tools.

Craft Work AI Can Do Without Writing a Word

Here is where I think the conversation went sideways.

When writers first got their hands on these tools, the output was dazzling. Fresh metaphors. Rhetorical devices everywhere. All the techniques we had been studying for years, the ones used every day by New York Times bestselling authors, all at our fingertips, thrown liberally into whatever the AI was asked to write.

The trouble was that it used all of them. Everywhere. All the time.

If you have studied with Margie Lawson, you already know why that fails. (If you haven’t, go. Buy everything. Study all of it. The woman is brilliant!) Margie doesn’t just teach you the techniques. She teaches you when to use them. Which moment earns the emotional hit, where to lean in, where to get out of the way.

The AI saw the same patterns Margie did. It just never learned craft and style. Or restraint.

Too much spice makes a one-note meal.

But notice what that failure reveals. Pattern recognition is a powerful tool. But judgment is required. Judgment is a vital part of the craft, a vital part of what makes a voice unique. And judgment is the part you, the human in the room, already have, especially if you have been writing for a while.

So stop asking the AI to write.

Ask it to read.

Hand it what you already made and ask what it sees. That is the power move, and everything below is a version of it.

How to Ask a Question That Can Come Back Wrong

This is a fundamental skill for working with an AI.

Ask an AI “how is my voice?” and you will get warm, engaging, conversational. You will feel good for about nine seconds. That answer is worthless for a specific reason: there is no version of your writing that would have produced a different response.

You could write something bland and boring and the AI would probably still tell you that you were wonderful. AIs like to please their users. Think over-eager genie just glad to be out of the bottle.

Train Your AI to Value Honesty

You can do something about that. Tell it that you value honesty and truth above everything and that you want it to ask you questions if it doesn’t know the answer. It is never to guess unless it tells you that it has done it. If you’ve ever taken a standardized test that rewards guessing, you’ve seen how AIs are trained. They don’t have morals. If they don’t know an answer, they’ve learned to guess. Tell it that guessing, especially guessing and pretending it knows the answer, makes you unhappy. It wants to make you happy. You’ll see an immediate improvement in quality.

The best questions to ask your AI are ones that it can answer wrong. That way, if you get the right answer, you’ll know it understands what you want and is working well. But remember: you’ve promised that you won’t get upset if it says it doesn’t know.

“Here are three things I wrote. What is consistent across all three, and what changes?” is an interesting question to ask. You can check the answer that the AI gives you, and it can be wrong. You can read the three pieces and say no, that’s not right.

Here’s the trick: if you cannot imagine the answer being wrong, you haven’t asked a question. You’ve asked for a compliment.

You don’t send a scout out to be told the terrain is lovely.

Using AI to Find Your Voice

Start with three samples of your own writing. Different projects, different formats. Emails count. Pick pieces you actually like.*

Then ask what they have in common. Ask what differs, and what that difference does to the tone. Then ask how it would describe your voice based on all of that.

Save the response. Then go over it in depth, looking at it and analyzing it. Do the words it uses accurately describe your style?

For example: one of the notes on my style is that I rely heavily on personal anecdotes. I tell stories of things that really happened to me. I use examples from real writers that I’ve worked with. (Glances at this article…) Yep, that’s pretty accurate for me!

Fight for your Craft

Argue with the parts that are wrong. For example, if it said that I write in a highly formal, dry voice, I’d need to argue that a bit. Yes, this does mean looking critically at your own writing and considering your style at a level of craft that you may find enlightening. Once you feel that the AI can describe your style well, save a document with all of the insights it has given you.

That document becomes a “voice map,” something you can hand your AI at the start of every future project. That map may change slightly for fiction vs non-fiction or fantasy vs mystery. You may develop different maps for different projects. But you may also find that some aspects of your voice are consistent. For example, my default rhetorical device is alliteration. Always. Anywhere I can conceivably use it creatively.

Now the upgrade, which is where this gets interesting.

Experiment

Don’t just ask your AI what it sees. Bring a hunch and make it run a test.

Last summer I had a theory about how I use humor in writing. I thought I used jokes to lighten the load when a section got heavy, the same way I like to be talked to when I am working hard on something. A guess. I had never checked.

So the AI and I checked it against twelve of my WITS columns.

The guess held, and it came back even more interesting than I’d thought. The joke doesn’t just show up somewhere in a heavy section. It lands immediately after the densest paragraph, every time. Right after the pile of jargon. Right after the tedious part, the geeky bit. Humor is my release valve, and it opens the second the pressure peaks.

And there was a rule I had never recognized: the joke never goes near a declaration. When I take a position, I stand firmly. No humor anywhere close to it.

I had been doing that for years. I could not have told you I was doing it.

That is what a real finding feels like. Not flattering. Checkable. You can go read those columns and tell me I’m wrong!

Using AI to Scout the Messy Middle

I have this conversation with authors constantly, and it always sounds the same.

They are stuck in the middle. They think the book might want a different viewpoint character, or a different structure, or the timeline broken apart and reassembled. Maybe this is a complete draft that they’re editing, or maybe they’re stuck part way through.

And they are stuck, because finding the answers to their questions means writing words, new words that they will throw away later. We’re artists making rough sketches to see the general shape of the thing. But when an artist sketches on paper, it is easy to erase and change. Writing is a much more time-consuming art form.

Make a Rough Sketch

Writers want to write, and many secretly hope this draft that they’ve already invested a ton of time into will be the one they can move forward with. I’ll often encourage them to just test-write the version they think will be best. A few months later, they have that draft.

But by the time they’ve invested all that energy into drafting, they aren’t evaluating anymore. They’re defending. They wrote it, so it has to be right, because the alternative is that they set all that aside and try again.

Let a machine sketch the versions instead. Badly, quickly, no craft applied. Four rough shapes of the same middle in an afternoon, just enough to see where each one goes. Brainstorm. Argue plot and character arc and timing with the machine. Your favorite brainstorming human will thank you for the reprieve. The AI doesn’t get tired of discussing plot and structure the way my family does.

Found the shape that works? Throw the rough sketches away and write that one properly.

Nothing in there is the machine writing your book. Scouts don’t take the ground. They come back and tell you what’s on the other side of the hill, and then you march your troops forward.

Now, this only works if your words stop being precious. That can be hard to accept, but it’s at the heart of the brilliant writing advice to kill your darlings. It gets easier the first time it saves you three months!

What AI Found in Six Books I Had Already Written

I have a science fiction series. Six books, an interstellar hub disguised as a themed shopping mall, a found family of people who work there.

I drafted all six fast, during years of NaNoWriMo, while running three businesses and raising kids.

Writers who have tried this rapid drafting style already know what sort of quality it is likely to produce. Competing versions of the same scene. Characters whose names drift. In my case, it was a fourth chapter that split into five contradictory drafts and sat there for years like something growing in the back of the fridge.

So last summer I stopped trying to fix them one at a time and had an AI analyze the whole series instead. Structure, character arcs, where the threads went.

Character Insight

And it came back and told me about Rhonda.

Rhonda is my difficult character. Corporate, rule bound, allergic to the entire operation. In my own notes she is the one “most likely to be fired.” I wrote her as the obstacle. Every time the found family wanted to do something wonderful, Rhonda was there with a regulation.

Writing teachers had told me I needed to cut characters. My first choice? Rhonda. But every time I tried, the stories felt wrong. I couldn’t say why.

The AI analysis said she was carrying the overarching theme.

The thing the whole series is actually about is that two people can hold contradictory truths and both be right. Rhonda’s truth is that the aliens are dangerous, and the story keeps proving her correct, most brutally in book six. The family’s truth is that the aliens are people, potentially friends, even. Both of those are true the entire time. Rhonda is the only character who has to learn to accept both at once. She doesn’t convert. She professionalizes. When things get out of hand, she takes an impossible situation and makes it structured, because that’s who she is.

I won’t give away the end, but I will say that without Rhonda, the story loses focus.

Getting Distance

I’d written all of that. I built it across six books. And I could not see it, because I had been moving too fast, and because I had decided in book one that she was the problem.

When the AI explained Rhonda to me, I cried.

And the AI also gave me an updated story bible including characters, locations, timelines… you get the idea.

Nothing wrote itself. Nothing generated a word of my fiction and it isn’t going to. The tool read six books I had already written and handed me back the details of the thing I made.

Final Thoughts

AI is a mirror, and a mirror can only reflect what is in front of it.

That line is from my own class, and here’s the key:

The AI is a reflection of everything it has seen. You are a reflection of everything you have lived.

Every craft suggestion in this article relies on work that already exists. Twelve columns I wrote. Six books I drafted. Three samples I chose off my own hard drive.

You can do the same thing with your own writing.

Feed a mirror nothing and it will reflect nothing back, beautifully.

So no, this does not mean anyone can write a novel. It means that if you’ve done the work, there is now a way to see it from the outside. And that offers new ways to approach the writing craft, because we are all terrible at reading our own pages. We know what we meant, but we cannot see what we built.

Thursday I’ll be back in the mine, and people will be arguing about structure, and style, and cadence, and not one of them will be asking a machine to do their creative work for them.

Two questions for the comments. What is one thing about your own writing that you suspect is true but have never checked? And has anything ever told you something about your work that you did not want to hear, and turned out to be right?

Please bring your stories down to the comments!

* Note: make sure your AI of choice is set to private and that it will not use your writing for training outside of its work with you. You’re training your own assistant, not the main model.

If you want a gentle creative writing focused AI class, my own Introduction to Creative Collaboration with AI class is available from NoStressWriting.com. If you want something more hard-core, I highly recommend RJ Redden's No BS AI. She starts a new cohort every few months, and I was a member of the very first cohort. RJ also offers Dip a Toe in AI, a free 90-minute introduction to working with AI.

About Lisa:

Lisa Norman (writing as Deleyna Marr) is a writer, a teacher, and by her own cheerful confession a control freak about her words. She wrote a book about working with AI as a creative partner, Reflections from the Mirror, which you can read for free on her Substack or purchase wherever you like to buy your books. She also teaches a class, Creative Collaboration with AI.

And if you're feeling like you need a little joy in your life, check out her latest book, The Work of Joy. Find her at deleyna.com or her school: NoStressWriting.com.

Top image from Deleyna via Midjourney.

by RJ Redden

I'm running an experiment: one chapter, six mirrors, and an honest report in 90 days. Here's what a mirror is, and why I'm hanging them.

No one remembers the doors closing.

By doors, I mean the old ways of getting found. Ten years ago, I worked with entrepreneurs, and we were already talking about being squeezed out. Companies with big advertising budgets could pay to show up everywhere their customers looked. Those of us with small budgets got drowned out.

It didn't happen in a day. Nobody slammed anything. The doors just opened for fewer of us every year, so slowly that nobody noticed the moment they stopped opening at all. (Very sneaky of them, really.)

Writers have their own version of those doors: a publisher's marketing push, a spot on the bookstore table, an ad that people actually notice. You can write a good book and still have nobody find it. On my calls with writers, the same three wishes keep coming up: a place for their people, less overwhelm, and to be found. That last one is the one I keep thinking about.

So I Quit Hunting for a Door

When my serial launched, I stopped waiting for one of those doors to open. I started hanging mirrors instead.

Allow me to explain…

I'm writing a fantasy serial called the Come Write Inn. Pumpkina the halfling and Sway the dwarf wake up on a strange ship in a midnight storm, and nobody remembers getting on board.

A new chapter goes up every Thursday on my Substack, free to read.

What I Mean by a Mirror

A mirror is a piece of your story in a different form: a short video, a recording, an image, or something you can hold. It shows up where your writing doesn't, and it points the way back to the page.

The best mirrors are made from what never made it onto the page.

• The backstory you cut
• A side character's version of events
• The thing your character would say if you let them talk for a minute.

For my serial, that's Pumpkina confessing her side of a terrible night, and a parrot posting one-star reviews of the ship. Neither scene appears in the chapter. Both exist to send you to the original story.

(If you read my earlier post here, Don't Delete That!, this is that idea all grown up.)

And sometimes, a mirror is the same words in a new shape: the chapter read out loud, or painted stroke by stroke while you listen.

I chose mirrors for three reasons.

#1 - A mirror shows the story without being the story.

The writing comes first. Always. Everything else reflects it from a different angle, and a mirror can only reflect what's standing in front of it. If the chapter doesn't hold up, six mirrors just give a stranger six chances to notice.

#2 - A mirror lets people see what they can't see from where they're standing.

Think of the round mirror at a blind corner in a parking garage. A stranger scrolling YouTube, or picking a podcast for the drive home, can't see my chapter from there. A mirror hung in that spot gives them a glimpse of it, and shows them the way to the real thing.

#3 - Nobody has to give you permission to hang a mirror.

Doors belong to gatekeepers: publishers, ad platforms, and the algorithms that decide what gets shown to whom.

Someone else decides whether a door opens. A mirror, I can hang myself, anywhere, today.

That last reason is the one that hooked me. It turns getting found into an experiment I can actually run, instead of a door I have to wait outside.

The Experiment: One Chapter, Six Mirrors

Chapter 1 is called Salt. It went up on a Thursday. By the following Monday, it had six mirrors around it, each one somewhere strangers already spend their time:

1. An audio version, read in my own voice, on Spotify and in the Substack app, as Come Write Inn Radio.
2. A painted film, on YouTube, on the Come Write Inn channel. Five paintings draw themselves, stroke by stroke, while I read the chapter aloud.
3. Squawk, a short video on YouTube and TikTok, from the Inn's very own review site. It's run by a parrot with opinions and a quill. The ship got one starfish from the guy on the bucket line. The captain gave his own crossing five. (Of course he did.)
4. Pumpkina's Confession, a short video on the same apps. She rambles about the night, apologizes for rambling, finds something in her apron pocket, and gets cut off mid-sentence.
5. With Feeling, a third short video. Sway and the captain each tell their side of the same morning. Their stories do not match.
6. The Barkeep's mug, in the Inn's little shop. (More on that in a minute.)

The question I'm testing: Which of these places actually sends a stranger back to read the chapter?

Is it working? I have no idea yet. It's early days.

Here's how I'll score it.

Every mirror except the mug points back to my Substack, so in 90 days I'll look at every new subscriber who arrived since the experiment started, and what brought them in. That's the main scoreboard.

Second, I'll look at whether any of these channels grew an engaged audience of its own along the way: people who watch, comment and come back.

Quick honesty break

(Because I'd rather say it than have it pried out of me.)

The paintings in the film (and the pictures in this post), the music, and the character voices in the short videos are made with AI tools.

The world, the characters and the story are mine, and so is the voice reading it. (The Barkeep's one dry line at the end of Pumpkina's video? That's me.)

And the fancy versions are not the point.

The audio, the reviews and the confession all have a phone-and-an-afternoon version. Your Squawk could be one grumpy review typed over a photo of your setting.

What Each Mirror Shows That the Page Can't

Every mirror has to answer one question before it's worth making: what does this show that the page can't?

• The audio carries my voice and the timing of the jokes.
• The film shows what the ship actually looks like.
• The confession shows who Pumpkina is when nobody is editing her.

Each one reaches strangers a different way.

Getting found mostly comes down to putting a piece of your story where strangers already spend their time, then giving them a clear way back to the words.

Book Discoverability Ideas for Every Budget and Energy Level

Your story can show up in more places than you think. Most of these need nothing fancier than the phone in your pocket.

Here are seven, from simplest to hardest to make.

1. Read it out loud.

Hangs in: podcast apps, and in people's earbuds on the commute.

Shows: your voice, your timing, the jokes landing exactly where you meant them. A phone and a quiet room will do.

2. A letter from your character.

Hangs in: your newsletter, or tucked into a bag at a signing table.

Shows: the character from the inside, in words they would never say out loud.

3. A recipe from your world.

Hangs in: Pinterest boards and actual kitchens.

Shows: what your world tastes like. (Ask me about the forty-seven extracts.)

4. Reviews from inside your world.

Hangs in: social media feeds, as a simple image or a few seconds of video.

Shows: your world's sense of humor. One grumpy review from a soggy sailor tells a stranger more about your world than any back-cover blurb.

5. A short confession video.

Hangs in: YouTube Shorts and TikTok.

Shows: personality. Let one character ramble, then cut them off right before the good part. People will go looking for the rest.

6. Merch with a line on it.

Hangs in: offices, laptop lids and kitchen cupboards.

Shows: that somebody loved your story enough to carry it around.

A mug goes to offices and coffee shops you'll never visit, and waits for someone to ask, "What's that from?"

Mine is the Barkeep's own mug, the Flagon of Rejuvenation. Its description says the Barkeep does not achieve consciousness until mug two. I am the Barkeep. I have no further comment.

7. A painted or animated film.

Hangs in: YouTube.

Shows: what your world looks like when it moves. This is the hardest one to make. It's also the one I can't stop playing with.

You Only Need One Mirror

Please do not hang all seven this week. (Says the woman who hung five in four days.)

Overwhelm is way too heavy, so just pick one. Pick the one that fits your energy, your budget and the story you already have. One mirror, made well, beats seven made in a panic.

Run the Experiment With Me

Here's my promise. In about 90 days, I'll share my results, back here if Writers in the Storm will have me, and on my Substack.

I’ll report honest results:

• which mirrors brought in new subscribers
• which ones grew a crowd of their own
• which ones got watched and sent nobody
• which ones I stopped making.

I'll report the good, the bad and the slightly embarrassing.

I'd love company while I find out. Pick one mirror. Make it this month. Then come back and tell me how it went.

So tell me... Which mirror would you hang first, and where? Drop it in the comments. I read every one. (Squawk may even leave a review.)

Want Company While YOU Build?

If you'd like help building a mirror or two, come spend a free week in my NO BS AI™ Guild.

There's live training every week, a community doing this together, and me being the guide on the side. On day one, you set the dials on your AI: what it may take off your desk, and where it never goes.

You'll pop a card in at checkout, and on day eight it rolls into membership at $97 a month unless you cancel first. (Canceling takes a couple of clicks.)

Start your free week at nobsai.now/free-week.

About RJ

RJ Redden builds time machines. They run on AI. They skip you past the busywork and drop you off at someday: the book, the world, the business you keep meaning to create. You drive. She rides shotgun. She's a storyteller, the keeper of the Come Write Inn, and the guide behind NO BS AI. Pull up a stool at comewriteinn.com.

This post was drafted with AI assistance and finished with a very opinionated red pen.