that's a whole 'nother part of the puzzle! I was gonna try the amazon/kindle platform, but I haven't researched much.

Last edited Sun Dec 1, 2024, 06:12 PM - Edit history (2)

there's a lot to say for publishing exclusive to Amazon at least for the first few months. It will help you get reviews, which are damn difficult to get. So, you can publish exclusively on KDP for a few months and then go 'wide'. I use Draft2Digital (D2D) and publish with many booksellers including Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, Angus & Robertson, and Hoopla (library books).

D2D will allow you to format your text for upload to Amazon for free. They are author friendly, and do a lot to help authors. Amazon is more focused on readers.

I use the free version of Canva to format my book covers. My entire operation is a one-woman show, so to speak. I've sold over 3k books, but believe me, that doesn't translate into much cash. I write for the love of it. I market my books through FussyLibrarian and BargainBooksy, which run about $40 to $60. There are a few good sites out there. The big gun for book Promotion is BookBub, which costs over $500. It's very expensive, but authors sell tons of books. I'm working on getting one for the latest book.

There are quite a few author friendly websites and YouTube channels that offer indie writers advice. Some of them are quite good. Best of luck to you!
Just an FYI regarding AI and publishing on KDP. They will ask if you use AI in writing your book. I don't, so I'm not sure if they ask more questions if you answer, yes.

I will always edit myself... I literally hate AI

But it also does a good job with my resume on LinkedIn so....

them, and most real editors do not want to see ANYTHING that's AI. Some editors will permanently ban submissions from people trying to sell AI-generated work.

Of course a lot of people - including people who don't give a damn about writers and writing - are using AI to generate all or most of manuscripts, and they're flooding platforms like Kindle with what is rightly called AI slop, and doing terrible damage to the self-publishing market.

The more you use AI, the more likely you'll fail to develop writing skills you need, and even lose those you already have.

You should write so that it's your work. Your talent. Your voice. Your decision about revisions. Making all those decisions yourself will hone your skills and make you a better writer.

GenAI is a potentially crippling crutch. It undermines individuals as well as undermining society in general because of the intellectual property theft, the use of AI to try to compete with real writers and artists whose work was stolen, the general dumbing-down of people using AI, and the discouragement of students and other aspiring writers and artists from learning skills because they worry that the use of AI, after the AI peddlers stole all the work they could steal, will mean human work will have little or no value.

I follow a lot of artists and teachers. They're both angry and despairing.

Please don't help support the intellectual property theft and destruction of real human culture and learning that those AI tools represent.

writing. And their naming one after him is exploitative as hell and shows tremendous disrespect.

Where my stuff could be used to train the monster. Ug
I plan on just printing out the highlighted bits and rewriting on my own ...

And the irony is that an AI editing app would ruin that statement.

Thread starts here, and is at first about the tacky AI art they use (ripping off artists as well as writers)

https://bsky.app/profile/eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social/post/3l4lgjchqxc2j

but finally gets to this:

https://bsky.app/profile/eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social/post/3l4lhdrbfxc25

...prompt chatgpt to write the whole thing and be done with it?

I should just delete this whole thread because all of you jumped on me and said it was like my fault or something. Piss off!

I was just excited that I found something that could help me with my edits because I can't get a fucking person to do it....

And I am writing the whole goddamn thing myself thank you very much 😡

Last edited Sun Dec 1, 2024, 09:24 PM - Edit history (1)

I didn't mean to hurt your feelings and I certainly don't want to turn you away from writing.

But the idea behind literature, indeed the purpose of literature is to express things that are meaningful in some way. Language is restrictive when to comes to heartfelt expression, and the written word without the nuances of tone and emphasis and even facial expressions is even more restrictive. If using your own dialect, or speech patterns, or stylisms, or even incorrect grammer and spelling expresses what you are trying to say then THAT is the correct way to write, in my opinion.

I wish you the best and would actually like to read your work.

Edit to add:

What I mean to say is: Write it as though you were telling it.
A trick I sometimes use is to narrate my writing verbally, into a recorder, and then just transcribe it as best I can onto paper.

Don't take it personally. Use it to help your writing as it seems to have been designed to do... I use it to help my math and well... It's some pretty good math. So don't take haters to heart... I'm certain they're all such accomplished writers that they could teach AI a thing or two but with such caustic attitudes... what other choice do you have? Take the help where it comes and if Hemmingway would have hated it... Fuck him. Who gives a shit. Ain't he dead?

And it's easy to get terms mixed up or conflate one with another. I say that as someone who works in the biz, mostly with NLUs and some privately trained LLMs, and who still has to constantly educate myself to keep things straight. The field is changing a lot, and fast.

Software development is my day job, but I'm also a professional writer, fiction and non-fiction. I share fellow creatives' concerns about the way the big LLMs were trained and how they're being used to spew out a constant stream of drek. I'm happy there's a backlash against newsrooms who've tried to replace actual writers with GenAI.

I actually wouldn't lump Hemingway in with GenAI. It's not like ChatGPT or Sudowrite or other generative tools. It's a rules-based natural language processor, and as a writer, I don't have any ethical concerns about it at all.

I don't use generative-capable AIs to produce text. Ethical considerations aside, the text that comes out feels to me like the literary equivalent of the Uncanny Valley. Its writerly voice is just...echhhh.

But I've used ChatGPT to argue with. I try to explain my plot, it second-guesses the shit out of me, and by the time I'm done justifying my choices, I feel a helluva lot more confident about my story. It can be really useful for that.

I'm glad to hear you're finding joy in writing, FirstLight, and if Hemingway is making you feel more confident about your story, I think that's awesome and a great use of the technology.

So yes... You know GPT is trained on the compendium of human intellect which isn't great at best... it's a brilliant thought calculator... no matter the form. And machine learning isn't really all that great. I have trained the shit out of some things and unless it's repetitive... yikes. It can learn how to do dishes but there's a reason it's not driving our cars yet.

I find it pretty fascinating that people are so intimidated by it. When you write it, no matter the form, I guess you see it for what it is and it's not remotely intimidating. Well... unless you're afraid you don't know what you're talking about but I can argue AI in circles... I'm not remotely intimidated by it.

As an experiment when these things first started coming out, I trained one on my fiction writing style and told it to generate a story, and it still filed all the edges off. I tried a few more times. Same result. Even when told to mix up the structure and sentence length, it still gravitates back to a certain uniformity of expression. The uniformity goes deeper than that in how it articulates groups of thoughts, or even what it thinks makes up a thought or thesis that hangs together. There's a predictability to it that is uncanny and just off, even though on the surface it looks sorta normal.

Last edited Tue Dec 3, 2024, 09:06 AM - Edit history (2)

Tensors try but they don't capture the full extent of what is happening. They are looking only for the Pos Thought and well there has to be a lot more to it... AI thought or Q_Thought as I call it has to be a set of simple equations. A: Do I know this... B: Is it critical to focus on this... Hierarchy.... C: Is this an ethical dilemma? Believe it or not... that comes before is this tangible...

So try to get Tensors to do that and you quickly see why AI is just a blocky ape that is miming us and there's no soul or essence behind any of it. It's just a reflection of it's creator as you found out by training it on your data. It's getting better but without the right equations... it's just a really expensive See and Say. And those shitting Magic Eight Balls they call quantum computers are just a massive step in the wrong direction. They're making it harder not better and have no idea what they're doing.

'Quantum' computers use Guessing as it's basis for calculations. Guessing. That's it. And the more 'Quantum' it is... the more error correction and guessing you need. Really... guessing is the plan? Going full on Godel are they... LOL. They're all just self-righteous, self-serving asshats who couldn't compute their way out of a paper bag.

You're absolutely right not to be intimidated by their Machine Learning or Thier AI or even their Math... it sucks. Hands down. And they know it... because Geometry isn't Physics... right? How is geometry not physics? Fucking morons... LOL

Keep up the good work and yes... AI is going to get a great deal better soon... and yes, you will be able to tell when AI writes because it will be better. It will hide the algorithms of life in plain sight... you'll be lying right next to it and never even realize you had eternity in your grasp.

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So as long as you don't forget... 41 /2 = 19. Understand that fact and well... you can just build your own AI and you don't need their shitty clunky one.

But then you can do things like this... LOL